He begins in his first part of his defence by taking the example of Aristophanes" play "The Clouds" and looking the way in which a character called Socrates is portrayed. The character in the comedy supposedly walks on air and, according to Socrates, talks nonsense. The philosopher claims to have "a human kind of wisdom" (20d, page 31, Defence Of Socrates, Oxford World Classics, Plato). He claims the Delphic oracle itself declared him to be wisest above all others, explaining that he has taken it upon himself to try and find someone wiser than himself by questioning anyone claiming to be wise. Yet he finds no one to be as wise as him, because he knows himself to not be wise, whereas others think themselves to be wise. As he says (through Plato's work), "It appears that I am wise in just this one small respect: if I do not know something, I do not think that I do." (21d, page 32, Defence of Socrates, Oxford World Classics, Plato) Socrates also says that he lives in complete poverty because he believes in devoting all his time to philosophy and the well fare of his spirit and mind rather than his physical self. He insists that the picture of him "trotting things out about the sky and beneath the earth, failing to acknowledge the gods, and turning the weaker argument into the stronger" (23d, page 35, Defence Of Socrates, Penguin edition, Plato) are simply not true, and that anyone that believes this is how he thinks is "completely ignorant" (23d, page 35, Defence of Socrates, Oxford World Classics, Plato).
In the second part of his defence, Socrates addresses his chares of corrupting the young and impiety. He clearly states that he does indeed believe in the gods. By taking the fact that his accusers say him to be disregarding the old gods accepted by the state and introducing new ones in their place, Socrates shows that he has a belief in spiritual beings, and then makes the point that it is illogical to believe in such spiritual beings without believing in gods also, and that he therefore does believe in the gods, saying "who in the world could believe in that there were children of gods, yet no gods?" (27d-e, page 41, Defence of Socrates, Oxford World Classics, Plato).
