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.

Since Socrates wrote nothing, everything we know about him comes from other people, and they do not describe the same man. Plato gives the fullest picture, but he was a brilliant writer with his own philosophy, and in his later dialogues Socrates often seems to speak Plato's ideas rather than his own. Xenophon, another follower, who was a soldier and historian, wrote his own Apology and memoirs presenting a more conventional, practical moralist. In Xenophon's account, part of the reason Socrates spoke so defiantly at his trial was that he had decided it was better to die than to face the decline of old age.

The third witness is Aristophanes, whose comedy The Clouds mocks Socrates as a head-in-the-air teacher of scientific speculation and clever argument. It is a caricature, but it shows how many Athenians saw him. Working out which parts of these portraits describe the real Socrates is known as the Socratic problem, and it has no final solution. Historians usually treat Plato's early dialogues and the points on which the sources agree as the firmest ground: a man who questioned people in public, claimed to lack wisdom, spoke of an inner divine sign and died rather than give up his way of life.

Athens had no public prosecutors and no professional judges. Any citizen could bring a charge, and Socrates' accuser was Meletus, a young man backed by Anytus, an influential democratic politician, and Lycon, an orator. The jurors were ordinary citizens over thirty, assigned to courts by lot so that nobody could easily bribe them in advance, and paid a small daily fee. There was no presiding judge to rule on law or evidence. The jurors decided everything by casting votes into urns, without discussing the case among themselves, and the whole trial, from the first speech to the sentence, was over in a single day.

Speeches were timed with a water clock, a pot that drained through a small hole and was stopped while documents were read out. Prosecutors carried a risk too: a citizen who brought this kind of public case and won less than a fifth of the votes paid a heavy fine and lost the right to bring such prosecutions again, a rule meant to deter frivolous accusations. In Plato's account Socrates teases Meletus that without the support of Anytus and Lycon he would not even have reached that fifth. With no judge to direct them and no appeal, the verdict of a few hundred citizens on one day was final.

The philosopher who wandered the marketplace asking awkward questions had also served Athens as a heavily armed infantryman in the Peloponnesian War. Plato's dialogues describe him fighting at the siege of Potidaea, at the battle of Delium and at Amphipolis, and praise his courage and endurance, including his indifference to cold and hunger on campaign.

In Plato's Symposium, the politician Alcibiades recalls that Socrates saved his life at Potidaea and that at Delium, during the retreat, Socrates walked calmly away from the battlefield while others fled in panic. At his trial Socrates compared his duty to philosophy with a soldier's duty to hold his post. The detail matters because it shows his prosecutors were condemning a citizen who had risked his life for the city.

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.