Now,
gentlemen, please do not interrupt me if I seem to be making an
extravagant claim; for what I am going to tell you is not my own
opinion. I will refer you to a witness who is worthy of credit; that
witness shall be the God of Delphi--he will tell you about my wisdom,
if I have any, and of what sort it is.
You know Chaerephon, of
course. He was a friend of mine from boyhood, and also a good democrat
who played his part with the rest of you in the recent expulsion and
restoration. And you know what he was like; how enthusiastic he was
over anything that he had once undertaken. Well one day he went to
Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether anyone was wiser
than myself and the Pythian prophetess answered, that there was no man
wiser. Chaerephon is dead himself; but his brother, who is in court,
will confirm the truth of what I am saying. Why do I mention this?
Because I am going to explain to you why I have such an evil name. When
I heard the answer, I said to myself, What can the god mean? and what
is the interpretation of his riddle? for I know that I have no wisdom,
small or great. What then can he mean when he says that I am the wisest
of men? And yet he is a god, and cannot lie; that would be against his
nature. After long consideration, I thought of a method of trying the
question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than
myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I
should say to him, 'Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said
that I was the wisest.'
Accordingly I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him--his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination--and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me. So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,--for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same. Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.
Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this: but necessity was laid upon me,--the word of God, I thought, ought to be considered first. And I said to myself, Go I must to all who appear to know, and find out the meaning of the oracle. And I swear to you, Athenians, --for I must tell you the truth--the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean' labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be instantly detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them--thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.
So I departed, conceiving myself to be superior to them for the same reason that I was superior to the politicians.
At last I went to the artisans. I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and here I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets;--because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom; and therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I was.
The effect of these investigations of mine, gentlemen, has been to arouse against me a great deal of hostility, hostility of a particularly bitter and persistent kind, which has resulted in various malicious suggestions, including the description of me as a professor of wisdom. This is due to the fact that whenever I succeed in disproving another person’s claim to wisdom in a given subject, the bystanders assume that I know everything about that subject myself. But the truth o men of Athens is this: that real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value. It seems to me that he is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as he would say to us “The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.”
