Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Socrates prayed to the gods simply to give him what was good, recognizing that they know best what is good for us … He thought that in offering small sacrifices to the gods from small resources he was in no way falling behind those who offered ample ones from ample resources. He said that it was a poor thing for the gods if they took more pleasure in great sacrifices than in small ones, because then they would often be better pleased with the offerings of the wicked than with those of the good.

  What Socrates is doing here is attempting to purge tradition of its vulgarity. Close to the start of Republic Plato has a minor character argue that one of the benefits of wealth is that one can be sure to fulfil all one’s ritual obligations, and in a collection of maxims written probably in the late 370s, the orator Isocrates of Erchia says: ‘Revere the gods always, but especially during the city’s festivals, because then you will gain the reputation of being the kind of person who performs sacrifices and abides by rules and regulations.’ Piety was taken to be measurable, and it was others who took the measure of it. These are the kinds of shallow conceptions of sacrifice that Socrates intended to combat.

  Moreover, it was perfectly acceptable, within standard Greek religion, to ask for the gods’ help in doing someone harm. A central tenet of Greek popular morality was the injunction to do good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies; and in extreme circumstances one was expected to help one’s friends even in dubious or downright immoral activities (such as fixing an election) and harm one’s enemies just because they were one’s enemies, not because they deserved it for any particular crime. Then again, and on Homer’s authority, it was taken to be possible to redeem sin by lavish sacrifices, much as various medieval popes absolved thugs from past crimes if they undertook to join a crusade. Socrates also rejected these muddle-headed beliefs.

  Socrates urged moderation and simplicity in one’s dealings with the gods, with the point being to petition the gods, not to impress one’s fellow men. Socratic gods do not have the same kinds of desires as us; they only want us to be good. He was deeply religious, then, but in a way that was unconventional in his own day, and probably would seem so in any culture. He saw himself as a servant of the gods in trying to promote human happiness in the Athens of his time, but he thought that happiness was identical to, or at least a necessary consequence of, a virtuous state of the soul, thanks to which one could practise moral virtue. The path to happiness, then, involved painstaking and often painful self-examination, or examination by someone as skilled at it as Socrates. And so he walked the path by questioning himself and others to see if anyone knew what they were talking about when it came to ethical issues, and by giving advice. The promotion of virtue was carrying out the gods’ will, since they want human beings to be good and happy. But if this is piety, piety is something we have to think about and work towards: it is not just a matter of unthinking conformity to certain rituals.

  These unconventional thoughts do tend to marginalize traditional Greek rituals, in the sense that prayers and sacrifices that asked for anything other than happiness, or were not just expressions of gratitude for bestowed goods, or were not requests for guidance (since Socrates held that humans can never have the whole picture on any matter), become irrelevant or, at best, peripheral to a true understanding of the gods. Plato gives us a perfect example of just such a Socratic prayer:

  Dear Pan and all gods here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my external possessions may be congruent with my inner state. May I take wisdom for wealth, and may I have just as much gold as a moderate person, and no one else, could bear and carry by himself.

  The gods are not there to fulfil our petty desires, but to help us in the great work of self-perfection, which is largely undertaken by one’s own efforts. But is this impious? It could be if Socrates was saying that the work of improving oneself and others is something one can do only by oneself, but this is not what he said: the gods still play a part, and we need to petition them in the usual ways, even if not for the usual things. In working for the perfection of oneself and others, we are instruments of the gods, carrying out their work on earth. So far from Socrates’ views reducing the gods to an ancillary role, it is we who have or should have the ancillary role: we should carry out the gods’ wishes.

  This is not far removed from an insight we find in Homer. In the Homeric poems there is a phenomenon which scholars call ‘double causation’: whatever I do, I can say either that a god possessed me, or that the deed was mine, or even both at once. Socrates’ views are no more obviously impious than it was obviously impious for Antigone in Sophocles’ Antigone to claim to be doing the gods’ work in burying her brother. Socrates was saying that piety is being the gods’ servant, and this was perfectly acceptable within Greek religion – how could it not have been? But he was also saying that the special relationship he enjoyed with the god, as his servant, was possible for each and every one of us.

  Socrates was skating on thin ice, but was not impious. But it was hardly difficult to make someone out to be impious when Athenians were encouraged to feel that piety consisted in ‘not doing away with any of the practices their ancestors had handed down to them, and not adding anything to the traditional ways’. Piety was conformity. The protocol of an ancient Athenian courtroom made it impossible for Socrates to explain his views to the dikasts, within the space of an hour or so. Plato’s Socrates seems aware that his views were liable to be thought unconventional, and were too open to misunderstanding to go into on the day in court: he never, in his defence speech, straightforwardly addresses the charge of failing to acknowledge the gods of the city. He establishes that he believes in gods, but he fails to say they are those of the city, and the reason for his reticence is that his conception of the divine involved too purged and refined a version of Greek religion for the dikasts readily to accept.

