Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  So Theramenes and others went to Sparta, and returned with the terms outlined towards the end of the previous chapter. Meanwhile, on Lysander’s orders, Cleophon, still resisting peace, was arrested on a trumped-up charge and put to death, and the clubs kept the population cowed by the fear of a resumption of their terror tactics of 411. This cleared the way for the Spartan insistence, as relayed to the Council and the Assembly by the oligarchs, that Athens should be governed from now on in accordance with the ‘ancestral constitution’ – the multivalent phrase that had become a slogan a few years previously. It seemed as though Athens was to be allowed the right of self-government, but as it turned out, the ‘ancestral constitution’ that was in store for the Athenians was hardly less oligarchic than, and certainly as brutal as, any of the puppet regimes Lysander was imposing on the Asiatic Greeks.

  THE THIRTY

  Athens was close to anarchy for a while. There was feuding in the courts, and no government to speak of, while the skeletal poor still slumped in the streets, and the rich reeled from the loss of all their foreign properties and argued that the democracy had been responsible for the war, and so now for all their suffering.

  A committee was set up in April 404 to try to determine which version of the ‘ancestral constitution’ Athens would have. This committee proved so ineffective in the face of lobbying by the various factions that the oligarchs, with their confidence restored by the return of their exiled friends, appealed to Lysander. The democratically elected generals were deposed in August, and a temporary board was formed of five ephors (‘overseers’), one of whom was Critias, to act as an interim government. The blatant borrowing of Spartan terminology for the members of this board was a sign of things to come. Lysander arrived in Athens in person from Samos in September and used the pretext of Athenian tardiness in carrying out the terms of the surrender to impose on the Athenians an oligarchy of thirty men.

  The same whiff of a set-up surrounds the fact that in the Assembly that instituted the Thirty, Theramenes got to choose ten of the Thirty, Critias and his fellow ephors got to choose themselves and another five, and the final ten were chosen from among sympathizers present at the Assembly. Most of the Thirty were politically experienced men, and quite a few had played some part in either or both of the scandals of 415 and the oligarchy of 411; they were also mostly extreme oligarchs, since they had no intention of allowing dissension to split their ranks as it had those of the Four Hundred. A Council of the normal number of five hundred was appointed, but its members came from a select list of only one thousand men (rather than from the entire citizen body), and its job was only to ratify the measures proposed by the Thirty. The same goes for other appointments, such as the Board of Ten, headed by Charicles, that was put in charge of Piraeus. Positions on the Board of Eleven, responsible for executions and Athens’s prisons, were also filled by supporters of the Thirty, and the city was policed by three hundred whip-bearing mercenaries (the same number of men as a Spartan king’s bodyguard). Once Athens was in the safe hands of fifty-one committed oligarchs, the Spartans withdrew their troops from Athenian soil.

  Left to their own devices, one of the first things the Thirty did was put an end to the political powers of the popular courts, by giving them back to the old Council of the Areopagus, to which all archons gained automatic entry at the end of their year of office. The removal of these powers from the Areopagus Council in the 460s had played an important part in extending the powers of the democracy in Athens. The Thirty also undermined the popular courts by trying the most notorious sycophants and putting them to death; although sycophants were an acknowledged menace (even if only to the rich), the elimination of sycophancy was another step towards taking the whole judicial system under central control. They also continued the work of tidying up the laws that had been initiated by the Five Thousand in 410, though the changes they wanted to see were those that suited an oligarchic constitution. These measures were portrayed as the first stages of the moral rearmament of Athens.

  One of the few laws they passed was aimed at the perceived menace of rhetorical teaching: no one was to teach the ‘art of words’. A similar desire for control can also be read off from the Thirty’s reconstruction of the Pnyx, the meeting-place of the Assembly. Under the democracy, the speakers’ platform had symbolically faced the sea, the source of political power for the poorest members of Athenian society, who manned the navy; as part of their overhaul of the Pnyx, the Thirty turned the platform so that it faced inland. Their rebuilding of the Pnyx prevented mass meetings from sprawling over the hillside: although no more than a few thousand regularly attended Assembly meetings, there was at least space for more, but the Thirty both limited the space available (to about six thousand in a crush) and made entrance into the meeting-place controllable. They also oversaw ballots in the Council, whereas previously they had been secret: every Council member’s vote had to be placed on a table where members of the Thirty sat, rather than deposited secretly in an urn. But then the Council consisted largely of their stooges, so this measure made little difference.

