Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  469 Persian fleet destroyed at Eurymedon; birth of Socrates

  c.460 Ephialtes sidelines Areopagus Council; birth of Critias

  454 Transfer of League funds to Athens

  c.453 Birth of Alcibiades

  451–429 Pericles ascendant in Athens

  446 Peace treaty between Athens and Sparta; death of Alcibiades’ father

  445 completion of Long Walls connecting Athens and Piraeus

  443 Ostracism of Thucydides Melesiou

  c.440–430 Anaxagoras and Protagoras flourish in Athens

  c.430 Diopeithes’ decree

  432–429 Siege of Poteidaea

  431–421 Archidamian War (first phase of Peloponnesian War)

  430 Typhoid fever strikes Athens

  429 Death of Pericles; birth of Plato

  428 Birth of Xenophon

  428–427 Revolt of Lesbos (apart from Methymna); ‘Mytilenean debate’’

  427 Gorgias’s first visit to Athens

  425 Athenian victory at Pylos

  424 Athenian defeat at Delium

  423 Aristophanes’ Clouds and Ameipsias’s Connus target Socrates

  422 Battle of Amphipolis

  421 Peace of Nicias

  420 Quadruple Alliance of Athens, Argos, Elis and Mantineia

  418 Sparta defeats Quadruple Alliance in battle of Mantineia

  416 Ostracism of Hyperbolus; Alcibiades’ Olympics; Melos attacked

  415 Desecration of herms

  415–413 Athenian invasion of Sicily

  414–412 Alcibiades in Sparta

  413 Resumption of war between Athens and Sparta; Spartan fortification of Deceleia

  412 Revolt of Chios, Naxos, Miletus, etc.

  412–411 Alcibiades with Tissaphernes

  411 Oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred; Alcibiades recalled by Athenians on Samos

  410 Democracy restored; battle of Cyzicus

  407 Alcibiades returns to Athens; exiled again after battle of Notium

  406 Battle of Arginusae; trial of generals

  405 Battle of Aegospotami

  404 Defeat of Athens followed by rule of the Thirty; assassination of Alcibiades

  403 Civil war; death of Critias; democracy restored

  401 Reduction of oligarchic enclave at Eleusis

  399 Trial and execution of Socrates

  (lightly adapted from Debra Nails, The People of Plato, p. 267)

  THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES

  ONE

  Socrates in Court

  In the spring of 399 BCE, the elderly philosopher Socrates, sixty-nine or seventy years old, stood trial in his native Athens. The court was packed. Apart from the hundreds of officials, there was also a shifting crowd of spectators – Socrates’ well-wishers and enemies, and those who were simply curious to see what would happen to this man, who had long been a well-known figure in Athenian life.

  The case was probably heard in the building known to the excavators of the Athenian Agora as the ‘Rectangular Peribolos’, a more-or-less square structure in the south-western corner of the Agora. Once the dikasts were seated (the ‘jurors’, that is, but their functions were so different from those of a modern jury that it is less misleading just to transliterate the ancient Greek term), and the court president, the King Archon, had decided that everything was ready, Socrates and his prosecutors entered through the main entrance in the north wall. The inside of the building was, at this date, still just an open space, about twenty-five metres square, lined on three sides with benches for the dikasts, for witnesses (if there were any to be called), and for onlookers, who were distinguishable from dikasts only by the fact that the dikasts had been issued with voting tokens with which to cast their verdict at the end of the trial. The fourth side of the building held chairs for the presiding archon, the prosecutors and defendant, and their separate podiums.

