Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Ancient atheism is hard for us to judge. Since the ancient gods are not our gods, we might even be inclined to admire the insights of those thinkers who espoused it or were working towards it, and to overlook how radical they actually were. It is worth repeating here that atheism threatened society, not religion as some abstract sphere, because religion was not a category separate from society. Atheism or any form of impiety angered the gods and turned them against the city. Thinkers had been developing more or less atheistic ideas for over a century, but atheists came under suspicion now because of the new argumentative tools that helped them to make their case stronger, and because Athens, the cultural centre of the Mediterranean world and the natural magnet for intellectuals of all stripes, was in the throes of a social crisis and needed someone to blame.

  Intellectuals were suspect, then, but was this taken any further? The evidence for the prosecution of intellectuals before Socrates’ trial is difficult to assess. There is quite a lot of it, and it is no worse or further removed in time than our evidence for other events of the fifth century, but some of it is plainly contaminated, as when we hear that Prodicus of Ceos was condemned to death by drinking hemlock – an obvious doublet of Socrates’ death. Even the generalizations point both ways: on the one hand, Aristotle gives as an example of an argument the following syllogism: ‘If the fact that generals are often put to death does not prove that they are worthless, neither does the fact that intellectuals are often put to death prove that they are worthless.’ This looks like good evidence for the prosecution and even execution of intellectuals – but then, if authentic, Aristotle’s later quip, that he was leaving Athens to stop the Athenians wronging philosophy for a second time, makes little sense, since it would not be the second time, but the fourth or the fifth or whatever – unless arrogant Aristotle was meaning to imply that only he and Socrates counted as true philosophers, or unless he was referring in the first place to the fate of intellectuals in other societies than Athens.

  The first, vital piece of evidence is one of the hardest to assess. We are told that some time in the 430s a professional interpreter of oracles and politician called Diopeithes, who was nicknamed ‘the mad’ for his overblown speaking style, proposed and got passed in the Assembly a decree to the effect that ‘anyone who did not pay due respect to divine phenomena or who offered to teach others about celestial phenomena should be impeached’. Our only source for the decree is Plutarch, writing some 530 years after the event, but he was a good researcher and a decree like this fits in with the general climate of the times. The omens just before the start of the Peloponnesian War, when this decree was probably passed, were ambiguous, to say the least. Diopeithes’ decree may have been just one of a number of attempts to ensure the gods’ goodwill towards Athens in the forthcoming conflict. Socrates was not tried under this decree, partly because its terms were not applicable to him, and partly because by the time of his trial decrees were no longer legally binding, but it lurks in the background as a sign of what was possible in classical Athens.

  As Plutarch tells it, Diopeithes was also trying to get at Pericles, via his circle of intellectual friends. And so we hear of the prosecution of his common-law wife Aspasia of Miletus, the philosophers Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and Protagoras of Abdera, the sculptor Pheidias of Athens and the Athenian musicologist Damon of Oa. ‘Pericles’ educated friends … were seldom in the public eye and a liability when they were,’ as Ober puts it. Of these, the evidence for Protagoras’s trial is flimsy: two late writers tell us that he was banished from Athens after a trial, but Plato, a witness far closer in time, says that Protagoras was held in high repute throughout his life, without becoming liable to the standard calumnies. It is equally hard to be sure about Aspasia, since there is only one report of her trial for impiety (perhaps on the grounds that, as an alleged courtesan, she polluted shrines by entering them). The reporter, Antisthenes, was an early witness, since he was a fol lower of Socrates, writing in the fourth century; but like all the Socratic writers, what he wrote combined fact and fiction, and Aspasia was fast attracting the attention of anecdotalists.

  Anaxagoras claimed that the sun and the moon, traditionally gods, were no more than lumps of burning rock, and wielded scientific reasoning against religious fears that a ram with only one horn was a terrible omen. But he was probably not taken to court for such views. Later writers said so, but the report on which they were all basing themselves was that of the fourth-century historian Ephorus of Cyme, who did not say that the Athenians actually prosecuted Anaxagoras for impiety, but that they ‘tried’ or ‘wanted’ to do so. But that is enough for our purposes: even if he was not brought to trial, it is clear that the notion of trying intellectuals was current before Socrates’ trial, and there may be truth in the story that Anaxagoras was forced out of Athens, since he died some time in the 420s back in Asia Minor.

  The musicologist Damon was almost certainly ostracized in the late 440s. The evidence is relatively profuse, and starts relatively early. A few ostraka have even been found in the Agora with his name – too few to prove much, except that he was considered the kind of undesirable power-possessor who was a candidate for ostracism. He was ostracized either because he was thought to be anti-democratic, and inclined to offer undemocratic advice to Pericles, or, just possibly, for trying to tamper with Athenian music, when music was recognized as a powerful force for education and acculturation.

