Despite his contributions to the foundations of philosophy as we have known today, it is a cruel irony that at 70 years old, Socrates was convicted to death for allegedly corrupting the youth’s minds. He was also convicted for not believing in the gods of the state and for speaking with contempt to the high ranking officials of his time (Ober “Gadfly on Trial” 2). The accounts of his trials were written by his avid and equally popular student Plato in Apology (Colaiaco 17). In Apology, he quoted:
For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the god; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life (Plato, in McIntyre 20). In this statement, Socrates compares himself to a gadfly – a biting, noisy insect commonly found buzzing around and refers to the state as the horses. What Socrates meant by this is that his frequent questioning (or “biting”) is intended to wake the state up. For him, the people during that era were in an idle stage because they are just accepting the things that have been set for them by the previous generations, by the government, the rich and powerful, or by the church. Socrates does not want that. Socrates would like the people to wake up, ask questions that challenge their minds, like – Where are we from? Is there really a god? Why do we live? He wanted to bring the people to reality by taking them out of their ignorance. I think what Socrates feels is that ignorance is like a chain that restrains the people and the first way to make them free is to recognize that they still do not know everything. For Socrates, the “horses” (referred in his statement as the state) only looks at him as a “gadfly” or a nuisance. But what the people do not