  The walls were lightly decorated and although in its previous incarnation the building had been open to the sky, it had been rebuilt after the Persian sack of Athens in 480 and was now roofed. The klepsydra – literally ‘water-stealer’, the clock by which the proceedings were timed – was manned by a responsible publicly owned slave, and kept outside, by the north wall, just to the west of the entrance. It was a terracotta jar with an overflow hole close to the rim and a bronze pipe acting as an outlet at the base. The jar was filled with water up to the overflow hole and the water ran out of the pipe into another similar jar, placed below the first one; speeches were timed in multiples of jars, and the original function of the water-clock was not to limit the length of speeches so much as to ensure that both litigants would have the same time to speak. Different kinds of trial were allowed speeches of different lengths, but no trial lasted longer than a day and many lasted considerably less, so that a court could get through a number of cases in a single day. Socrates’ trial lasted a full day, but he still complained, with considerable justification, about the time restriction.*

  The number of dikasts employed in Athenian trials seems enormous by modern standards: the smallest jury we hear of, for a private case later in the fourth century, was 201; the most critical public cases might be heard by the entire pool of six thousand. The commitment by ordinary people of their time and energy to the pursuit of democratic justice in classical Athens is astonishing. At the beginning of every year, six thousand citizens were enrolled as dikasts, and the courts drew on this pool every time they met; as many of the six thousand as were needed were at the last minute (to curb bribery) divided by lot among the courts. The size of the jury too was partly a hedge against bribery, but more importantly, the law courts were an integral tool of the democracy, and the numbers were meant to ensure that the will of the people was done.

  The jury was a fair cross-section of adult male Athenian society, in terms of age groups, wealth distinctions, modes of employment and so on, with something of a bias towards the poor, who needed the state pay for attendance. Since the 420s, dikasts were paid three obols for a day’s session – an amount that, on its own, would barely keep a single person alive, but on top of other sources of income was enough to improve the quality of a poor man’s life. For Socrates’ trial, there were almost certainly five hundred or 501 dikasts, the normal minimum at the time. Following the devastating losses of the long-drawn-out war with Sparta, which had recently ended with the Athenians’ defeat, there were probably no more than twenty thousand citizens available for jury duty (for which one had to be male and over thirty years old), so Socrates was tried by a good percentage of his citizen peers.

  With the dikasts assembled, the indictment was read out by one of the archon’s assistants. The prosecution speech or speeches followed, and then those of the defendant and, if he had them, one or two supporting speakers. The dikasts then voted – immediately, with no further time for deliberation – on the defendant’s guilt or innocence. The voting system in use for Socrates’ trial in 399 was still relatively new, but vastly improved on its predecessor. Dikasts were given two ballots, which were clearly differentiated, so that one recognizably meant ‘I vote for the prosecution’ and the other ‘I vote for the defence’. The ballot was a small bronze disc pierced through the centre either by a hollow tube (‘for the prosecution’) or by a solid tube (‘for the defence’). Each dikast approached a jar and dropped into it one or the other of his two ballots; he then approached a second jar and dropped into it his unused ballot. When every dikast had voted, votes from the first jar were counted, and could be checked by counting the discarded ballots from the second jar. Secrecy was ensured by the fact that the dikasts could hold the ballots with their fingers covering the spindles, so that no one could see whether they were solid or pierced, but in general the use of ballot-voting in ancient Athens was a way of ensuring accuracy rather than secrecy, since votes could be counted rather than just estimated, by vociferous acclaim or a show of hands.

  Socrates’ trial fell into a common category, technically known as ‘assessed trials’ (agōnes timētoi), in w
hich further, shorter speeches were allowed. These were cases where the state acknowledged that there could be degrees of guilt, and so after the chief prosecutor had proposed a penalty, the defendant proposed a lesser counter-penalty, and then there was a second round of voting by the dikasts, on which of the two proposed penalties to enforce. For both rounds of voting, a simple majority was all that was required; a tied vote counted in favour of the defendant.

  The trial attracted a great deal of attention on the day, and became even more notorious afterwards. This helps to explain the fortunate accident of the preservation, albeit by a biographer writing over six centuries later (drawing on an only somewhat earlier historian, who claimed to have found the document preserved in the Athenian archives), of the exact wording of the charges against him:

  This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus Meletou of Pitthus, against Socrates Sophroniscou of Alopece. Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges, and of introducing other new divinities. He is also guilty of subverting the young men of the city. The penalty demanded is death.

