by Paul Johnson
The first book is a dialogue, Euthyphro, set before the trial, in which Socrates, suddenly becoming aware that he is shortly to be tried for impiety, realizes that he is not quite sure what impiety is, or piety for that matter, and seeks definitions. As usual, he is frustrated by his own methods of examination, and all he shows is the muddle and confusion that arise when humans, anxious to appease or gratify the gods by offering sacrifices, are unable to explain the practical value of these pious actions or why the gods should want them. Socrates was by instinct and reason a monotheist and could perfectly well have argued that a human soul does indeed please an omnipotent god by offering him a pure and virtuous life on earth, and that this is the only form of sacrifice (which involves dispensing with carnal pleasures and all forms of self-indulgence) that matters. But to argue on this line would merely give hostages to his legal opponents, so he does not take it.
There follows the Apology, a supposedly verbatim recollection of Socrates’ defense at his trial. Plato was present, so we must presume that the speech is, in general, accurately given. It also includes Socrates’ remarks after he was convicted by a small majority and his response to the sentence of death by putting forward, as was his legal right, an alternative punishment. Third comes a dialogue, in jail, with one of his closest friends, Crito, who is anxious to provide funds so that Socrates can escape the death sentence and live in exile for a time. It gives Socrates reasons for declining the offer and his determination to uphold the dignity and sovereignty of Athenian law by submitting to it. Finally there is a description of Socrates’ last hours, which includes an argument about the immortality of the soul and the nature of death. This is followed by his taking the penitential poison and his passing into the next world. Plato was not present but knew those who were, and his account has the ring, indeed the muffled thunder, of truth.
The absence of an account by Thucydides, that matchless analyst of motivation and historical settings, means that some aspects of Socrates’ end will forever remain enigmatic. The trial took place in the late spring or early summer of 399 B.C., when Athens was still shaken by the cruel and bloody events during the tyranny of the Thirty, the Quisling government made possible by the Spartan victory and occupation. The 1,500 prominent citizens killed under this ferocious regime formed a significant percentage of the entire male citizenry of Athens and a much higher proportion of those actively involved in public life. Although by the time of the trial the democracy and the rule of law had been restored for three years, the courts were still clogged with litigation arising out of the drastic events under the Thirty, including property confiscations, and the loss and restoration of citizenship rights. It is amazing that, in the circumstances, such a prosecution, which many must have seen as frivolous, was allowed to proceed. Unfortunately there was no attorney general in the Athenian democracy. In England and the United States, this official, the chieflaw officer of the state, has the right to veto a legal process he judges contrary to the public interest. Likewise, in an Athenian court, there was no presiding judge who after hearing the prosecution case, can, in England and America, throw out the case as unjustified, frivolous, or incoherent. Any investigation of the Socrates case is bound to reveal the Athenian legal system as profoundly flawed.
That may well have been Socrates’ view too. But his position throughout was that, as an Athenian citizen, he was fully subject to the laws and bound to abide by them. On many occasions he said, “I am grateful to God for making me a man, as opposed to a woman, a Greek as opposed to a barbarian, and an Athenian as opposed to a foreigner.” His love of Athens was boundless, and the value he attached to the privilege of being free to walk its streets and talk and argue with its people was the spring of his life and all its motions. He could not be without it, and therefore never considered exile. Athens to Socrates was life.
Socrates, then, accepted his trial as a perfectly valid expression of Athenian law and democracy. Many expected him to disappear before it could take place, and go abroad. But that to him was unthinkable. He did not make any preparations. He consulted nobody learned in the law and engaged no one to speak for him. His old rhetorical mentor, Diotima, was dead. Aspasia, that other friend and expert on persuasive rhetoric, may still have been alive, if elderly, but there is no evidence she was still part of Socrates’ life. He took no counsel that we know of. We have to accept that Socrates was a curious mixture of genuine humility and obstinate pride. He never made claims for himself as to knowledge or virtue. On the other hand, believing in justice as he did, he would not be unjust to himself. He believed he had a mission from God to examine and improve people. No power on earth, no threat to take away his freedom or his life, would deflect him from pursuing that God-ordained purpose.
