He leaves us to ponder the questions on our own, and turns to a seventh question: “The most mysterious thing of all is that Socrates does not spell out the connection between saying things that are just and a willingness to tell the truth in a haphazard manner.” (9-10) He supposes that the connection resides in Socrates’ confidence that by being just and telling the truth he will “ensur his acquittal.” (10) Thus for Leibowitz, Socrates here asserts, by implication, the belief that a life of justice is itself sufficient to guarantee an acquittal, even if one speaks haphazardly in court. He offers a list of six questions that occur to him when he reads Socrates’ statement, “I trust that the things I say are just” (17c). In the second chapter, Leibowitz discusses the irony in Socrates’ claim to speak the truth, but to do so using whatever words occur to him, rather than in a carefully composed speech. In order to illustrate the character of the book, I will take a look at a few of the examples of irony the author finds and the explanations he offers. It follows the text in order from beginning to end, including sections on the prooemium, the first accusers, the present accusers, the digressions, the penalty and so forth. The book serves a useful purpose in the sense that it collects just about every possible instance of irony in the Apology. Readers who do not already possess a deep familiarity with the text and its interpretation may find this judgment impossible to make. The burden of judging whether the interpretation is persuasive or not is placed on the reader. To my mind, Straussian theory – as opposed to method – is plausible and well worth testing, but Leibowitz’s goal is not to test it but to apply it on the assumption that it is correct. It is Straussian both in theory (philosophical writers who do not accept popular beliefs are reluctant to criticize them openly) and in method (speculative interpretations which are not fully canvassed). The philosophical and exegetical framework of the book is openly Straussian, and references to Strauss and his students abound. Still, one does sometimes find persuasive accounts of irony, and it was with the hope of finding some that I opened David Leibowitz’s book on irony in Plato’s Apology. Of course, irony is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to pin down, partly because one of the common aims of an ironic speaker is to avoid being pinned down. I for one do believe that Socrates speaks with irony in parts of this work. The Apology is the only work in which he addresses a court of law, and one would not be surprised at all to find a special degree of irony on display. Most readers believe that Plato’s Socrates often speaks in an indirect, humorous or ironical manner.

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