  For a radical group, the Thirty’s reforms in the first few weeks of their regime were modest. The reason for this relative lack of activity is surely that they were plotting something far more extreme: they wanted to restore to Athens the kind of constitution where less needed to be written down, because the good men and true were in power, who instinctively knew about such things and could confer among themselves. It was democracy, with all its moral complexities and ambiguities, that needed written law. In fact, it seems distinctly possible that the Thirty were intending to establish a Spartan-style constitution in Athens. Sparta too had five ephors, a ruling committee (called the gerousia, or Council of Elders) of thirty members, and a general Assembly of a limited number of privileged citizens, with limited powers. The coincidences are too great to ignore. The Thirty were men with a vision, and with the ruthlessness to do whatever it took to see that vision become reality.

  Such thorough social engineering was bound to meet with opposition. As a precaution, the Thirty asked the Spartans to send a garrison, and offered to pay for it themselves. Seven hundred Peloponnesian hoplites arrived, to quell disturbance or to see that none arose, and were housed on the Munichia hill in Piraeus, which was, not coincidentally, where the Assembly was meeting while work was in progress on the Pnyx. But the Thirty now had an extra problem: they not only had to make reparations to those of the returned exiles who were clamouring for the restoration of their confiscated property, but they had to pay the Peloponnesian garrison too. They were strapped for cash.

  And so they raised money by killing or banishing men of property, focusing especially on wealthy metics and anyone they judged to be a potential opponent of their political programme. This reign of terror earned them their familiar title: the Thirty Tyrants. They go down in European history as the first to make fellow citizens live in fear of the dawn raid. Inevitably, the violence escalated, as many, even among their supporters, withdrew either in disgust or because they would not tolerate a Spartan-style limitation of their rights and privileges, and so became targets themselves. Anytus, later one of Socrates’ prosecutors, was one of the lucky ones: he had been an ally of Theramenes, but the Thirty banished him and stole his tannery business with all its valuable slaves.

  We hear that in all fifteen hundred people were illegally killed in just a few weeks. Others chose voluntary exile rather than death. Once there was no longer much chance of opposition, the Thirty published the definitive list of the three thousand wealthy Athenians who were to count as full citizens and members of the Assembly (the equivalent of the Spartan ‘Peers’, the full-blooded Spartiates, who were about the same number at the time). Only they were subject to the laws, while anyone else could be put to death at the whim of the Thirty; only they could bear arms, while the rest were disarmed by the Spartan garrison; only they could live and own property in Athens, while the rest were to be resettled, chiefly in Piraeus, presumabl
y in houses formerly rented by metics who had either fled or been put to death.

  Many of those who had the means to do so chose exile over resettlement; a few chose to form the backbone of the resistance movement. Those who stayed in the Piraeus were to be the businessmen of Athens, while the Three Thousand were to be supported by their slave-run farms. Meanwhile, the Thirty fortified and occupied Eleusis, some thirty-five kilometres north-west of the city, perhaps to prevent its becoming a centre of resistance, but also as a future bolt-hole: it had a good harbour, and control of the cult of Demeter and Korē had more than just symbolic value, since the temples were filled with treasure and the storehouses with the grain that was Demeter’s province. The takeover of Eleusis involved the arrest and subsequent killing of many of the inhabitants; they also removed potential dissidents from the Athenian-owned island of Salamis. This was Athens’s darkest hour.

