Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  What, then, of the two defence speeches? If execution is an attempt by a community to have a trouble-maker disappear, Athens signally failed with Socrates. The trial rapidly became so notorious that a number of Apologies of Socrates were written soon afterwards, and at least one prosecution speech purporting to be that of Anytus. If the object had been to report the actual speech or speeches Socrates himself gave in the course of the trial, there would have been no need for more than one or two such publications, and all the rest would have been redundant. The fact that so many versions of Socrates’ defence speeches were written strongly suggests that the authors were not reporters of historical truth, but were concerned to write what, in their opinion, Socrates could or should have said – which is what characterizes the whole genre of Socratic writings that sprang up in the decades following Socrates’ trial and death. If there is any truth to the stories that Socrates came to court unprepared, a rhetorical innocent, Plato’s Apology certainly begins to look fictitious: it has long been admired as polished oratory.

  Given the unlikelihood of our ever having objective grounds for proving the fictional nature of either or both of these two versions of the defence speeches, it is gratifying, and significant, that we can easily create a plausible case for their fictionality. One of the most famous episodes in Plato’s Apology is the story that Socrates’ friend Chaerephon of Sphettus, famous in comedy for being ascetically emaciated (or at least poor), a con artist and a creature of the night, consulted the oracle at Delphi, the fabulously wealthy shrine of Apollo which was one of only a handful of international cult centres in Greece, and came back with the god’s judgement that there was no one wiser or more knowledgeable than Socrates. As Plato tells the story, this oracle was the trigger for Socrates’ philosophical mission. He was puzzled by what the god could have meant, and so set about questioning all the experts he could find in Athens, to try to understand what the god meant. And in the end he decided that the god was right, because everyone else suffered from the false conceit that he knew more than he actually knew; none could demonstrate his expertise by responding coherently to Socrates’ questions. So Socrates concluded that he alone did have a kind of wisdom – the sense to know how little he knew. But by then he was launched on his mission of enquiry, of asking himself and others tough questions to try to uncover the truths underlying our beliefs and opinions.

  But why should Chaerephon have approached the oracle with his question in the first place? In order for it to make sense to ask whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, Socrates must already have had a reputation for wisdom. He had never been famous as anything other than the person in Athens who went around questioning people and finding out if they could define the moral and other concepts they claimed to work with; this enterprise had started around 440 BCE, and had brought him notoriety by the end of the decade. But this is precisely the kind of questioning that, according to Plato, was supposed to have been triggered by the oracle, rather than going on beforehand. Another good reason for supposing the oracle a fiction is that there is no other reference to it by Plato, or by any of the other Socratics (who would certainly have made hay with it), or anywhere else in Greek literature, except a mention in Xenophon’s Apology, which now begins to look decidedly derivative. It surely would have been a famous tale.

  What Plato was doing with this story is rather subtle. Throughout his life Plato wanted to establish philosophy, as he understood it, as the one valid form of higher education, and in order to do so he used his writings to puncture the claims of rivals – educators, poets, statesmen, orators and other experts. So this is what Plato has his character ‘Socrates’ do in the early dialogues: question such experts and find them lacking. This was Plato’s mission, and his Socrates was the mouthpiece for this mission. But this is precisely the mission summarized in Plato’s Apology in the oracle story. Plato made up the story, then, as a way of introducing his own mission, the mission he would give to the character Socrates who was to appear in his works.

  Since Xenophon knew Socrates, he knew that Plato’s Socrates was fictional. He was in a position to recognize that Plato’s description of Socrates’ mission was actually a clever way of outlining and introducing Plato’s own mission. So Xenophon did the same: he used the same story for the same purpose, and merely tweaked it to suit his mission. The chief difference between the oracle story in Plato and the version in Xenophon is that in Xenophon the oracle states that there is no one more free, upright and prudent than Socrates. Xenophon’s mission was to make Socrates out to be a paragon of conventional virtue (and to explore what inner conditions are required for such virtue), and so his Socrates is ‘free, upright and prudent’, rather than ‘wise’. Xenophon avoids mentioning wisdom because its corollary was Socratic ignorance: Plato’s Socrates was wiser than anyone else because he was the only one who was aware of his ignorance. But ignorance is not one of the traits of Xenophon’s Socrates, who spends most of his time advising others what to do. What we have, then, is an exquisite case of intertextuality between the two authors. Plato used the oracle story to establish his mission in writing, and Xenophon, recognizing that this is what Plato had done, did the same for his own mission.

  ‘Here before our eyes is the mythmaking process at work,’ as Moses Finley once remarked apropos of these two speeches. Perhaps it is the lot of people such as Socrates and Jesus, people who initiate great changes, to be what they become in others’ versions. Before long Socrates became such a larger-than-life figure, thanks to the efforts of his followers, that we have to work to uncover the truth about the trial, and the case achieved such fame that, in subsequent centuries, writing defence speeches for Socrates became an exercise for students of rhetoric or concerned philosophers, fuelled by the liveliness of an ongoing debate about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Dozens of Socratic defences were written, and some even ‘published’, but the only survivor was written by Libanius of Antioch in the fourth century CE, 750 years after the event. The great orator of the late second and early third centuries CE, Maximus of Tyre, alludes to this tradition of writing both prosecution and defence speeches for Socrates’ trial, and explains it, at least partly, by reference to the rumour, which started perhaps late in the fourth century, that Socrates himself said nothing at his trial, but just stood there mute and defiant.

  SOCRATES’ DEFENCE SPEECHES

  There may be nuggets of historical truth within either or both of the two works, but we lack the criteria for recognizing them. We will never know for sure what was said on that spring day of 399 BCE. Here, in any case, are summaries of Socrates’ main defence speeches, as told by Xenophon and Plato. Plato claims to have been there in person, and Xenophon to have heard about it at second or third hand – but even these claims may be an odd Greek literary convention, a way of creating verisimilitude, rather than a guarantee of truth. Throughout his Recollections of Socrates, Xenophon frequently claims to have been present at conversations he could not possibly have witnessed.

