Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  The only true friend, he says, and the only true parent, is one who knows what is right – right, that is, by Socrates’ private standards – and can explain it to others and guide them towards it. But he says this only to make himself appear the greatest friend to his students, and so to drive a wedge between them and their families. How can anyone take the place of a father, who has given his children the gift of life? It is hardly going too far to say that this man was solely responsible for the inter-generational conflict that so afflicted our city a few years ago. He and he alone plunged the city into the crisis from which it is only now recovering. We must make sure that he does nothing to undermine this recovery.

  It is well known that he mocks, and teaches others to mock, the lottery, the basis of our democratic egalitarianism and token of our trust in the gods. As if he were a loyal citizen, he says that the lottery actually harms the city. He wants to see a few men of knowledge in charge of the city – and what would we call that, if not oligarchy? He has long been known to favour Sparta and Spartan practices, which brings us back again to the elitist pederasty that he perpetuates. He is so far from encouraging his followers to play a part in the public life of our city, that by his very example as well as his words, he gets them to prefer idleness to undertaking their civic duties.

  So far I have spoken in general about his followers. Let me now be more specific. Socrates was the teacher of Alcibiades and of Critias. I scarcely need to remind you of Alcibiades’ deeds. This was a man who aspired to tyranny himself, instigated the oligarchic coup twelve years ago, profaned our most sacred Mysteries and may well have desecrated the herms. This was a man who aided both the Spartans and the Persians in their military efforts against us, when he could and should have put his undeniable talents towards helping us to win the war. This was a man who was cursed and banished, as a monster of impiety, and who had scarcely been restored by you, in your lenience, to our city, when his tyrannical ambition again raised its vile head and you rightly saw fit to banish him once more. Alcibiades was responsible for almost all the terrible things our city suffered during the war.

  As for Critias, the terrible events he masterminded are too recent for you to need any reminders. He wanted to turn us into a satellite of Sparta; he wanted to wipe the slate clean of democracy and start again. In pursuit of this vision, he mercilessly killed fifteen hundred citizens or loyal metics, and stole the property of many more, whom he sent into exile. All Athenians of sound hearts and minds rose up in rebellion against him. What did Socrates do? He stayed in Athens; he stood by and watched as Critias drove Athenians out of the city, stole their property and murdered their kinsmen. And why did he stay? Because Critias was one of his pupils – as were Charmides and Aristotle, men of scarcely less evil repute. Indeed, it would probably not surprise you to learn that many of Critias’s ideas were gleaned from his master.

  He will tell you that he is no teacher, and so that he never taught Alcibiades and Critias. He will call on his famous poverty to witness that he has never accepted money for teaching – when it proves only his utter eccentricity. He will tell you that a teacher should not, in any case, be blamed for his students’ views. He will tell you that his views are not subversive or atheistic – and in fact that there is no one in Athens more moral and upright than him, a claim that I will not even bother to address. But is it just a coincidence that Alcibiades and Critias held views that were so similar to those of their master? Did they pluck them out of thin air? Everyone believes that teachers – not teachers of facts, but teachers of opinions, as he was – are responsible for their students’ opinions. If he denies this, it is just another example of his contempt for what we, the common people, believe.

  Along with the rest of the Three Thousand, he was offered the chance to retire to Eleusis, with no further retaliation for his wickedness. He did not have the common decency to take up the offer and avoid this trial; since he chose to stay and to appear in court, he deserves the death penalty. If you do not kill this man, you connive at the moral malaise that has gripped our fair city and which we are now doing our best to combat, and you will fail to deter future oligarchic revolutions, masterminded by this man himself or yet others of his circle. Look, even now he counts among his followers at least one relative of Critias, young Plato. It is up to you to protect our youth, the future of the city, by condemning this man to death.