  Socrates’ trial, then, was one of a number known to us in which the fundamental charge was impiety (asebeia), a prosecutable offence under Athenian law. Meletus had demanded the death penalty, and he got his way; I will later outline what we know or can reasonably guess about Meletus and his fellow prosecutors, Anytus of Euonymon and Lycon of Thoricus. Death was a penalty or possible penalty for a surprisingly wide number of serious charges in classical Athens. Having lost the case, Socrates was led by public slaves straight from the court to prison, not far distant in the Athenian Agora. Imprisonment was not, as now, a common punishment; the usual penalties were death, disenfranchisement, exile, confiscation of property or a fine. Prisons were used less as places of long-term internment than as temporary holding-stations, for those awaiting execution, for public debtors, and for some categories of criminals awaiting trial; they fell under the jurisdiction of an annually selected board known, banally rather than sinisterly, as the Eleven, and were staffed by a few lowly workers such as turnkeys, who were probably state-owned slaves.

  Execution usually followed a guilty verdict within a day or two, but fate intervened to prolong Socrates’ life for a brief span. No executions were permitted while the Delia, the annual festival of Apollo on his island of Delos, was being celebrated, because the sacred island had to remain free of pollution. So Socrates lingered in prison for thirty days, awaiting the return of the official Athenian ship from the festival (it set off for Delos the day before his trial and its return was delayed by adverse winds). Apollo, the god to whom Socrates felt closest, was looking after him to the last.

  If Plato is to be trusted, Socrates passed the time conversing with friends and family members, and composing incidental poetry (his only known attempts at writing). Visitors were allowed in the prison at any time of the day or night, and were expected to bring food for the inmates, whose rations were meagre or non-existent. But, until the final day, when he was released as an act of mercy, he was kept in uncomfortable fetters; they were used to reduce the numbers of staff required, and because building materials were such that escape from prison would otherwise have been easy, a matter merely of digging through a relatively soft wall (the ancient Greek for ‘burglar’ means ‘wall-tunneller’). Even so, escaping from prison was not difficult, and some of Socrates’ friends made plans to break him out, but Socrates asked them not to. Having earlier turned down the opportunity of exile before the trial (when it was permissible, if not quite legal), he could not now escape illegally. That would be to harm the city, he said; to harm anyone or anything is to commit injustice and to scar one’s own soul; and Socrates prided himself on never having wronged anyone throughout his lifetime.

  And so at last the ship returned from Delos, and Socrates was executed by drinking hemlock. This form of execution had been introduced only a few years earlier, and had not yet replaced the most common method (a kind of crucifixion), perhaps because it was considered expensive; at any rate, the preparation of the dose was paid for by friends or relatives of the condemned criminal rather than by the state – but what they were really paying for was a more benign death for their friend. The state also approved of the use of hemlock, because it was self-administered and bloodless, and so freed the state from the miasma of guilt.

  It used to be thought that death by hemlock was painful and ugly, with spasms, choking and vomiting; but we now know, thanks to classicist and amateur toxicologist Enid Bloch, that the particular species of hemlock used for this purpose in ancient Athens (Conium maculatum, available on the slopes of nearby Hymettus) was effective, but not especially violent. Its effects, in fact, are pretty much as Plato described them in the closing pages of his dialogue Phaedo, a beautiful and profound work set in prison on the last day of Socrates’ life. Plato correctly portrays his beloved mentor dying a gradual death by paralysis, leading finally to asphyxiation. His body was then collected by family and friends and accorded the traditional rites.

