“Be not surprised, O Athenians, nor express displeasure at what I have said; listen rather and hear, for you will be the better and not the worse for anything that I have said, and I have some other things to say also of a nature to bring out similar expressions of your dissent; but hear me, I beseech you, with patience. This I must plainly tell you, that if you put me to death, being such an one as I have described, and doing such things as I do, you will not hurt me so much as you will hurt yourselves; or, more properly speaking, no man can hurt me, neither Anytus nor Meletus nor any one else; for it is not in the nature of things that a better man should receive essential harm from a worse. No doubt a worse man may kill me, or banish me, or brand me with statutable infamy--evils these the greatest possible in the estimation of some, but not certainly in my conviction, who hold the greatest infamy to be even that which this man has brought upon himself, in that wrongfully he endeavours to take away the life of his fellow. I am not therefore, in making this present defence, pleading my own cause so much as speaking in your behalf, O Athenians, lest ye should be found sinning against the god in condemning a just man unjustly. For if you put me aside you will not easily find another (though it may excite a smile when I say so) who may be able or willing to perform the same service for the public good; for even as a large and mettlesome, though from the size of its body somewhat slow, horse requires {116} a goad to make it run, even so the god seems to have attached me to you, that by spurring and goading, and exhorting and reproving you day after day with a pious persistency, I should rouse you to the performance of what your dignity requires. Such an honest counsellor, and one who shall as faithfully apply when necessary the profitable pain that belongs to the successful treatment of your malady, you may not so readily find again; for which reason I say, fellow-citizens, hear me and spare my life; but if, as is natural enough, you take offence, and, like other sleepers, begin to kick and to butt at the man who rouses you from your lethargy, nothing is easier than killing me; and then when I am gone you will be allowed to sleep on in uninterrupted sloth, unless indeed the god shall be pleased to send some other messenger of grace to pluck you from destruction. And that I truly am such a person as I here profess to be, a real messenger of the gods to you, you may gather from hence that no mere human motive could have induced me now for so many years to have neglected my own affairs, and devoted myself to your good, looking upon every man as my father or my brother, and exhorting him by every possible suasion to seek for virtue as the only good. And this also I may say, that if in the exercise of this my vocation I had exacted any payment or received any pecuniary reward my accusers might