The circumstances of his trial were unfavorable to him. He had to speak, in the open, to a jury of 500 members, enlarged by a crowd of onlookers composed of his friends and the merely curious, those with nothing better to do. One of the most difficult things we have to do, in the early twenty-first century, is to transport ourselves back 2,500 years, to a city of not many more than 150,000 people, with huge cultural and political pretensions but in many ways with the narrow outlook of a medium-size provincial town. Most Athenians knew one another, at least by sight. That knowledge was flavored by gossip, rumor, superstition, and prejudice. Most people in Athens had heard of Socrates, and many had seen him pottering about. He was thought to be “clever.” Now as Socrates himself remarked on more than one occasion, Athenians did not like people merely because they were clever. It was a term, if not exactly of abuse, at least of suspicion. So Socrates was clever, was he? Then why does he wander about, with no shoes, almost in rags? Something wrong there, eh?
In physical terms, we have to try to imagine Socrates addressing a town meeting in the Midwest in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The issue was capital, in that the man’s life was theoretically at stake, but probably nothing would come of it. In other respects, it was a routine affair, nothing special. Socrates was used to talking, but always to small gatherings. He did not have a seasoned orator’s powerful voice. I have spoken to gatherings of five hundred or more in various parts of the world and had no problems. But then I have always had amplification. Socrates had nothing but his voice. He was not speaking, either, in the theater at Epidaurus, with its superb acoustics, but merely in an uncomfortable open space in a dusty corner of the Acropolis.
His audience would have been roughly of three parts. One third knew him, had actually met and talked to him, knew the kind of things he said—and what he did not say—and felt there was no harm in him. They would have voted to acquit him without much regard for the procedures in court. Another third of the jury also knew him or of him, but at one remove. They had seen or knew of Aristophanes’ play about him, Clouds, first performed twenty-five years before, but probably revived from time to time. Its hostility and lies created lasting prejudice against Socrates as a nuisance and troublemaker. Very clever: oh yes, very clever indeed. There had been other theatrical attacks on him, including an entire comic play, whose text has disappeared. Such mud sticks, and plenty of mud had been thrown in Socrates’ direction over many years. A third portion of the jury, in any likelihood, had no views at all about Socrates. But they probably disliked him, as being “clever,” or reputedly so. And why was he of such importance as to occupy the attention of the court, when there was so much more of genuine importance to be dealt with? These people would not have listened hard, and in any case it was clearly not too easy to hear everything that he said: He complained several times of interruptions.
Nor was the substance of Socrates’ defense calculated to win over either those prejudiced against him or to attract the indifferent. His strongest argumentative virtue, a sinuous and sinewy subtlety, could not work with a mass audience. His habitual flavor of irony was a positive handicap. His best strategy, and one that a professional advocate would certainly have recommended, was to bring forward a succession of witn
esses of impeccable character to testify, first, to his observance of the outward forms of Athenian religion and, second, to his having instructed them in ways that had led to their strong affection for virtuous civic principles. This would not have been difficult to do. But Socrates would not do it. It was against his principles in that it gave a misleading view of what he had been trying to do in his life for the best part of half a century. He was not in the least interested in the outward observance of religion, but in its inner content. Nor did he instruct young men—or old ones, either—in civic virtue or in anything else. His object was to help, not teach, by his examining method—teach people to think for themselves.
