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Author’s Note:

This is a substantially edited transcript of a 1998 lecture on Plato’s Apology of Socrates. The translation is from Plato and Aristophanes, Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Paraphrases are placed in ‘single quotes,’ whereas actual quotes appear in “quotation marks.”