  In any case, there is something odd about the charge that Socrates failed to acknowledge the gods of the state. There was no specified set of deities that Athenian citizens had to worship or acknowledge, by law or by convention. There were about two thousand cults in Athens and Attica at the time, so it was impossible to worship them all; one was selective, focusing on the major public deities and on those relevant to one’s life or to a particular situation. The prosecutors must have used this charge (as Plato suggests by means of the dialogue between Socrates and Meletus) to imply that Socrates did not recognize any proper gods at all – that is, that he was, to all intents and pur poses, an atheist. It would have been hard to make this charge stick, but even harder for Socrates to have explained his views to the dikasts. He could have relied on the let-out that the gods were inscrutable (as he undoubtedly believed, along with all other Greeks) and so neither he nor anyone else could be certain about such things, but that would have been tantamount to an admission of guilt under the circumstances of a trial. The prosecutors were happy: innuendo served their purposes just as well as facts.

  The prosecutors relished all the popular conceptions and misconceptions about Socrates and his followers. The comic poets had consistently portrayed them as a kind of mystical cabal, with Socrates as their guru. There is such a strong religious dimension to Socrates’ work that he can be portrayed as a fully fledged mystic, as one scholar has recently, and mystics have always been the butts of bemused and self-righteous incomprehension. I suspect that the prosecutors presented a weird mish-mash of quasi-Socratic thoughts and practices, confusing him with representatives of various intellectual streams, while reminding the dikasts that he was known to associate with Pythagoreans (a famous mystical sect) and to fall into trances. Even so, the prosecutors must have known that, if push came to shove, it was going to be hard to get Socrates convicted merely on the vague charge of impiety. And so they specified his major impiety: introducing new gods.

  INTRODUCING NEW GODS

  Socrates was not the last person in Athenian history to be accused of introducing new gods, but he was the first. Again, however, there
is something odd about the charge, because many new cults had been introduced into Athens in the fifth century. Some were new deities or heroes, or previously undervalued ones who were raised to sudden prominence, such as Athena Nikē, Zeus Eleutherios, Heracles, Ares and Theseus, all of whom were held to be partly responsible for victory over the Persians. Some were suitable personifications, such as ‘Fair Fame’ (Eukleia) and ‘Rumour’ (Phēmē), or Artemis Aristoboulē (Artemis the Good Adviser), personally introduced by Themistocles in gratitude for the intelligence that had helped him to win the battle of Salamis. Some came from elsewhere in Greece, such as Pan, an Arcadian deity who was believed to have induced panic in the Persian troops at Marathon and who subsequently achieved international prominence as a result of Athenian interest in him, or the Epidaurian healing god Asclepius, whose introduction was hastened by the plague of 430–428. Some came from further afield: the need to placate the eastern Thracians, the Odrysians (who both controlled vast reserves of timber and threatened the trade route to the Black Sea), in the late 430s led to the introduction of one of their major deities, Bendis, and the small-scale, elective cults of Sabazius and of Cybele, Mother of the Gods, both from the Near East, were tolerated too, as private, small-scale forms of cult have to be in any cosmopolitan city.

  So what was Socrates’ crime? Polytheism is necessarily flexible and open-ended; it encourages personal choice, experimentation (‘God A seems to answer my prayers more than god B’) and change. Around 450, however, the people took for themselves the right to introduce new gods, after proper consultation of the oracles or as a result of an authentic epiphany by the god himself. A wealthy individual could sponsor the introduction of a deity, as one did for Asclepius in the 420s, but the ultimate sanction came from the Assembly. The reason for the decision-making body of democratic Athens to want control over such matters is that introducing new gods could lead to other gods being edged out. But since Athens’s prosperity and success depended on the goodwill of the gods, and since at the time (and for two heady decades after 450 as well) Athens was conspicuously successful, it followed that it was important for the traditional gods to keep being worshipped.

  But this is still not enough to convict Socrates, because minor sects slipped under the net: the worship of Sabazius, for instance, never received the official sanction of the Assembly, and even when such cults were thought disreputable, no legal action was ever taken against them or their devotees, as far as we know. And whatever people thought of Socrates, no one could have imagined that he wanted to introduce any deity requiring worship on a large scale.

  We hear of three other trials for introducing new gods, all from considerably later in the fourth century, when it was far easier for individuals to set up private shrines to obscure deities. The defendants were a famous courtesan called Phryne of Thespiae (and her deity Isodaites), the politician Demades of Paeania (who successfully, if briefly, introduced the worship of the Alexander the Great into Athens), and a priestess of Sabazius called Nino (the names of the new deities she wanted to introduce are unknown). The prosecution of Demades was inspired by anti-Macedonian sentiment, while Phryne and Nino were considered to be disruptive influences. Phryne came to court because the revels she conducted were too wild and licentious, and Nino because she was regarded as a sorceress.

  It seems likely, then, that introducing new gods was actionable only if the individual or the religion concerned was suspect on other grounds. This will lead us to look further for the real reasons why Socrates was held to be objectionable, but why was the charge even plausible? What new deity or deities was he supposed to have introduced? There is only one candidate.

