The Athenians disagree. In the courtroom that May day, 399 BC, the jurors of Athens find Socrates guilty as charged.
51
AN APOLOGY
Athens’ religious courtroom, May 399 BC
SOCRATES: I’ll be judged the way a doctor would be, when prosecuted by a manufacturer of sweet-treats before a jury of young children.
Plato, Gorgias, 521e1
SOCRATES IS GUILTY.
But his punishment is not yet set.
Socrates’ accusers have spoken, and now the water-clock has been filled afresh to give the defendant his modest allotted time to put across his point of view. At last Socrates stands on the bema (the speaking platform), as he very self-consciously has not done throughout his time as a citizen in the Assembly. This trial was of the type known as agones timetoi – assessed trials; the court recognised that a level of guilt was in question and therefore the punishment should be equally calibrated. It was up to the man in the dock to suggest his own penalty. The philosopher who delighted in picking an argument now has to argue his way out of a death sentence.
Socrates has listened to the case against him – a fundamentally serious one, corruption of the young and denial of the city’s gods – in the religious court of Athens. Eye-witnesses (Plato himself was at the trial) tell us the place was a bear-pit that day: much heckling, jangling, scolding.
Once the hubbub has died down, Socrates has the chance to speak.
It is worth waiting to hear what the philosopher has to say: this is, after all, the man who has been accused not for his deeds, but for his words. And by all accounts, his clever command of the human tongue was exquisitely painful. Alcibiades once breathed that Socrates’ moderated voice and way with words was like that of ‘the music of Marsyas [a satyr fond of rivers]2 who only had to put his flute to his lips to bewitch mankind’.3
Now Socrates can outfox the sly gentlemen who have trapped him here.
But the speech that Socrates makes in response to his conviction (as recorded by Plato)4 is short and to the point. He states that he has lived his life for the benefit of Athens; he deserves reward, not punishment.
SOCRATES: I’m not a clever speaker at all – unless they call a clever speaker one who tells the truth. If this is what they mean, I’d agree that I’m an orator, though not the way they are. As I say, they’ve said almost nothing that’s true. But you’ll hear only the truth from me, and yet not, by god, Athenians, in beautifully crafted language like theirs, carefully arranged with words and phrases. Instead, you’ll hear things said by me without any planning, in words as they occur to me – for I assume that what I say is just – and none of you should expect anything else.5
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that the danger of written words is that they can’t answer back. And of course the doubly dangerous thing about speaking in public is that anyone can. Because now Socrates suggests an incendiary thing.
And so the man proposes the penalty of death. Well then, what shall I propose as an alternative? … Now what is fitting for a poor man who is your benefactor? … There is nothing, men of Athens, so fitting as that such a man be given his meals in the prytaneum … For he [an Olympic victor] makes you seem to be happy, while I make you happy in reality … So if I must propose a penalty in accordance with my deserts, I propose maintenance in the prytaneum.6
Commemorate me as if I were an Olympic hero, he says. Honour me as you do the very greatest in the city. Give me the hearty spread that you dish out to the prytany council. Free dinners in perpetuity at the state’s expense, in recognition of the good I have done – naturally that is what I deserve.
We can still feel the heat of the crowd’s rage in the court of the Archon Basileus as they shout Socrates down. The citizen-jurors hold the philosopher’s life in their hands, and yet he mocks them.
‘I beg of you gentlemen,’ says Socrates, ‘let me speak without interruption. He [Chaerephon] asked the god whether there was anyone in the world wiser than I, and the Pythia responded that in fact there was no one.’7
Socrates has already taunted the men – shifting on their jurors’ stone seats – with the suggestion that he is the wisest man in the world.
