Supplement Edition: Apology of Socrates, and The Crito Book

and the text of Xenophon's Apology of Socrates

Authored by Plato
Supplement by Sasha Newborn

The Supplement Edition: Apology of Socrates & The Crito is designed to aid teachers with a wealth of background information and opinions. The Supplement includes the text of the class book Apology of Socrates & The Crito (with the same page numbering), plus the supplement material, with bibliography, glossary, and the text of Xenophon's Apology of Socrates about the same trial from a different point of view.
Benjamin Jowett's early translation of Plato's Apology is remarkably free of Victorianisms, and brings to life the figure of Socrates with an easy colloquialism. Almost the entire dialogue is actually a monologue, battling the demons, real or imaginary, that had haunted him for decades.
The record we have is Plato's rendition of Socrates' words and the court proceedings. Our best assumption is that Plato himself was there—he places himself as a mute audience member in the dialogue. Are Plato's words direct from Socrates' mouth? Common Greek practice by Herodotus, Thucydides and others, was to recreate scenes or even entire speeches from the past as they might have happened; today we would describe taking those liberties with history as docudrama.
The later dialogues that Plato wrote featuring Socrates have led critics to wonder how much in these texts represent Plato, a systematic philosophizer, and how much could be attributed to actual statements made by Socrates, the perennial seeker.