  Socrates called the little voice that spoke inside his head his daimonion sēmeion, ‘supernatural alarm’ or ‘divine sign’, and the second half of the impiety charge says that he introduced kaina daimonia, ‘newfangled supernatural beings’ or ‘divinities’. Both Plato and Xenophon understand Socrates’ daimonion as direct contact with the divine, and they both agree that this part of the charge was an implicit reference to it. This remarkable little voice was unique to him, and he had had it since childhood; it occurred frequently enough for him to describe the phenomenon as familiar. It usually said ‘no’ to something (whether important or trivial), but since saying ‘no’ to one course can be a recommendation of another course, it was not merely prohibitive. It was, of course, prophetic: it foresaw some aspect of the future and warned Socrates against it.

  Xenophon presents Socrates’ listening to this voice as no more or less impious than any other form of divination, and this seems to me to be essentially correct. But there were still problems with having such a friendly, private deity: it seemed to privilege Socrates (and by extension his friends and followers) and to exclude others in a most undemocratic fashion. Likewise, Aristophanes had a character condemn comic versions of the scientists’ ‘gods’ as both ‘new-fangled’ (the same word as in the charge against Socrates) and private, not available to the people of Athens for worship. One of the main reasons the state maintained a high degree of control over religious matters was because religion helped to weld the community together by means of shared rites.

  Socrates’ supernatural voice was apparently well known in Athens. With the help of the rumours about his trances and his little voice, the prosecutors could have made him out to be a kind of prophet – but a loose cannon, a prophet without civic bounds, the minister of an unknown god that made sudden appearances and seemed not to require all the usual rituals. For Socrates never specified what god he thought the voice came from; for him it was pure experience. It did not start its communications by saying ‘Hello! Apollo here again!’ (though if pushed he would probably have identified it with Apollo, whose servant he was and who was the main god of divination). It would not have been difficult for Meletus to claim that Socrates was a believer in new deities. And since he said that Socrates was also trying to introduce these new-fangled deities, he must have argued that Socrates spread the word among his followers.

  In short, there was nothing in Socrates’ supernatural voice that was clearly criminal or impious, but the prosecutors used it to stir up all the old prejudices about him. Introducing new gods was what the scientists did, after all, with their reliance on natural forces instead of the Olympic pantheon – hence the vague plural of the charge, ‘introducing new divinities’. They could portray Socrates as the kind of arrogant person who counted himself superior to the whole religious framework of Athenian society, an acolyte of a god not recognized by the state and therefore no true citizen. Plato has Euthyphro superciliously sympathize with Socrates: ‘Such things are easily misrepresented to the masses.’

  The flexibility of Athenian legal procedures meant that a defendant was rarely, if ever, on trial just for the particular crime mentioned in the indictment; his whole life as an Athenian citizen or resident was explicitly or implicitly scrutinized. Some scholars, who believe that there was more substance to the impiety charge than I do, argue that it was all the prosecutors needed to get Socrates convicted. But even if the impiety charge was such a powerful threat, a political subtext is not ruled out. In fact, it dovetails with it, because impiety was a matter of public concern: the thriving of Athens as a political entity was held to depend, in large part, on the favour of the gods, which was jeopardized by impious individuals. And if we believe, as I do, that there was little substance to the impiety charge, then we are obliged to look elsewhere for the real reasons why Socrates was taken to court.

  THE WAR YEARS

  FOUR

  Alcibiades, Socrates and the Aristocratic Milieu

  ‘Hello, Socrates. Where have you been? Not that I need to ask: you’ve been chasing after that gorgeous Alcibiades.’ Plato began his dialogue Protagoras with these teasing words from an unnamed companion of Socrates. The dialogue is set in 433 BCE. Socrates would have been thirty-six years old, and Alcibiades is described in terms that strongly suggest he is in his late teens: Socrates’ friend, wonde
ring why Socrates was breaking the norms of Athenian homosexual life, goes on to say, ‘When I saw him recently, he struck me as being a handsome man – but a man, Socrates, with a bearded chin now.’

  Alcibiades’ presence is like a refrain in the Platonic dialogues, as a living person and, later, as a symbol. A dialogue simply called Alcibiades and consisting entirely of a conversation between Socrates and his young friend purports to be the first, or the first intimate conversation between the two of them; it too can be dated to 433. In Gorgias Plato has Socrates declare his love for Alcibiades and philosophy; the dialogue appears to be set in 427, at the time of Gorgias of Leontini’s famous ambassadorial visit to Athens, when his purple oratory made such an impression on the Athenians, but it also contains enough anachronisms to make it plausible to think of it as timeless, or at least not datable with any security.

  The best evidence for the extent of the relationship comes from Plato’s Symposium, where Alcibiades outlines, in a wonderful, drunken speech, at least some of the affair. The implication is that it lasted quite a while, since Alcibiades describes an on-off relationship in which, for all his huge attraction to Socrates, he often ran away from him, back to the world of Athenian politics, and just as often returned, hung over and shamefaced. He describes at length one particular night when, convinced that Socrates was in love with him in the normal way, he gave him every opportunity to consummate the relationship, but ‘I might as well have been sleeping with my father or an elder brother.’