  Outside the Periclean circle, the evidence for harassment of intellectuals is less secure, or somewhat irrelevant. This in a sense makes the existence of Diopeithes’ decree more plausible, since it might then have had the specific anti-Periclean purpose Plutarch assigned to it. We also hear that the natural scientist Diogenes of Apollonia was in danger of losing his life, but again this is an isolated and implausible report; at the most, perhaps he was unpopular, or ridiculed by comic poets (he is the unnamed source of quite a few of the ideas lampooned by Aristophanes in Clouds). We can be pretty sure that Diagoras of Melos fled into exile to avoid a trial, or was banished, but his crime was taking the Eleusinian Mysteries in vain, and there was a specific law on the statute books (so to speak) that criminalized such impiety, and so we can accept that Diagoras got into trouble without adding his case to the list of unusual actions against intellectuals.

  FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

  We can be fairly sure, then, that Socrates was not the first intellectual who got into trouble in Athens, but a couple of prosecutions do not add up to persecution, and Athens was still a more congenial culture for artists and intellectuals than Sparta and elsewhere. Even so, classical Athens was not as liberal as many have liked to think. The idealization of Athens in this respect was a deliberate construct, a highly successful piece of propaganda, started by Pericles in the section of the Funeral Speech I translated at the start of this chapter. But if the Athenians were intolerant of intellectuals, why did Athens continue to act as a magnet for them? Why did it retain its position as the intellectual and cultural centre of the Mediterranean world? Because intellectuals, along with everyone else, were taken to court only on those very rare occasions when they were felt to be politically undesirable.

  What, then, of certain rights that any modern democracy deserving of the name takes to be inalienable, such as freedom of thought and the right of any individual to speak his or her mind? The Greeks had a far less developed sense of an individual’s rights than we do today. The dividing line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ was different: our private lives extend a long way, but exactly the opposite was the case for an ancient Athenian citizen. Athenian perception of what was ‘public’ was so capacious that it was easy for a citizen to trespass on to public ground – and if what he was saying or doing could be construed as contrary to the public interest, he could become liable to censure or even prosecution. It never occurred to ancient Greeks that freedom from governmental interference might be an individual’s right.

  There is a lot of talk in Athenian speeches and drama
s about every citizen’s right to say what he wanted. The terms used are isēgoria and parrhēsia, the first meaning ‘equality of public speech’, and the second ‘frank speech’ or ‘saying whatever you want’. At a couple of points Euripides suggested that the only alternative to Athenian parrhēsia was slavehood, and lines such as ‘I pray that my family may flourish as free citizens with freedom of speech, dwelling in the far-famed city of Athens’ were guaranteed to raise a cheer in the Theatre of Dionysus. Even the enemies of democracy recognized the centrality of this right to the democracy, and there was a state-financed ship called the Parrhēsia.

  But isēgoria was the right of all citizens in good standing to voice an opinion in the Assembly; hence the discussion of every motion that came before the Assembly was prefaced by a herald crying the question: ‘Who wants to speak?’ And parrhēsia was not ‘freedom of speech’ as we understand it; it was not the right of every citizen to speak (and think) as he might wish under any circumstances, but the right to speak his mind in the Assembly. Likewise, when the term ‘freedom of speech’ first occurred in the English language, it meant ‘the privilege of free debate belonging to members in parliament’, and the same went for the fledgling United States of America: the original free speech clause in the US Constitution is Section 6, Article 1, guaranteeing freedom of speech ‘in either House’. As Isocrates said in 355 BCE, parrhēsia was restricted to comic poets (who were taken to be politically engaged) and to speakers in the Assembly; he might have added the law courts, since they too were a political arena.

  Nor was even this restricted freedom of speech considered inalienable. The comic poets were curbed on several occasions between 440 and 420, each time when a situation was considered so sensitive that drawing attention to it in the theatre might be inflammatory or otherwise politically inappropriate. And restrictions were in place which applied to all public speakers: there was a long-standing law against slandering the dead, and another (dating from around 420) against unsupported accusations of crimes for which an individual could lose his status as an Athenian citizen. The law against slander was beefed up in the 390s to attempt to restrict slander of magistrates in office, but in the fifth century, at any rate, comic poets could get away with transgressing these laws, because they were sanctioned by the Athenian people, who were more powerful than any of the abused individuals, and because the festivals at which their plays were produced were regarded as times when normality was, to a degree, suspended.

  In any case, talk of ‘rights’ can seem anachronistic: it is a useful tool of historical analysis, but it was not a major aspect of the ancient Athenian political universe, as it is of ours. If anything was going to bring up the issue of rights, it was the harassment of intellectuals; but this pivoted not on infringement of rights, but on whether or not they had harmed the community. In his defence speech Socrates did not protest: ‘What about my right to think and speak as I choose?’ He argued that his thoughts and words were not subversive of the established moral code and did not harm the city. Ancient Athenians simply took for granted that the state had a more pressing claim than any individual.

