ACT III
(The Judges are seated on a tribunal. Socrates is standing.)
A JUDGE: (to Anitus)
You mustn't sit here. You are a priest of Ceres.
ANITUS:
I am only here for edification.
MELITUS: Silence. Listen, Socrates, you are accused of being a bad citizen; of corrupting the youth; of denying the plurality of the gods; of being a heretic, deist, atheist. Answer.
SOCRATES: Athenian Judges, I exhort you always to be good citizens as I have always tried to be. To shed your blood for the country as I have done in more than one battle. Regarding the youth of which you speak, do not cease to guide them through your admonitions, and especially by your examples; teach them to love true virtue, and to flee the wretched philosophy of the school; the article of the plurality of the gods is a bit difficult to discuss, but you will easily understand me. Athenian Judges, there is only one God.
MELITUS AND ANOTHER JUDGE:
Oh, the knave.
SOCRATES: There is only one God, I tell you. His nature is to be infinite. No being can share his infinity with him. Raise your eyes toward the celestial globes, turn them towards earth and the sea. All corresponds, all is made for each other. Each being is intimately linked to other beings. Everything is of the same design. There is only a single architect, a single master, a single guardian. Perhaps he's deigned to form some genies, some demons, more powerful and more enlightened than men. And if they exist they are creatures like you; they are his first subjects and not gods at all. But nothing in nature advertises to us that they exist, while all nature announces to us one God and one Father. This God has no need of Mercury and Iris to signify his orders. He has only to will it and that's enough. If by Minerva, you understand only the wisdom of God, if by Neptune you intend only his immutable laws which raise and lower the seas, I would say to you: He allows you to revere Neptune and Minerva, since under these emblems you are still adoring only the eternal Being, and so long as you are not giving occasion to people to misunderstand it.
ANITUS:
What impious balderdash.
SOCRATES: Always beware of turning religion into metaphysics: Morality is its essence. Adore and stop disputing. If our ancestors had said that the Supreme God had descended into the arms of Alcmene, of Danae, of Semele, and that he had children with them, our ancestors were imagining dangerous fables. It's insulting to the Divinity to pretend that he had committed with a woman in whatever manner it might be what we would call amongst men an adultery. That's discouraging to the rest of men to say that to be a great man, one must be born from the mysterious coupling with one of your wives or daughters. Miltiades, Cimon, Themistocles, Arisitides, that you persecuted were perhaps worth more than Perseus, Herakles and Bacchus. There being no other way to be the children of this God than by trying to please him, and by being just. Deserve that title by never rendering iniquitous judgments.