What Happened at the Trial of Socrates? The Death That Founded a Tradition

Socrates was born about 470 BC, fought as an infantryman in three campaigns, and spent his life in the public places of Athens asking people what they meant. His method was to take a confident claim, that a general knew what courage was or a priest what piety was, and to draw out its consequences until the speaker contradicted himself, which left everyone wiser about their ignorance and the speaker humiliated in front of a crowd of young men who found it very funny. He said the oracle at Delphi had called him the wisest man in Greece and that he had spent years trying to refute it, concluding that he was wiser only in knowing that he knew nothing. He was poor, ugly by the standards of a city that cared, physically tough, and impossible to embarrass.

The indictment had two counts, that he did not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledged and introduced new divinities, and that he corrupted the young. Both were serious in a city where religion was a civic matter and where a man's obligations ran to the community, and both were vaguer than they look. The context is what gives them force. Athens had lost the twenty-seven-year war with Sparta five years earlier, had suffered a plague, an oligarchic coup and a brutal junta, the Thirty Tyrants, and had restored its democracy under an amnesty that forbade prosecutions for political acts before 403. Socrates could not be charged with what actually made him hated:

• •Two of his closest associates had betrayed the city: Alcibiades, who defected to Sparta, and Critias, the cruellest of the Thirty
• •He questioned in public whether the many were fit to decide anything, in a democracy that had just been overthrown twice by men who thought so
• •His daimonion, an inner voice he said warned him against actions, sounded to a jury like a private god
• •Aristophanes had put him on stage twenty-four years earlier in The Clouds as a fraud who taught young men to argue their way out of debts, an image that had had a generation to settle

Plato's Apology, written some years afterwards and the nearest thing to a transcript, has Socrates refuse to do what a defendant was expected to do. He did not weep, produce his children, or flatter the jury; he cross-examined his accuser, compared himself to a gadfly stinging a large and sluggish horse, said that a man who is any good should think only of whether he acts rightly, and told the court that if it offered to release him on condition that he stop philosophising he would refuse, since the unexamined life is not worth living. He was convicted by about 280 votes to 220. Athenian procedure then invited each side to propose a penalty, and where the prosecution asked for death, Socrates suggested that the city should feed him at public expense as it fed Olympic victors, before offering a small fine that his friends increased. The jury voted for death by a larger margin than it had voted to convict.

Execution was delayed a month by a sacred embassy to Delos, during which his friend Crito arranged an escape and was refused, in the dialogue that bears his name, on the argument that a citizen who has accepted a city's laws all his life may not break them when they go against him. The Phaedo describes the last day: conversation about whether the soul survives, a bath, farewells to his wife and sons, and then the hemlock, which he drank without hesitation, walking about until his legs grew heavy and lying down as the numbness climbed. His last words, that he owed a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, and that the debt should be paid, have been read as a joke, as piety and as the suggestion that death is the cure for life.

Two views have contended ever since. In the first, Athens killed a good man for asking questions, and the trial is the standing case for free thought against the crowd; this is Plato's version and, through him, almost everyone's. In the second, argued by I. F. Stone in 1988 among others, a democracy that had twice been destroyed from within put on trial a man who had taught its destroyers to despise it, and did so with more restraint than the charge deserved, since he could have left the city at any time and chose the confrontation. What is certain is the consequence. Plato, then about twenty-eight, spent the rest of his life writing dialogues in which Socrates talks, founded the Academy, and taught Aristotle, so that the execution of a man who wrote nothing produced the tradition that most of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to.

In 399 BC an Athenian jury convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the young and condemned him to hemlock, on charges that stood in for the real grievances: his associates had betrayed the city, he questioned the competence of the democracy, and a comic play had made him a figure of suspicion. He refused to plead for mercy or to escape, argued that the unexamined life is not worth living and that a citizen must accept his city's laws, and his death moved Plato to write the dialogues that founded Western philosophy.