Socrates’ attempt to explain to his dull Athenian mass jury what he was trying to do was dangerous in two ways. First, it involved telling them about his inner voice from God, which ordained him to conduct philosophy as he understood it. This in itself was sufficient proof he was not an atheist as such. His cross-examination of Meletus elicited that the young fanatic did indeed accuse him of atheism, and to that extent the first part of the indictment was refuted. But the jurors were probably not much interested by this point. What did impress them, and far from favorably, was Socrates’ claim to be guided by a special divine command. Ordinary people who have had no such experience do not like to hear about those who claim to have a private line to the divinity. They scent presumption and arrogance. They feel that such persons are liable to make public nuisances of themselves, especially if, as Socrates appeared to be saying in his defense, this special divine voice gave him commands that took precedence over any others, including, presumably, the standing orders of the civic deities. Here, indeed, Socrates appeared to be confirming the indictment, that he had substituted new gods, or god, one specially devoted to him, for the traditional gods of Athens.
Second, and worse, Socrates insisted on resurrecting the old tale of the prophetess of Delphi, who declared that there was no one in Athens wiser than Socrates. Some of the jurors would already have heard it. Others had not. Both groups might have been, and probably were, shocked that Socrates would bring it up in the context of his trial. Again, it smacked of arrogance and insensitivity. Of course, to those of us who have been able to follow the full flow of Socrates’ thought, thanks to Plato, his object in referring to the oracle is clear and even admirable. It was central to his whole philosophy. At least he was aware of his own poverty of knowledge. In describing to the Athenian jurors his attempts to explore the minds of his fellow Athenians to discover, whether they possessed any wisdom and whether they were conscious of possessing none, he was in fact trying to defend the reputation for truth of the god who inspired the prophetess. He concluded that she was, after all, speaking the truth, for his admission of being ignorant, of knowing he had no wisdom, made him unique in Athens, and to that extent, in confessing and acknowledging his miserable bereftness, wiser than his fellow Athenians, who thought themselves to know more than they did. But the subtlety and irony of this argument was quite beyond most of his hearers, who probably thought that Socrates was merely finding a new and tortuous way of praising himself. It was all very clear, no doubt, and to hell with him! So he was the wisest man in Athens, was he? Well: an Athenian jury would show what they made of that claim.
Some of Socrates’ friends, listening to his defense, must have winced when he thus played into his enemies’ hands by his candor, and by the fact that he clothed it in that most dangerous of all vestures, irony. However, when all is said about the inadequacies of Socrates’ defense, what probably led to the guilty verdict had nothing to do with it. The damning points were the two names: Critias and Alcibiades. Both were hated figures. Alcibiades had been rich, handsome, reckless, full of braggadocio and temerity, proud as the devil, hugely appealing, and infinitely wicked. He had Athens at his feet and then led it into the most disastrous military adventure in the whole of its long history. In his wicked and childish way, he had blasphemed the most sacred of Athens’s private religious cults, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and condemned accordingly, he had fled to the Spartans, turned traitor to Athens, and advised her enemies how to attack her successfully. Forgiven and reinstated, he had achieved some successes, but met failure, too, and was again a suspect exile when the Persians, conspiring with the Spartans, had him murdered.
Critias, born in 460 B.C., was ten years older than Alcibiades, and a follower and associate of his in some of his exploits, both antireligious and political. He was a writer, poet, and dramatist, some of whose works, which have since disappeared, were once attributed to Euripides. Whereas Alcibiades was by inclination a democrat and populist, Critias was an elitist who valued his aristocratic connections, and on the surrender of Athens in 404, he returned as a violent supporter of the pro-Spartan Thirty Tyrants and took a prominent role in their atrocities. In Xenophon’s account, he was the leader of the extremists among the Thirty, and in a desperate attempt to prolong the regime, he was killed fighting the democrats in the spring of 403.
In 399 B.C., Alcibiades and Critias were the two most hated names in Athens. But they were both dead, and nothing further could be done by Athenians to avenge themselves upon them. Moreover, though associates of both, and especially Critias, were still alive and at liberty, they were covered by an act of amnesty that Anytus and other moderate democrats had caused to be passed in 403 B.C. in an attempt to heal wounds and reunite the shattered political consensus of their city. It was probably because of the inhibiting role of the amnesty that Anytus was under pressure from his side to find a suitable guilt victim who could be blamed for the sins of Critias and Alcibiades and punished accordingly. Hence his decision to attack Socrates and finance his prosecution.