And, men of Athens, do not interrupt me with noise, even if I seem to you to be boasting; for the word which I speak is not mine, but the speaker to whom I shall refer it is a person of weight. For of my wisdom – if it is wisdom at all – and of its nature, I will offer you the god of Delphi as a witness.8
Well, once he went to Delphi and made so bold as to ask the oracle this question; and, gentlemen, don’t make a disturbance at what I say; for he asked if there were anyone wiser than I. Now the Pythia replied that there was no one wiser. And about these things his brother here will bear you witness, since Chaerephon is dead.9
Unusually moderate in an age of extremes, at his trial Socrates seems to have forgotten entirely the meaning of the word ‘humility’.
Is he abhorrently arrogant? Has he lost his mind? Is this radicalism or (what we would call) hubris? First Socrates suggests his punishment should be free dinners for life, then he reminds the court he is the wisest man on earth. Has he forgotten what his fellow Athenians have recently been through? Or is he genuinely apologetic – in the Greek sense of apologia – defensive? If he believes that Apollo gave him a mission to bring wisdom to the world, does he think that a reminder of his ‘special calling’ will be the perfect defence against this ridiculous charge that he is ‘impious’? Or is Socrates, with his reference to Apollo and the Delphic Oracle, actually suggesting that the god is in all of us, that we are all capable of god-like activity? All his life the philosopher has claimed that if we look deeply into ourselves we will realise what depths we humans have. Perhaps Socrates was desperately reiterating his belief to a court that wanted to see him extinguished.
In a democracy, men are meant to be allowed to speak out. But at his trial in 399 BC Socrates speaks too big, literally. Megalegoria is the word used by Xenophon. Socrates does not play ball. He does not charm, or incite. He does not whip the crowd up to a favourable fever-pitch. Instead he is belligerent – ‘full of big talk’. Whatever form this megalegoria took, Socrates wasn’t meant to behave in this way. He was expected to observe the finely orchestrated dances of public speaking, where the audience is led – but knows it – and is comfortable about being navigated along in a barque of persuasive words.10
He was meant to weep and wail, to bring his family in tearing their cheeks, to prostrate himself, begging for mercy; he was supposed to incarnate the highly emotional timbre of a traumatised, volatile city, of 399 BC, of after-shock Athens.
Already raucous, now the crowd in the courtroom bays at him. Socrates has made many men laugh in his time, he has charmed them, enthralled them, seduced them, befuddled them, he has changed their lives – but now he cannot even raise a smile.
Perhaps only now does Socrates realise that for once he is not going to be the tenacious one, the one who is not carried off by plague or stasis, by a Spartan sword or an insurgent’s knife. And so, instead of his flippant request for dinners, the philosopher proposes a serious alternative. A fine: 30 minas – the equivalent of close on nine years’ labour for an average Athenian, or enough to pay 6,000 Athenian men to come to court in order to act as jurors for one day.
His offer is rejected. The court is in no mood to play games, let alone consider leniency. The only penalty now on offer is death.11
Too little time to fight for a life
SOCRATES: The man of the law-courts is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the water-clock. Besides, he can’t make his speeches on any subject he likes, he has his adversary standing over him … Such conditions make him keen and highly-strung, skilled in flattering the master and working his way into favour; but cause his soul to be diminished and warped.
Plato, Theaetetus, 172d–173a12
The pissing stream of the water-clock has drooped.
Thos
e who spoke last know their time is up. Now for the vote. This is the city, remember, that is never still. There is no pause for reflection. The crowd is asked to give its verdict immediately.
And for Socrates, the fact that his entire life could be judged on just a few hours of well-spun words, by a mongrel crowd of men – a day of democracy in action – exposed one of the great shortcomings of Athens’ glorious experiment.