  The only way they could counter the pervasive presence of the state was by appealing to a higher authority: thus both Sophocles’ fictional Antigone and the historical Socrates appealed in their moments of crisis to higher religious claims – Antigone by preferring certain ‘unwritten laws’ to those of the state, Socrates by claiming that his mission was god-given. A fully fledged concept of rights had to wait until larger entities – the state or the gods – were dethroned. Until then, they held all the cards: serving the state or worshipping the gods was an absolute good. Until an individual’s rights relative to the state were recognized, until a degree of relativity began to undermine the absolutism, citizens’ rights were attenuated. Ancient political theorists did not couch their theorizing in the kind of terms we might expect, of balancing the demands of individuality against the demands of citizenship: they tried to imagine perfectly functioning societies, and the citizens of these societies often appear to be little more than cogs in a machine.

  THE CONDEMNATION OF SOCRATES

  ELEVEN

  Socratic Politics

  Nowadays, those of us who are concerned about such things assume that the quest for moral goodness is, to a large extent, a private affair: I deploy my inner resources to avoid doing harm and to do good. But just as, towards the end of the previous chapter, we saw how the ancient Greek conception of the public domain impinged on areas that we would take to be private, so another surprise is in store: in Socrates’ day, almost all Greek thinkers assumed or argued that the polis was the correct and only environment for human moral flourishing – that a good community created goodness in its citizens.

  So Plato occupied himself in Republic with imagining an ideal state in which all members of society would be good to the best of their abilities, while for Aristotle education in moral goodness was a product of the right constitutional environment, and his Politics is expressly a continuation of his Nicomachean Ethics: thorough ethical enquiry entails also describing the state that will best allow its citizens to find and retain goodness. As a moral philosopher, Socrates was also concerned with the circumstances that would allow his hopes and aspirations for people to be fulfilled. Plato was not being untrue to his mentor when he had him divide statesmen into two classes – those who aim for the moral perfection of their fellow citizens and those who aim merely to gratify them.

  If political thought starts with the consideration of three factors – how power should be exercised in the community, how power should be limited and controlled in the community, and what the goals are of wielding power in the community – then, as far as our evidence goes, Socrates contributed to the first and the third of these questions, but failed to address the middle one. That is, he was sure that power should be given to the wise, and he was sure that the point of political power was the moral improvement of every citizen, but it is not clear how he thought the wise were to achieve this, or what steps he thought should be taken to educate and control the power-possessors and ensure that the goal of moral improvement was not diverted into other channels, or where he stood on the pros and cons of collectivism versus pluralism – which is to say that it is not clear to what extent he had mapped out and thought through at least some of the issues Plato came to address in Republic.

  Though Socrates never worked out a political programme, we can be sure that it would have been based on reason. Socrates believed that all of us are, essentially, rational creatures; he even, controversially, went so far as to claim that all errors are intellectual errors, as if we could never be swayed by emotion. Any reforms that were to be put in place, then, would be rationally thought out and, more importantly, rationally presented to the citizens, because as a wholehearted intellectualist, Socrates denied the gap between a person’s realizing that something is correct and his acting on that realization. A great part of a true statesman’s job would simply be education. Reasoned reflection – certainly not passive acceptance – would lead his fellow citizens to see that the statesman’s laws were rationally justified, or at least would lead them to trust that he had their best interests at heart. If there was something they did not like about their community, they could either leave or try to influence the legal code to suit them better. The successful Socratic statesman need never use tricks, coercion, or even mere habituation. This may sound naïve (as it did first to Plato and Aristotle), but Socrates pursued this vision for at least thirty years. Visionaries often seem naïve to their successors.

  Some readers might already be puzzled by the idea of a politically engaged Socrates, remembering that, according to Plato, his little supernatural voice discouraged him from playing an active part in democratic politics. But he was not altogether aloof: from 449 BCE, when he became eligible for public service, he did his duty as a soldier (three times, and one of those was an extended campaign), on the Council (once) and probably also as a dikast (
more than once). We have no way of knowing whether this amount of service was more or less than usual, and in any case, since both membership of the Council and empanelment as a juror were subject to a lottery, even definite statistics would still leave room for doubt, though both involved first volunteering for the job. When Plato’s Socrates says that he has never taken part in the political life of the city, he means high office, of the kind that might have enabled him to push through reforms more quickly.

  Socrates’ decision not to play a major role in Athenian politics should not be taken to mean that he thought that politics was pointless, but that he himself would be ineffective on the public stage, that society was too corrupt for effective political action, and that he would risk death if he exposed himself in this way. We may regret that Socrates did not protest against some of the injustices that were performed by Athens during his lifetime, but despite this all our sources agree that Socrates was a person of the utmost moral integrity, by which I mean that he spent his entire life, devoted his entire being, to reducing injustice and promoting justice. This led him not just to disdain death, but even to avoid a certain amount of political activity; even as a high-ranking official of the Athenian democracy, he could never have promoted his vision without compromising it, which to a person of integrity is the same thing as giving up. And so he paradoxically practised politics in private, by helping others to become the kind of politicians that he wanted to see.