Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Nothing can harm a good person, either in life or after death.”
Socrates · Socratic · Ancient · 399 BCE
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that a good person's real welfare is virtue, which neither the jury nor death can take, so harm in the deep sense cannot land. A competing reading calls this a moral redefinition that ignores injury, poverty, and grief, which still harm people in every ordinary sense. The sentence is among Socrates's last words to the jury in Apology 41c–d. He pairs it with a claim that the gods do not neglect his affairs.
Did Socrates really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Plato's report of Socrates near the end of the Apology. The English is close to G. M. A. Grube's translation of 41d.
Where it comes from
Plato, Apology 41d
Approximate date: 399 BCE.
How to use it
A sacking, a lost case, or a cruel rumour still knocks a life sideways, and nothing in an ordinary week makes that unreal. His claim is narrower if you keep his meaning of harm: what damages the goodness by which he is scoring a person. Use it as a ranking of harms, not as a denial that the rent is now a problem, and friends still have work to do.
A mindset reading
The habit is to ask which sense of harm is in play before repeating the sentence. If harm means damage to virtue, the claim is a Stoic-sounding thesis Plato's Socrates is willing to die with. If harm means suffering, the sentence is false, and pretending otherwise is not piety.
Understand the philosophy
Socrates is answering the apparent victory of his accusers. A good person, on this view, is harmed only by becoming worse, not by being killed or slandered. The after-death clause depends on his hope that death is either nothing or a migration, both of which he has just sketched. The line is comfort and doctrine at once, spoken after the sentence of death.
- ethics
- death
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading is that a good person's real welfare is virtue, which neither the jury nor death can take, so harm in the deep sense cannot land. A competing reading calls this a moral redefinition that ignores injury, poverty, and grief, which still harm people in every ordinary sense. The sentence is among Socrates's last words to the jury in Apology 41c–d. He pairs it with a claim that the gods do not neglect his affairs.
Did Socrates really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Plato's report of Socrates near the end of the Apology. The English is close to G. M. A. Grube's translation of 41d.
Which work is it in?
Plato, Apology 41d Approximate date: 399 BCE.