Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  This post-trial address to the dikasts occurs in both Plato and Xenophon, but it again flies in the face of what we know of Athenian courtroom procedure. The core of both versions is that, like the legendary hero Palamedes, the archetypal wronged innocent, he, Socrates, has nothing to worry about, because no harm can come to a just man. It is those who have condemned him to death, and especially his prosecutors, who should worry about the effect on their souls of their wrongdoing, and about the effect on the city of their removal of the one man who could have helped it. Plato’s version ends with Socrates voicing some thoughts on death: since his supernatural voice did not prevent him from attending the court today, he is confident that death cannot be a bad thing for him. It is either a blank state, like dreamless sleep, or he can look forward to philosophical conversations in Hades with interesting men of the past. His final words are: ‘And so it is time for us to leave. I go to die, and you to live, but which of these two states is better is unclear to all except the god.’

  Plato’s Apology is brilliant; no summary can do it justice. It contains startling, thought-provoking claims, such as that his prosecutors may be able to kill him, but they cannot harm him, because it is a law that a good man cannot be harmed by a worse man; it contains resonant suggestions such as that wherever one has been posted by a superior, man or god, there it is one’s duty to remain. Scholars still mine the book not just for details of Socrates’ life, but in the attempt to understand some of his core ethical views. Socrates’ equanimity, resolution, defiance, wit and clarity greet one on every page – but this Socrates may, in some part, be Plato’s creation rather than the historical man.

  Apart from those I have already mentioned in passing, there are a few more or less trivial details common to both Xenophon’s and Plato’s versions; more importantly, both writers create a certain atomsphere for the trial, and in this, at least, they seem to be reflecting the events of that day. The courts in Athens were not as dignified and solemn as we might nowadays expect and, more than once, dikasts and spectators raised a hubbub of indignant protest at what Socrates was saying, or at his outrageous attitude and refusal to kow-tow to them.

  The attitude Plato’s Socrates displays to the dikasts, the common people of Athens, is consistently one of defiance and arrogance. Socrates argues that any just man, such as himself, who takes part in democratic politics will be killed; he accepts that he is commonly viewed as an enemy of democracy; he denies the educational value of the democratic inherited conglomerate and even suggests that this kind of education is a major cause of corruption; he states his preference for following his own conscience rather than the collective will of the masses; he makes himself out to be morally superior to the jury, because they expect him to resort to the usual methods of invoking pity, which he says are beneath his dignity; he expresses surprise that so many people voted for him in the first instance – which is to express surprise that the Athenian legal system might actually work in favour of an innocent man; he criticizes the legal system for restricting the time allowed for his defence; he charges the dikasts with acquitting only flatterers and yes-men; so far from directly addressing the charge of impiety, he claims that he would be an atheist if he stopped doing what he did, and to have a superior sense of piety to that of the dikasts; and, finally, his suggestion that he should be fed at public expense amounts to a refusal to accept the authority of the dikasts to find him guilty.

  Socrates undoubtedly did adopt this tactless approach; it is Xenophon’s express purpose to explain why this tone of voice was not as ill-considered as it might seem (because, according to Xenophon, the elderly philosopher preferred death to a prolonged old age). And the upshot is that, even if we conclude that Socrates did mount a defence against the charges (as recent scholars have argued, contrary to an earlier tendency to see the speeches as sheer provocation), it was one that would have worked only if the majority of the dikasts had already been confirmed Socratics. Plato was aware of this: on one of the several occasions when he refers in later works, more or less obliquely, to the trial, he has Socrates say: ‘My trial will be equivalent to a doctor being prosecuted by a pastry-cook before a jury of children’; and on another occasion he celebrates the unworldliness of philosophers and how useless they are in court. Both Plato and Xenophon wanted to give their readers the impression that a high-minded philosopher was convicted by the stupidity of a mob, but this was also an attempt to distract attention from the real reasons why Socrates was killed.

  *References can be found on pp. 209–26. Unattributed facts derive from a variety of sources, which can be tracked down via the bibliography on pp. 227–45.

  TWO

  How the System Worked

  Socrates was tried, condemned and executed; these bare facts alone have spread ripples of puzzlement and indignation down the centuries. But proper understanding of the trial – of any trial – needs context. What kind of society was classical Athens at the time? How did it work? What had it done? What were its hopes and fears? Who were its heroes and villains? We need an outline, at least, of relevant aspects of the classical Athenian political and legal systems. Even such a sketch will show how intertwined the two were. Classical Athens was a radical democracy – the most radical, in certain respects, the world has ever seen – and the courts often acted as another way for the people to wield power. The ancient Greek for ‘the people’ is dēmos, and so, along with the democratic ideal, the Athenians gave us the word ‘democracy’, ‘the rule of the people’.

  The author of the fourth-century BCE The Athenian Constitution (either Aristotle or, more likely, one of his students) was no fan of democracy, and he ruefully agreed that it is only when the people have control of the courts that they are in full control of the constitution. The people’s courts had gained political power above all in the 460s, when they were given the job of assessing the suitability of political officers before they took up their positions, and of judging their performance at the end of their year of office too; by 415 the courts were also hearing cases where the defendant was accused of having introduced an unconstitutional proposal in the Assembly.

