Socrates' Defense

The translation aims foremost at accuracy and completeness , including the liveliness of the dialogue form. We have striven to preserve the natural flow of the speech. This both helps and, in a way, hurts the readability of the translation. After all, these texts portray people speaking, and speaking to one another, and humans are not always the most eloquent of speakers. This is recreated by Plato. Socrates' Defense is almost entirely comprised of Socrates speaking at length to his judges and so he sometimes finds himself, because he goes on for quite a while, and keeps inserting qualifications, and then loses his way, and so he moves to a new grammatical construction. Similarly, characters sometimes pile one clause on top of another. Usually these run-on sentences are easy to follow and the effect is often an increasing intensity, but once or twice in Socrates' Defense, Socrates seems rather to be finding his way into an idea and is less than eloquent.