  CRITIAS

  Were the Thirty motivated in all this by nothing more than greed for money and power, as hostile sources (and only hostile sources remain) soon began to assert? Though we know little enough about Critias, it is more than we know about the others, and it adds substantially to our picture of the Thirty. Born around 460 BCE, Critias was a member of an old Athenian family, and a highly cultured man, whose written work was admired and edited by no less a critic than Herodes Atticus, the controversial professor and benefactor of Athens in the second century CE; in the Platonic tradition, however, he was known, more disparagingly, as ‘an amateur among philosophers, and a philosopher among amateurs’. His close association with Socrates is proved not only by his presence in two of Plato’s dialogues (though not the Critias, which is named after his grandfather), but by Xenophon’s efforts to deny that there was any politics involved in their friendship.

  We first hear of Critias when he was named by Diocleides as involved in the desecration of the herms in 415; he was released after Diocleides admitted that he had lied. He does not seem to have been involved in the oligarchy of 411, but he was later banished by the democracy, at Cleophon’s instigation, for something, and most likely for his pro-Spartan views, of which he made no secret. At this stage of his career he was chiefly known as a polymath and multi-talented writer, who wrote lectures, verse reflections on political matters, incidental poetry in several metres, tragedy, and a literary symposium, the prototype of Plato’s and Xenophon’s versions.

  None of these works survives in more than meaningless fragments. They included two on Sparta, one in prose and one in verse, which displayed an admiration for all things Spartan. In these encomia he certainly perpetuated, and possibly originated, the ‘Spartan mirage’ – the state’s reputation for incredible toughness, structure and discipline. In fact he spent at least some of his time in exile working for the Spartans in Thessaly, where he tried to replace the relatively lawless state of affairs, loosely led by various hereditary aristocracies and princelings, with a broad oligarchy, a hoplite franchise. This would have given the Spartans a single body of people with whom they could negotiate; they wanted a buffer state there, between the Macedonians and southern Greece.

  Critias was present at the Samos conference, returned to Athens at the end of the war, along with all the other oligarchic and pro-Spartan exiles, became one of the ephors, and was then co-opted into the Thirty. Why did his fellow oligarchs rate him so highly? Paradoxically, it is a hostile source, the democrat Lysias, who gives us a clue, when he acknowledges that the original intention of Critias and the Thirty was ‘to purge the city of unjust men and turn the rest of the citizens to goodness and justice’. This moral goal is confirmed by whoever wrote the seventh Platonic Epistle (and it just may have been Plato himself), when he says that he (i.e. Plato) was at first tempted to support the Thirty, because he believed that they would turn the city into a place of justice and morality. And he says that it was his relatives who dangled this bait before him: his uncle Charmides was one of the Piraeus Ten, and Critias was another uncle, Charmides’ cousin.

  This moral aim dovetails perfectly with Critias’s professed admiration of Sparta, and with the Spartan-style constitutional changes that the Thirty instituted. Admirers of Sparta found in the Spartan constitution a healthy emphasis on a simple way of life based on physical exercise, the avoidance of commerce, and respect for one’s elders; more substantially, they liked to think that all Spartan citizens worked together in concord for the common good and were obedient to the laws. They were sure that the Spartan constitution developed moral excellence in its citizens – and that, no doubt, is why Critias described it as ‘the best possible state’.

  All this makes plausible the suggestion that Critias was the brains behind the Thirty, and that the moral regeneration of Athens was their purpose. The Thirty were not mindlessly savage tyrants, but were motivated by a genuine concern to do good as they saw it; but then dictators always begin by thinking that they know better than others what is good for all. Critias’s aim was perfectly summarized over two thousand years later by another dictator, General Francisco Franco of Spain, who said: ‘The Fatherland must be renewed, all evil uprooted, all bad seed extirpated. This is not a time for scruples.’ Athens had been corrupted by years of democracy, with its artificial egalitarianism, its lack of structure, and its resolute defiance of the aristocrats’ god-given right to rule. To cap it all, the democracy had taken the city into a crippling war and then lost it. It was time to put things right.

  CIVIL WAR

  The resistance movement began in earnest early in 403, when Thrasybulus, earlier banished by the Thirty, reappeared from abroad with a small band and occupied a steep, defensible hill near the village of Phyle on the rugged border between Boeotia and Attica. The rebels had the support of democrats in Piraeus, such as Lysias, who sent them arms and armour made in his own factory (the only Athenian workshop large enough to deserve the name) – and made himself the target of a hit squad, which he only just evaded. The Thirty tried to persuade Thrasybulus that he could work with them, but that would have been putting his head in the noose, and he remained where he was, with a small but steadily growing band of followers, many of whom had been exiled by or had fled from the oligarchs.