  Something like this is what Anytus seems to have said. Since he was focusing on the corruption aspect of the charge, he naturally emphasized how Socrates widened the gap between fathers and sons. Accustomed as we are nowadays to trying to bring up our children to be independent, their own men and women, Anytus might seem to be over-emphasizing a relatively trivial issue, but it was the single most important aspect of the charges against Socrates. It was not just that he was impious and irreligious, but that he taught young men to be so too. Mogens Hansen was only slightly overstating the case when he said:

  Sokrates was not charged with being an atheist, but with being a missionary … A trial of a person who had his own views about the gods was rare, and a trial of a person who criticized the democratic institutions is unique. The presumption is that Sokrates was not put on trial for having such views, but rather for having propagated them to his followers every day, year in, year out.

  The generation gap seemed to threaten the very future of the city, since the continuity of the city was assumed to depend on the perpetuation of the values on which the fathers’ generation had been reared, and of course simply on the sons’ willingness to take up the reins of democratic government, which Socrates appeared to undermine. So it was up to Anytus, the driving force behind the prosecution, to address the corruption charge, and so also the majority of the explicit or implicit comments in our sources for Socrates’ trial are concerned to rebut the idea that he misled the youth of Athens. Plato simply denied that Socrates was a teacher, a transmitter of information, and spent much of his life as a writer perpetuating an image of a Socrates who disappears so thoroughly behind a mask of irony and questioning that it is all but impossible to attribute views to him. At the most, Plato says, certain young men imitated Socrates’ method of questioning.

  Xenophon’s tack was different. His Socrates is a fully fledged teacher, full of wise advice for all and sundry, and not slow to admit that he is an educational expert. In The Education of Cyrus, an idealized, fictional (and often tedious) account of the upbringing of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire, Xenophon tells a transparent fable. Tigranes, the son of the king of Armenia, was very fond of ‘a certain sophist’. Cyrus had observed this, and one day asked Tigranes what had happened to this man. He was astonished to hear that the king had put the man to death, and asked why. ‘According to my father, he was corrupting me,’ replied the prince, and went on: ‘But you know, Cyrus, that teacher of mine was such a paragon of virtue that even when he was just about to die, he called me over and said: “Don’t be angry with your father for putting me to death, Tigranes. It’s not malevolence, just ignorance, and I for one am sure that no one ever intends to make ignorant errors.”’ The Armenian king happened to overhear Cyrus’s question to his son, and explained that he had killed the teacher ‘because it seemed to me that, under his influence, my son was looking up to him more than me’.

  The moral is as plain as Xenophon meant it to be, and has long been recognized. The wise teacher, identifiable as Socrates by his voicing a core Socratic belief (that no one does wrong on purpose), was killed because he made Alcibiades, or the jeunesse dorée of Athens in general, prefer him to the state, represented in the story by the Armenian king. His condemnation was a direct response to the social crisis.

  A SCAPEGOAT

  Socrates was taken to court as a figurehead – precisely as Plato suggested by identifying as his most potent enemies the ‘old accusers’, who had made Socrates a figurehead. He was punished for the inter-generational conflict, which was caused by social factors rather than by individuals
, and certainly not by a single individual; he was punished as a morally subversive teacher, when there were others who could equally have had this odd charge pinned on them; he was punished as a critic of democracy, when he was far from alone; even Critias and Alcibiades were products of the time rather than of his teaching. Socrates was put to death because the Athenians wanted to purge themselves of undesirable trends, not just of an undesirable individual.

  At the end of the war, the Athenians could look back on a record of moral uncertainty, which had led them to episodes of ruthless brutality. They also knew that from time to time they had behaved with the utmost stupidity – in their treatment of the Arginusae generals, for instance, or in turning down respectable peace offers from Sparta. But over and above these human faults, there was the divine. In a society so thoroughly permeated and cemented by religious sentiment, catastrophe could only be seen as a sign of the gods’ displeasure. Athens had just lost a war; the gods were clearly not on the city’s side.