  BEFORE THE TRIAL

  The trial was the culmination of an orderly procedure. First, some weeks or even months earlier, Meletus had had to accost Socrates, and in the presence of two witnesses (perhaps in this case his two fellow prosecutors) read the charges out to him and summon him to appear on a specified date at the office of the King Archon in the stoa named after him in the north-west of the Agora, when Meletus would formally lodge with the King Archon a written copy of the indictment. The King Archon was one of the nine arkhontes of Athens, officers annually selected by lot from an elected short-list, who, in the developed Athenian democracy, had little more than formal roles, especially in the religious and judicial spheres. The King Archon’s title was an odd residue of the long-gone era of kingship, and he retained some of the prehistoric kings’ powers in matters pertaining to religion, so that he was responsible, among other things, for trials for impiety. Socrates’ case was slightly complicated by the fact that impiety was only half of the charge, with the other half being subversion of the youth; but since impiety was the more serious charge, it took precedence and the entire procedure was as if for a trial for impiety. Besides, to judge by the phrasing of the charges, the way in which Socrates was supposed to have subverted Athenian young men was by encouraging them to be as impious as himself. That was how Meletus understood the charges.

  At the end of this meeting in the Royal Stoa – the dramatic context of Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, which has Socrates discussing piety (what else?) with a religious fanatic – the King Archon also set a date for the preliminary hearing, the anakrisis. In the intervening days, the King Archon’s staff posted a copy of the charges in public, in the heart of the Agora. Then, at the preliminary hearing, it was the King Archon’s job to decide whether the case had enough merits to go to court. The indictment was read out, depositions were taken from any relevant witnesses, and Socrates formally denied the charges. If the King Archon was still unsure whether or not there was a case that needed answering, he questioned both Meletus and Socrates until he could reach a decision. After all, the state paid dikasts for their service, and he did not want to waste resources on hopeless or frivolous cases. But these proceedings were more or less a formality, since there were further measures in place to fine prosecutors severely if their cases failed to win twenty per cent of the dikasts’ votes in the actual court itself. The people themselves, sitting as dikasts, would decide the merits of the case.

  We have no way of knowing what either party said at the anakrisis, but Meletus evidently convinced the King Archon that there was a case to be heard, and the archon set a date for the trial. Some weeks passed between the preliminary hearing and the trial. This should have been a time for the defendant to prepare his defence, but on the day Socrates claimed to be speaking off the cuff and even told one of his associates that he had spent his entire life preparing his defence, by consistently doing no wrong. Both Plato and Xenophon were, in some sense, followers of Socrat
es, and his trial and execution aroused such dismay and anger that they and several others from Socrates’ circle devoted at least part of their literary career to defending their mentor’s memory. We have all of the Socratic writings of Plato and Xenophon, and too few fragments from a number of others. Above all, in the present context, we have both Plato’s and Xenophon’s versions of Socrates’ defence speeches, each traditionally called in English the Apology of Socrates, or just the Apology – a transliteration of the Greek word for ‘defence speech’.

  When such a tiny percentage of ancient Greek literature has survived, and yet two versions of a single episode remain, it might seem churlish to complain, but the fact is that we cannot know for certain how much, if anything, of these two versions of Socrates’ defence resembles what Socrates actually said on the day. The differences between the two versions are enormous; they cannot both be right. So whom does one trust? It is tempting to rely on Plato’s version, because it is brilliant – funny, philosophically profound, essential reading – whereas Xenophon’s is far more humdrum, and is in any case an unpolished work. But this is the nub of the whole ‘Socratic Problem’, as scholars call it: we want to trust Plato, but his very brilliance is precisely what should incline us not to trust him, in the sense that geniuses are more likely than lesser mortals to have their own agendas. And in fact no one doubts that Plato had his own agenda, and came to use Socrates as a spokesman for his own ideas; the only question is when this process started and how developed it is in any given dialogue. The most sensible position is that no dialogue, however early, is sheer biography and no dialogue, however late, is entirely free from the influence of the historical Socrates. Plato, Xenophon and all the other Socratics were writing a kind of fiction – what, in their various views, Socrates might have said had he been in such-and-such a situation, talking with this person and that person on such-and-such a topic. For one thing that is common to all the Socratic writers is that they portray their mentor talking, endlessly talking – either delivering homilies, or engaging others in sharp, dialectical conversation and argument.