If it were the law with us, as it is elsewhere, that a trial for life should not last one, but many days, you would be convinced, but now it is not easy to dispel great slanders in a short time.13
Throughout that one, heated, epoch-forming twelve-hour stretch, each juror has had charge of two discs of metal. One with the axle solid, the other hollow. They have been fingering them perhaps throughout the speeches, cooling them in the folds of their clothes, warming them in their hands, and now they have to choose which one to drop. A pierced axle is a vote for Socrates’ death, a solid axle for his innocence. The first few discs of metal thud on the terracotta-and-earth base in the ballot box, then as the box fills, the bronze clamours for attention, chiming out the decision of the troubled democracy.14
The first majority that decides Socrates to be guilty has been slender; but now the margin is far more substantial. These Athenian democrats want closure on the situation. Whereas 220 had voted for him and 280 against in the first mandate, now only 160 choose to acquit the philosopher and 340 vote for his death. Originally, it seems, the Athenians remembered that, in 403 BC, they had sworn an oath of amnestia, amnesty. A promise officially to forget the ‘bad’, the anti-democratic offences of the past. But Socrates’ hubris, his worrying religious unorthodoxy was too much to bear. If, in that initial round casting, just thirty men had chosen to vote with a different-coloured pebble or a different bronze disc (because a tied vote always fell in favour of the defendant), if Socrates had not become a martyr, a cause-célèbre, then the history of philosophy, the value-system of the West, and of the East, might have been immeasurably different.
The Athenians were as fearful of what they could not see as they were in awe of that which they could. Imagine a miasma seeping through the court. Criminals, ‘honourless’ and infected men were not allowed to speak in the Assembly. It was thought that their very presence, and in particular their dirty words, would pollute the common good.15 And yet now, in full view, breath-on-cheek close, is this man who, it seems, is on the hit-list of the gods, spitting out a series of home truths. The Athenians may have accused Socrates of being beloved of the sophists, but a bit of sweet sophistry would have softened those verbal blows. Yet Socrates’ case is proved in the manner of his defence. He does not attempt to sway the crowd with his cleverness. He just tells the truth. He is, he says, naked before them.
In his apology the philosopher continuously stresses that he speaks the truth – that his accusers run from it. He compares his adherence to the gods, his sacrifice for what he loves and his preference for death over a bad life to the choices that Achilles once made. Achilles and Socrates? How in heaven’s name could the philosopher compare himself to this Hero of Heroes? How could he (or perhaps his biographer Plato, given that all these words are Plato’s) introduce a Homeric hero into the rhetoric at this make-or-break juncture? The hard-toned, sinew-sweet, love-locked war-machine that was Achilles set up against a dirty, smelly (probably), rolling, pug-faced, daydreaming stonemason’s son? Yet there is some logic in Socrates’ self-pairing with Achilles’ self-serving might. Both men, despite appearances, share one vital thing. They are true to themselves. They know themselves. They are who they are, not who society wants them to be.16
You get the sense that the Athenians really did not know what to do with this obdurate, annoying, wonderful man, impossible to pigeonhole, neither true democrat nor dyed-in-the-wool oligarch, neither golden hero nor twisted villain. Socrates has dined in Periclean circles, but has criticised imperial ambitions. He cautions virtue, but never once spoke out against the outrages in Mytilene, Corcyra, Melos. He loves young men, he gives voice to young women. He worships, fervently, with his fellow democrats, but also enjoys a strange, private kind of piety. In the good days Athens could cope with the philosopher; Socrates was, above all, an irritant – a gadfly on the flesh of Athena’s people. But now the city is swarming with flies and bloodsuckers – actual and allegorical – it seems less troublesome to have him dead than alive.17
The minuscule cash-surplus generated within the city-state (any trickle of income from Athens’ attenuated empire had by now dried up) was used to pay the jurors for this day in court. The functionaries of the democracy have had to sit in judgement on the man who is both the summation of democracy and its nemesis.
And so, their decision made, the judges file out of the courtroom. Not, as they have done for centuries, only at boulutonde, the time when the cows come home, but because the clock has run dry. And the tally of metal discs in the ballot box shows no ambiguity. Socrates is condemned. The only journey that remains for him is terminal – to Athens’ jail and then to his death.