  Since the gods were motivated by reciprocity, the removal of their goodwill towards the city proved that the Athenians had let them down somehow, and deserved to be punished. In other words, there was a vein of impiety in the city, which the gods were punishing. The easiest way to deal with such a trend was to make it particular, to attribute it to a single individual. This mental leap was facilitated by the Greek concept of pollution, which was seen as a kind of pernicious vapour that could spread from even a single individual and infect an entire community. Punishing a murderer was as much a religious as a legal obligation, since his miasma had to be prevented from spreading. Even animals and inanimate objects that had ‘caused’ a human death could be ‘tried’ and, once found guilty, killed or banished beyond the city’s borders.

  But since it was impossible to guarantee that all sources of pollution had been dealt with, once a year, in the month of Thargelion (the eleventh month of the Athenian calendar, roughly equivalent to our May), two people, one representing the men of the community and wearing a necklace of black figs, the other representing the women and wearing green figs, were driven out of the city. Much remains obscure about this ritual, known as the Thargelia (the month was named after it). Both the scapegoats were paupers or criminals, and once they were outside the city walls, they were flogged. The festival lasted for two days, with the expulsion on the 6th of the month, and then feasting and enjoying the good things the expulsion had made possible on the following day.

  The usual Greek words for ‘scapegoat’ (the English word derives from the ancient Judaic practice of using a goat rather than a human) were katharma (‘scouring’) or pharmakos, which is closely related to pharmakon, meaning ‘medicine’ or ‘remedy’: the scapegoat carried away the city’s ills (somehow symbolized in Athens by dried figs) and cured it. In fact, the ritual probably started as an attempt to prevent or cure disease; hence it was sacred to Apollo, the god of disease. The flogging, and the symbolic death of expulsion from the community, diluted the ancient practice of actually killing the scapegoat. Voluntary scapegoats were far more propitious than unwilling ones, and there would always be criminals available who preferred a ritual flogging and expulsion to whatever fate the courts had decreed for them.

  There are issues here that were still vital for Socrates’ contemporaries in Athens, not just because the annual ritual was still carried out, but also because all Athenians were constantly being reminded of the importance of self-sacrifice for the good of the city. The Parthenon, the temple of Athena on the Acropolis, was completed in 438, and its sculptures by 434. On the interpretation of the frieze that I prefer, the story it told was one of the main Athenian foundation myths, the legend of King Erechtheus and his daughters. Faced with a barbarian invasion, Apollo told the king that he would have to sacrifice one of his three daughters to save the city, and in order to spare him the impossible choice, all three chose to die.

  We are faced with a number of strange coincidences, on which it might be hazardous to construct much of an edifice. But Apollo was not only the god of the Thargelia and of the legendary king’s daughters’ self-sacrifice; he was also Socrates’ god, the one who had prompted his mission in Plato’s story, the one whose moral maxims (such as ‘know yourself’) Socrates felt himself to be perpetuating and, as the god of divination, the one who was probably the source of his little voice. Perhaps most astonishingly, 6 Thargelion, the first day of the scapegoat festival, was Socrates’ birthday – or so the tradition had it. But even if this is a fabrication or a guess, it suggests that someone made a connection between Socrates and the Thargelia.

  I like to think that Socrates, the devotee of Apollo, accepted his death, as a voluntary scapegoat. He had failed to see his vision for Athens become a reality, and no doubt if he were still free he would think that the continuation of his mission was the best chance Athens had for regeneration. But that was in the past. If, even in a temporary fit of post-war zeal, the Athenians thought it would take the death of a troublesome thinker to heal the rifts in the city and to create the concord that all politicians appeared to be committed to, and that he himself had worked for in his own way, so be it. Rather than escape, as he easily could, he let himself be killed.

  Socrates’ last words, uttered to his old friend Crito from his deathbed in prison as the poison took hold of his body, were: ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please make sure you pay the debt.’ Asclepius was the healing god, whose worship had been introduced into Athens less than thirty years previously. These famous and mysterious words have attracted numerous interpretations. I would like to add one more. Playing on the close link between pharmakos and pharmakon, ‘scapegoat’ and ‘cure’, Socrates saw himself as healing the city’s ills by his voluntary death. A thanks offering to the god of healing was due.

