This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!—and then if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practise or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected—which is the truth; and as they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and
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While written by Plato, with uncertainty concerning the validity of the statement on Socrates’s behalf, “Apology” represents an acute denial of the oligarch; whose means are compared to that of a potential Hobbesian-Greek political body, without the branches the Western world relies on. Here we see the Leviathan that is the Greek city-state of Athens—Having once been a democratic state in the life of Socrates—upholding its purpose as a government to produce a working system with theocratic hierarchies ruled by those who have garnered political; militaristic; economic; and religious power. Socrates was a cog in the machine and he was treated as such; with a respectable defiance to that which does not do him any good or evil, for death is not a punishment unto him.
