Apology

Socrates describes his daimonion—which translates to “a divine something”—as “a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do” (35). It is like a transmission from the divine world to the mortal world that for Socrates manifests as a conscience. He points to this daimonion as evidence of his piety and thus his innocence of the charge of asebeia. Nevertheless, Socrates’s belief in this personalized divine entity is not supported by Athenian religious dogma and thus may serve as further evidence of his guilt.

In Apology Socrates famously likens himself to a gadfly, another word for a horsefly known to deliver painful bites to livestock. He says, “I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly” (35). Thanks in large part to this quote, a gadfly today commonly refers to an individual who upsets the status quo, often by posing painful questions.

Sophists were teachers in Ancient Greece around the time of Socrates’s death. Today, the sophists are often associated with fallacious arguments, largely because Plato repeatedly and unfavorably compared sophistry to philosophy, which he felt was far more rigorous. For Socrates’s part, he forcefully rejects the notion that he is a sophist on the grounds that he is not paid by rich donors for his instruction and is therefore free to provide education that challenges Athens’s moneyed elite.