Platonis Apologia Socratis

Platonis Apologia Socratis (1891)
Editor: J. Adam • Publisher: Cambridge at the University Press
ISBN: none (Athens ran on dialogue, not digits)
Condition: Good (the upright, school-issue kind)
Imprint: Crappy Old Books
Provenance: Ex–Old Palace School, Croydon (where Attic Greek faced morning assembly and won)

Presenting the most famous day in court ever committed to small type and stern margins: Socrates v. Everyone, edited with Edwardian confidence by J. Adam. This 1891 school edition wears its Cambridge blues with the calm of a don who has never once misdeclined a participle. It promises the whole performance—the gadfly buzzing, the jury harrumphing, and that final cup of civic hospitality—served with notes crisp enough to shave.

Condition “Good” translates as scholastically seasoned. Expect the classic trifecta: an Old Palace stamp (ceremonial), a neat shelfmark in pencil (dutiful), and the faint tan of foxing that suggests tea more than tomb. The boards are straight, the hinges honest; corners are rounded by a century of satchels. If previous scholars have left their mark, it will be of the improving sort: an accent corrected, a margin whispering “aoristus historicus,” perhaps an exclamation where Socrates politely dismantles a man’s career in six sentences.

Inside you’ll find Adam’s apparatus doing what it was born to do: pointing you towards the idiom, away from the panic, and occasionally raising an eyebrow at your scansion. The Greek is set in well-behaved lines; the notes keep their waistcoats buttoned. Vocabulary lists lurk at the back like prefects—reassuring, unavoidable. This is the Apology as it was meant to be suffered and loved: in a room that smells faintly of chalk, with a teacher who says “translate quietly” and a book that has no intention of letting you fudge a particle.

As a reading copy, it’s excellent; as a relic, it’s practically a time machine to the moment Britain decided that character could be built on peri + genitive. Display it and your other classics will form an orderly queue. Read it and you may acquire inconvenient virtues—asking questions at dinner, refusing to flatter, and treating death scenes as occasions for grammar.

Highlights you can boast about at tea:

• The original gadfly speech, still buzzing after 2,400 years.

• A masterclass in cross-examination without shouting.

• Notes that translate irony into something you can parse before lunch.

• The comforting knowledge that “I know that I know nothing” is also an excellent excuse for not doing one’s homework—though Adam would never approve.

Crappy Old Books guarantee: we don’t deal in mint; we deal in meaningful scars. If you want a sterile reprint, the world abounds. If you want Socrates in a Croydon school blazer, ready to interrogate your conscience and your accents with equal zeal, this is your copy.

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