Socrates had taken no part in the events of 404–403 B.C. and thus was not covered by the amnesty. What he had done, many years before, or so it was widely believed, was to teach both Critias and Alcibiades, introducing them to impious and immoral ideas of the kind attributed to him in Aristophanes’ Clouds or worse, and sowing the seeds of wickedness that eventually produced the evil fruit of treason and mass murder. This, I am sure, was the line of thinking that led directly to the prosecution of Socrates. Whether either of the two hate figures was ever his pupil in any regular sense is doubtful. But they had been at times on friendly terms with him, and Alcibiades had openly boasted of his admiration for Socrates and his wisdom. Critias had family connections with Plato, now Socrates’ favorite pupil, and it could easily be shown, or at least was widely believed, that Critias and Socrates had remained friends.
Here we come to another fatal consequence of Socrates’ unwillingness to get involved in politics. Except privately, among intimate friends, he never commented on Athens’s politics and her rulers. He said nothing for the record about Pericles and his regime, for or against. He neither supported nor condemned the Peloponnesian War. He did not discuss the excesses of Alcibiades, applaud his victories, or condemn his follies and failures. So far as we know, he had no public comments to make on the fall of Athens and the murderous regime of the Thirty Tyrants. Yet one thing spoke for itself: He chose to remain in Athens during those terrible months. It is true, he refused to have any part in the murder of Leon. But the fact that he then went home and remained there to await retribution instead of fleeing abroad to join the democratic opposition could be held against him. Few understood the nature of his passionate attachment to the streets of the city, even when stained with the blood of its citizens.
Hence it could be said that Socrates was the first man in history, in a formal trial, to fall victim of guilt by association. He had been a friend of both Critias and Alcibiades, and though he denied having taught either of them, he would not repudiate the friendship to satisfy the court. So he was judged guilty. The verdict, considering the number of jurors, was a narrow one. A total of 280 jurors voted for condemnation, 220 for acquittal: a majority of 60. Under Athenian law, the accused was now entitled to propose an alternative to the death sentence demanded by the prosecuting trio. It was
universally expected, at any rate by those who did not know him well, that Socrates would propose his banishment. But this was unacceptable to him for two reasons. First, it meant leaving Athens. This, as he saw it, was a greater punishment than death. Second, to have made an alternative punishment proposal acceptable to the court—as banishment certainly would have been—seemed to Socrates to admit the justice of the verdict and the whole process of prosecuting him in the first place.
Instead, and doubtless against the advice of his friends—if he consulted them—Socrates made a defiant counterproposal. It had two attractions for him. First, it maintained his position that his philosophical ministrations to Athenian citizens, including the young, were a positive benefit to his native city and should be rewarded, not punished. Second, this audacious response was a piece of delicious irony and could be couched in his habitual quasicomic tone. He proposed that, in view of the good he had done to Athens by his work, he should be treated like one of the victors in the Olympic Games or like certain generals, admirals, and statesmen who had rendered exceptional services to the city, and awarded his meals at the celebratory table in the Prytaneum—this rare privilege to be conferred on him for life.
This proposal was intended to shock, and did, but chiefly his own supporters. It appeared to show contempt for the court and its verdict. In response to their frantic signals, Socrates then changed tack. He made a counterproposal that was punitive. He said he would pay a fine, of one mina, which was all he possessed. He added that he was sure his friends would stand surety for a larger fine, if the court felt this appropriate, and put forward a figure of 30 minas. This figure, which he seems to have produced from the top of his head, was not negligible. One mina, he knew, would buy a well-produced copy of a play, a history or a poem by Homer at one of the new manuscript shops in the marketplace. Thirty minas would constitute an adequate dowry for a middle-class bride. But such a fine would not normally be considered a serious alternative to a death sentence, and the proposal of a mina fine would have seemed an insult, like his ironic demand to have a seat at the public table in perpetuity.