  Glossary

  Agora: a combination of central city square, marketplace and administrative centre.

  Archon: literally, ‘leader’. The term was used to describe various high officials of Athenian government at different points of its history. In the classical period, there were nine annually selected archons: the Eponymous Archon (who gave his name to the year), the King Archon, the Polemarch (war-leader), and six thesmothetai (originally responsible for law and order).

  Deme: Cleisthenes’ reforms in 508 included the assignment of all Athenian citizens, and their future descendants, to one of 139 demes (‘villages’, ‘parishes’), for constitutional and identificatory purposes. The registration of eighteen-year-olds in their ancestral deme constituted their entry into Athenian citizenship. A deme, then, was an Athenian citizen’s ancestral parish, whether or not he still lived there, and was used for personal identification: Socrates Sophroniscou [son of Sophroniscus], of [the deme] Alopece.

  Dēmos: the common people. For a democrat, the word meant every citizen irrespective of wealth and other social markers; for a member of the elite, it meant everyone except other members of the elite, i.e. ‘the masses’.

  Dikast: a member of an Athenian jury, which combined the functions of judge and jury.

  Ephor: literally, ‘overseer’. The name of a high official in Sparta – and, temporarily, in Athens in 404.

  Helot: an agricultural serf in Laconia and Messenia, which had been conquered by Sparta.

  Hetaireia: a club or association of like-minded men, usually aristocrats; formed originally for social reasons, but capable of becoming politicized.

  Hoplite: a heavy-armed footsoldier, armed, typically, with a helmet, a corselet with a short protective skirt, bronze greaves for the shins, and above all a large, round, concave shield, about 90 cm in diameter, made of bronze-covered wood with a rim of bronze. He carried a long thrusting spear with an iron head, and an iron sword.

  Klepsydra (‘water-stealer’): a water-clock.

  Kōmos: a revel, in which a boisterous party, typically of aristocrats who had already drunk deeply at a symposium, paraded through the city, still dressed as symposiasts and still singing and joking, in search o
f another house where they could prolong the evening.

  Liturgy: a public service imposed on wealthy Athenians: they had to fund a warship for a year, or finance a religious festival (for instance, by providing a chorus for a playwright to put on a play or plays at one of the festivals of Dionysus).

  Metic: a non-Athenian resident in Athenian territory, from the Greek metoikos. The term was used not only for domiciled foreign residents, but for temporary residents who stayed for a minimum of a month at a time. Metics were liable to a special metic tax, and in general had fewer rights than Athenian citizens; they could not normally own land, for instance.

  Ostracism: the process whereby each year the Athenian people had the right to send a prominent public figure into exile for ten years, though with no loss of property rights. A minimum of six thousand votes had to be cast for all the candidates, and the one who was exiled was the one with the most votes against him. A vote was an ostrakon – a piece of broken pottery with the appropriate politician’s name inscribed or painted on it. The process fell into disuse after 416, while remaining as a theoretical possibility.

  Palaestra: literally, a ‘wrestling-ground’, but in practice a small gymnasium. Events might be held there, but on a daily basis it was a place for training and for the schooling of upper-class children.

  Panhellenic: pertaining to all Greeks, wherever they lived – and they inhabited coastlines from southern France to northern Africa, southern Italy and Sicily, the west, north and south Turkish littoral, and of course the Balkan peninsula.

  Pnyx: the usual meeting-place for the popular Assembly at Athens, on a low hill to the west of the Acropolis.

  Polis: the ‘city’ or ‘state’. Each of the many hundreds of Greek poleis from around the Mediterranean and Black Sea consisted of an urban centre and more or less surrounding territory. Since what distinguishes poleis, whatever form of government they had, is a high degree of involvement by citizens in government, the most accurate translation of the word ‘polis’ is the rather cumbersome ‘citizenstate’.