  But such powers were not the only factors that politicized the law courts; the incredible and enduring competitiveness of upper-class Athenian society also played a part, in that political rivalries often spilled over into the courts. The competitiveness of trials was recognized: the usual word for a court case in ancient Greek was agōn, literally a ‘contest’. The courts were arenas where what would once have been feuds were played out in more civilized circumstances. Any kind of case could become an arena for political showboating by one or both of the litigants.

  This also means that Plato’s (rather obscure) attribution of personal motives to each of Socrates’ prosecutors is perfectly plausible. Since anyone who wanted to could act on behalf of the city as a whole and initiate a court case on a wide range of charges, including impiety, personal motives were to be expected: ‘Extant evidence reveals’, concludes Danielle Allen, ‘that the Athenians typically prosecuted only in cases where they were victims or personally involved in the matter at trial. The surviving oratorical corpus yields only four cases in which a prosecutor claims to act as a purely disinterested public actor.’ And so the prosecutor of a case would typically begin by claiming that, as a good citizen of the community, his personal grievances coincided with harm done to the city. These generalizations will prove to have enormous implications for Socrates’ trial.

  THE ATHENIAN CONSTITUTION

  The population of Athens at the time of Socrates’ trial in 399 was around 220,000: 120,000 citizens (men, women and children), thirty thousand ‘metics’ (resident non-Athenians) and seventy thousand slaves. Of these, only the thirty thousand or so male citizens had full political rights; admirers of the Athenian democracy in the past tended to gloss over the fact that it was a slave-owning society, and that full citizenship was restricted.

  As in most societies, there were huge differences between the incomes
of ancient Athenians. They themselves generally spoke in broad terms of the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’; the ‘rich’ were indeed rich, but the term ‘poor’ was applied (usually, it has to be said, by the snobbish rich) to anyone who had to work for his living, rather than purchase labour and generate wealth from the surplus value. More precisely, among the thirty thousand full citizens, there were about twelve hundred super-rich, who were liable to ‘liturgies’ (mandatory and usually very expensive benefactions to the state, in lieu of taxation, such as funding a religious festival, or a warship for a year); after this class, there were about three thousand men with sufficiently large estates for them not to have to work or worry much (in peacetime, at any rate), to be able to speculate with their capital, and to occupy a territory close to either side of the liturgical boundary, and another three thousand had enough of an income, from whatever sources, to make them liable to emergency taxation (eisphora) by the state, especially in times of war; then there were about fourteen thousand small farmers and businessmen with sufficient income to serve as hoplites, heavy-armed infantry, who were required to provide their own arms and armour when called up for active service; finally, there were about nine thousand ‘thetes’ – smallholding peasants, casual labourers, menial workers. The Peloponnesian War, which ran intermittently from 431 until Athens’s defeat in 404, devastated the last two of these wealth classes, and reduced the numbers of slaves as well – either by death or by giving them the opportunity to run away. The overall population of 220,000 was down from 335,000 at the start of the war.

  For all the democracy’s claims to egalitarianism and its promise that everyone, however poor, could take part in the city’s affairs, it took money to play a major role. There were perks (such as the occasional bribe from abroad, or booty if you were elected general and conducted a successful campaign), but until late in the fifth century there was no remuneration for most political posts, and they were full-time jobs. As well as money, the job was facilitated by recognized standing in society, and above all by a more or less loyal circle of friends and dependants. Aristocratic culture had long been underpinned by such networks, woven partly by a tradition of complex intermarriages between and within clans, and partly by judicious largess. For much of the fifth century BCE, important political offices remained in the hands of wealthy aristocrats, and even when this monopoly became weakened, they were replaced only by nouveaux riches.

  Networks thrived on kharis, an impossible word to translate because it means simultaneously ‘favour’ and the feeling of gratitude a favour evokes. It refers to the reciprocity that governed traditional Greek thinking in many areas of life, and it would be only a little too crude to gloss it as ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ But kharis could extend beyond kinship groups and other alliances: a wealthy politician might endow the city with a park, for instance, as a way of winning the favour of the common people; in return, he expected them to support his political career. Favouritism and a marked lack of concern for altruism were two of the consequences of the way Athenian politics were conducted. Politicians did at least pretend to have altruistic motives, but favouritism was openly acknowledged and was not generally thought immoral.

