From a jury of 501, he was found guilty of a vote 281 220. In one of Plato s most famous dialogues, The Apology, Socrates' defense speech is given to his accusers, the jury, and a panel of Athenian citizens. In this paper, it will be the first accusation that I will concentrate on whether Socrates was guilty of making the weaker argument the stronger. I am going to argue that Plato gives clear textual evidence that this was not the case. During the time of Socrates life, being accused of making the weaker argument the stronger was another way of being accused of being a Sophist.
Sophist is the noun derived from the adjective sopho.
Sopho means to be an expert, or to be wise at something. While there are several conflicting ideas of what defined a sophist, I will follow what I believe to be the traditional interpretation. A sophist was a person who was an expert in the art of speech, and taught this art to the youth for a fee. It was common that a wealthy person or an aristocrat would send their youth to a sophist, to be educated in the art of speech and persuasion in order to prepare them for a career in law or politics. While one interpretation of sophist is that they taught virtue and wisdom, coincidentally, sophists received a negative interpretation from many of Athens s citizens.