SOCRATES: … But surely it is possible – and indeed one ought to say a prayer to the gods that the journey from here to there will be a happy one. That’s what I pray and may it turn out to be so.18
Athens, though, is going to make the philosopher attend his death. Because the Delian festival of Apollo has begun, this is a month of ritual purity. The beautiful sun god with his enigmatic smile now commands all attention in the city. Socrates can wait. Athens, still religious to the core, is preoccupied.
52
TWILIGHT AND DELOS AT DAWN
Delos, the Cyclades, 399 BC
You sing as if you were sailing to Delos.
Zenobius, 2.731
As happy as sailing to Delos.
Popular Attic Greek proverb
THE DAY BEFORE SOCRATES’ TRIAL, ATHENS would have breathed in the smell of crushed stalks and bruised petals.2 The philosopher is now condemned. But he is going to be forced to wait to die. Because it so happens that his trial fell on the day in the year when Athenians started to celebrate an ancient festival on the small Cycladic island of Delos.3
The story behind the festival is still told today: the Athenian hero Theseus – as a young man, before he has raped Helen and chased Persephone, before he has, as a ghostly apparition, led the triumphant troops of Athens at Marathon – was sent by his father, the King of Athens, to slay the Minotaur on the island of Crete. Theseus brings with him to that ‘wide and lovely’ island the usual tribute: seven young boys and seven maidens. But his plan is to end the humdrum human sacrifice with which the Athenians have had to put up, year in, year out. His aim is to kill an abhorrence, a man-monster. What better way to earn your stripes as a trainee hero?
Theseus does manage to slaughter the beast, but only with the help of King Minos’ daughter, dancing Ariadne. They love, but Theseus is not polite. He leaves the princess, heart-broken, on Naxos. When he sails back home, preoccupied with his own marvellousness, he also forgets to change his sails from black to white, and so his father Aegeus, thinking his son dead, hurls himself into the sea (the ‘Aegean’ Sea still bears his name). But what Theseus does find time for is a little stop-off at Delos, Apollo’s birthplace. The sun god was born of a difficult labour – nine days; Hera, jealous of this creature (Zeus’ love-child by Leto), accidentally-on-purpose forgot to let Eileithyia, the goddess of parturition, and an aide to women in labour, know that Leto was about to give birth.4 But when at last the god-child arrived wailing into the world (in some versions with his twin sister Artemis), the island – which had until then been unfixed, a wandering womb on the sea – became rooted.
The Athenians commemorate Theseus’ selfish heroics in grand style. They send to Delos a modern chorus in (so they told themselves) the very boat that Theseus himself had used.5 Lovingly cared for in dry-dock throughout the year, possibly near the sanctuary at Brauron where those young Athenian girls grew up as little bears, the boat is kitted
out as a barque fit for heroes.6 As the priest of Apollo garlands this legendary vessel, crowning the stern-post with a laurel wreath and making sacrifices to ensure the safety of its journey, the city enters a period of purity. This is a time when no executions are allowed. And so Socrates has to sit and wait. Meanwhile the gaudy boat with its cheerful cargo sails out of the harbour at Piraeus. It is a sacred journey, and as the devout Athenians turn their faces to the south-east, they know that powerful divinities must be appeased. The boat’s passengers sing, keeping the world turning with superstition and cant.
Approaching the island of Delos today, it still feels as if the gods of wind and rain protect the place. The gneiss rock, coarse-grained, meta-morphic – layered with quartz and ferromagnesium – is unwelcoming. But many city-states have left their mark here, claiming a stake in the pooling, prehistoric sanctity of the island. Rain drips off the bared gums of rows of snarling lions, installed by pious Naxians just before 600 BC. Massive statuary, a Hellenistic row of engorged 6-foot-high penises, still brave it out against the elements. City-states had their own boarding houses next to the ritual sites. By reviving the Delian festival some time around 427 BC the Athenians made the triangular connection between Athens, Delos and Theseus even stronger. They wanted to remember the good old days, when the treasure houses were full, when heroes stole women, when a small, favoured city ran the known world’s most productive and energetic territories.
The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life Page 41