  Friends were important, above all, because there were no political parties in ancient Athens; there were programmes initiated by individuals, which withered when the individual died or lost influence. Of course, one person’s programme might resemble another’s, but even so it makes little sense to speak of political parties, with all the machinery, ideology and endurance the word implies. The phenomenon of a politician changing his mind even about fundamental issues such as war and peace, or whether power should be in the hands of the common people or those of an elite, was more familiar in ancient Athens than in any state organized on party political lines. What a politician was promoting, in the first instance, was not so much a platform as himself, as a statesman or trouble-shooter. A proposal was helped on its way by an individual’s core network, and by temporary alliances with other politicians (and their networks) who approved or could be persuaded to approve of that particular proposal. The kaleidoscopic ebb and flow of such alliances, and the behind-the-scenes negotiations, may be left to the imagination. Until very late in the fifth century, there was no civil service to speak of, no permanent committees and sub-committees to see that government progressed relatively smoothly. Friendship was the way things got done.

  Nothing shows the individualistic nature of Athenian politics more clearly than the extraordinary institution of ostracism. Once a year, since the foundations of democracy had been laid by Cleisthenes in 508, the people had the option of sending a prominent man into exile for a maximum of ten years – not because he had committed any crime (and so his estates and property were not confiscated while he was away), but just because he was felt to be a threat to the stability of the democracy, especially as a result of bitter rivalry with an aristocratic opponent. Once the decision had been made to conduct an ostracism, feuding among the most powerful politicians reached fever pitch, as each tried to turn the spotlight on to anyone rather than himself. Then, on the day, each attending citizen wrote on a broken piece of pottery (ostrakon in Greek) the name of the person he wanted to see removed, or got hold of a pre-inscribed shard. If we see ostracism as a vestige of the prehistoric practice of scapegoating (and sometimes literally killing) the king, ostraka are virtual curses, spelled out by ordinary people against their leaders. Though the opportunity was there every year, the Assembly had first to vote to conduct an ostracism, and a minimum of six thousand votes had to be cast in total on the day; but then the person who had the most votes against him was banished.

  The very existence of the institution of ostracism shows that the people were aware of the tensions created by the fact that they needed the continuity, professionalism and contacts (both at home and abroad) that wealthy and ambitious individuals brought to government, and yet had to curb them. One might expect that the members of the elite who held political power would gradually have imposed their own agenda on the community; remarkably, it was not so. One of the great strengths of the Athenian democracy, as a true democracy, was that the general populace found ways to control the elite, and even to make use of their education, wealth and status for democratic ends. Generally speaking, the system worked well; the Athenian democracy ran more or less smoothly, with brief interruptions in 411 and 404–403, for most of its almost-two-hundred-year history (it was overthrown in 322 BCE, after an unsuccessful rebellion against Macedonian dominion), and found a good middle ground between the chaos of aristocratic feuding and a collectivist, totalitarian consensus.

  While recognizing the need for elite leadership, because initiative comes from individuals, the people kept for themselves the right to decide which initiatives to implement. They dictated what was and was not acceptable content for speeches heard in the Assembly and the courts, the ever-present threat of their courts kept officials transparent and accountable, and they taxed the rich in various ways. It was almost impossible for a single individual to gain the kinds of powers that in our lifetimes successive Russian presidents (to take just one prominent example) have awarded themselves. Almost all political positions were changed annually, and certain positions (such as Council member) could not be held consecutively, or more than twice in a lifetime; most positions were not unique, but involved membership of a committee; above all, there was the use of the lottery.

  Only the boards of generals and of financial officers were elected (since they were taken to require special expertise), while everyone else was chosen by lot (though in the case of the Council, the lottery was applied to a pre-elected pool). In the fifth century, the best ways to achieve long-lasting prominence were to use generalship as if it were a political position (especially since the post could be held in consecutive years), or to bypass the system altogether by being a notable speaker, capable of swaying the Assembly, even without holding any official position. Pericles, for instance, used
successive generalships as the foundation of his power in Athens in the 440s and 430s, while after him it became more common to use rhetorical ability for the same end – so much so that the Greek word for ‘public speaker’, rhetor, came to mean ‘professional politician’. But, strictly speaking, as Harvey Yunis says: ‘Athenian rhētores had no professional standing and constituted no restricted or recognized class; held no office, legal position, or any formal power greater than the right to advocate a particular policy; enjoyed no special prerogatives and officially were on a par with all other citizens in and outside the Assembly; were not leaders of parties or factions upon whose support they could call; and had to persuade the dēmos anew every time they mounted the platform to advocate a policy or move a proposal.’ The system encouraged demagoguery.

  The most important check on an individual’s gaining excessive power was simply the fact that the Assembly was the executive branch of government. The Assembly could be attended by any male citizen over the age of twenty, though in practice, since many citizens lived too far away (especially before the days of good roads) or were otherwise occupied, it was rare for more than four thousand people to attend, at least until the city became packed by refugees during the war years, and until the Pnyx (the meeting-place) was expanded around 400 and pay was introduced for attendance. The Assembly met at least ten times a year, though emergency meetings could be summoned between these mandatory sessions. Some issues came up regularly and recurrently, such as provisions for the supply of grain; others, such as ostracism, came up once a year. Otherwise, the agenda for each Assembly meeting was prepared by the second main administrative body, the Council of five hundred men over the age of thirty, fifty from each of the ten tribes to which all Athenians belonged for administrative purposes.