  The oligarchs’ first attempt to dislodge Thrasybulus and his men, by besieging the hill until the democrats ran out of provisions, was foiled by a wild snowstorm. The city was thrown into crisis, and Theramenes, suspecting that the days of the Thirty were numbered, began to distance himself from his fellow oligarchs – just as he had in 411, and again probably as an attempt to save his skin. (Thanks to his eleventh-hour opposition to the Thirty, a rich streak of heroization of Theramenes has contaminated the historical record about him, but in all probability he was always a hardcore oligarch who pretended otherwise only when it was expedient to do so. At any rate, he seems to have been thought by his contemporaries to be a trimmer: he was nicknamed kothornos, after the actors’ boot that fitted either foot.) The rift had begun to open when the Thirty decided to restrict Athenian citizenship to only their chosen Three Thousand – ‘as though this number necessarily encompasses all the good people,’ Theramenes said, with impeccable logic and sarcasm.

  The Thirty disarmed everyone who remained in the city apart from the Three Thousand, and this left them free to accelerate their programme of fund-raising by murder. Feeling increasingly cornered and in need of a desperate pistis, a pledge of loyalty, to cement their ranks, the Thirty made it a condition of membership that each of them should personally undertake at least one of these assassinations. Theramenes refused, and the Thirty decided to eliminate him. Critias publicly denigrated him in the Council and, with armed knights standing by in case of resistance, removed him from the list of the Three Thousand. Since the Thirty had the power of life or death over anyone not on the list, in the same breath Critias condemned Theramenes to death. Theramenes took refuge at an altar, from where he was dragged away to execution. Diodorus of Sicily’s account of Theramenes’ death contains the delightful suggestion that Socrates m
ade an attempt to save Theramenes’ life at the last minute, but this is rubbish – a mis-transcription at some point of an already dubious story that the orator Isocrates of Erchia made such an attempt.

  Meanwhile, Thrasybulus’s men had grown in number from seventy to a thousand, consisting of a mixture of Athenians, metics and mercenaries; their morale had also been boosted by the successful repulse of a second assault on Phyle, in the course of which about 120 of the new Peloponnesian garrison were killed. Anytus had joined Thrasybulus, and so changed status from moderate oligarch to hero of the democratic uprising.

  Thrasybulus felt confident enough to move his main base of operations to Piraeus, where the Munichia hill offered the same kind of protection as Phyle. The clearance of Athens had made Piraeus the heartland of opposition to the oligarchs; Thrasybulus was making himself available to a pool of new recruits. The Thirty, with the knights and the remains of the Peloponnesian garrison, immediately marched against Piraeus, but they were defeated in a gruesome battle by the outnumbered democrats, who made skilful use of their advantage on the hill, and of their poorer supporters as light-armed skirmishers. Critias and one other member of the Thirty were killed, as was Charmides, one of the ten responsible for Piraeus. Others fled to Eleusis. Critias’s tomb was said to have portrayed a personification of Oligarchy setting fire to Democracy and to have been inscribed: ‘This is a memorial to good men who for a short while restrained the arrogance of the accursed Athenian populace.’

  Piraeus was now a democratic stronghold, and effectively a separate municipality from Athens itself. In Athens, the Thirty were replaced by a board of ten archons, one from each tribe. The King Archon was Patrocles, possibly Socrates’ half-brother. The democrats in Piraeus promised equal rights in the future to anyone who joined them, and many metics seized the opportunity to risk improving their lot. The increasing boldness and confidence of the democrats, who began to treat the countryside around Athens as their own, aggravated the fears of those who remained in Athens and prompted one of the nastiest atrocities of the civil war. A band of knights, patrolling the countryside to prevent democratic foragers, came across some peasants, who were doing no more than picking up supplies from their farms, and slaughtered them. In retaliation, the democrats executed one of their prisoners.