  Xenophon’s version focuses on the current charges. Socrates denies the charge of not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by the state by claiming that he has always performed his religious duties as a citizen. Taking the charge of introducing new gods to be an oblique reference to the supernatural voice that often came to him with advice (more on this later), he argues that listening to this voice is no more irreligious than making use of any other form of divination to receive communications from the gods. The only difference is that this supernatural voice is exclusive to him, to Socrates – but that he is particularly favoured by the gods is also proved by Apollo’s response to Chaerephon. This claim to be the special agent of the gods natu rally provokes uproar in the court, and Socrates does not help matters by going on to argue that he is such a paragon of virtue that it makes no sense to charge him with corrupting or subverting anyone. Meletus, when questioned by Socrates about the sense of this charge, falls back on the claim that Socrates attracted young men to h
imself and took them away from the traditional, family-based forms of education. Socrates admits this, and justifies it by saying that he is an educational expert, so naturally people come to him for education, just as they would go to a doctor on matters of health.

  Plato’s version is considerably longer and more complex. In this version, Socrates’ defence rests crucially on a distinction between his ‘old accusers’ and his ‘new accusers’, as he calls them. The ‘new accusers’ are simply Meletus, Lycon and Anytus, with the specific charges brought at this trial, but the ‘old accusers’ are largely faceless and nameless: they are the common people, with their prejudices against the new learning that had swept the upper echelons of Athenian society in the last thirty or forty years of the fifth century. They are ill-informed, and incapable of distinguishing between different types of intellectual, and so they project on to Socrates a confused picture in which he becomes simultaneously an archetypal scientist, sophist and orator, along with all their fears about the dangers of such intellectuals – atheism and other forms of moral subversion. Tabloid newspapers used to do the same with the gurus and ‘cult leaders’ of the 1970s.

  Luckily, we are in a position to validate this complaint of Plato’s. Socrates often featured in comic plays from the late 430s onwards, and apart from fragments we have an entire work in which he plays an important part. This is Aristophanes’ Clouds, originally produced in 423, but extensively rewritten some time between then and 414. And in this play we find that Socrates is just such an amalgam: a scientist, a sharp talker, a hair-splitting quibbler, who undermines conventional moral norms and prefers bizarre gods such as Chaos, Clouds and Tongue to the Olympic pantheon. If this was meant to be farce, it became mistaken as satire – and satire of Socrates himself, not of a conglomerate intellectual. And so Socrates was widely taken to be an irreligious corrupter of the young – exactly as in the indictment. It may have been meant to be funny at the time, but things had changed by 399 and people were more inclined to take Aristophanes’ charges seriously.

  Plato even includes in his Apology a specific reference to this play as a source of the old accusers’ prejudices against Socrates. Aristophanes chose Socrates as his figurehead intellectual for no better reason than that he was a native Athenian, whereas the vast majority of other current intellectuals were foreigners. Aristophanes returned to the theme in two later plays, where Socrates is tarred as a corrupter of the young, a kind of cult leader or hypnotist necromancer, and other comic poets (especially Eupolis and Ameipsias, whose work unfortunately has scarcely survived) frequently mocked and expressed comic concern about Socrates and his circle.

  Socrates’ point here, in Plato’s Apology, is that there is no way for him to combat such confused and deep-rooted prejudices. He denies them, but in the 440s he had taken an interest in current scientific ideas, and that may still have been vaguely remembered. And his distinction of himself from the sophists (which depended, anyway, on grouping a mass of diverse people together as ‘sophists’) would have been regarded by most of his audience as mere hair-splitting, just as, to non-initiates today, a logical positivist and a Platonist would seem to share more similarities than differences.

  It is even likely that the distinction of Socrates from the sophists was an invention of Plato’s. The sophists were educators, and Plato tries to make out that Socrates never claimed to be a teacher (in the sense of a transmitter of his own ideas), and simply followed the course of arguments wherever they led, whether the upshot was the refutation of one of his own beliefs, or those of his interlocutors. Xenophon’s Socrates, however, is a fully fledged teacher, offering advice to all and sundry, and Plato’s portrait is pretty unconvincing anyway, as a piece of history, because it is hard to imagine that Socrates spent his whole time on refutational argument, that this was the beginning and end of his philosophical mission. He must have spent some time teaching too, and this is what Xenophon portrays. One minor difference is that Socrates did not take money from his students, as the sophists did; he preferred not to be obligated to take pupils on just because they had the means to pay him. Where the testimonies of Plato and Xenophon coincide, however, is in their condemnation of the sophists for the superficiality of their arguments. They were not educators in genuine morality, because they taught their students only the eristic art of winning arguments, whether or not that involved searching for the truth. Only Socrates had at heart his students’ moral improvement. This shaky foundation is all that allows us to distinguish Socrates from those whom his followers lumped together as ‘sophists’.

  There was no reason for those who were outside Socrates’ exclusive circle not to believe that Socrates was as he was portrayed in Clouds: an atheistic scientist-cum-sophist who taught wealthy young men his weird and dangerous notions. In Plato’s defence speech, Socrates claims that the source of these prejudices is his mission to interrogate people (so this is where he introduces the story of the Delphic oracle). Not only has this made those whose conceit to knowledge he punctured angry with him (imagine a contemporary critic who day after day demolished the pretensions of our religious, political and artistic leaders, in public debates broadcast on television to millions), but some young men have imitated his method of interrogation, and even misused it as a way to try to score points off their opponents, rather than as a way of trying to get to the truth. And so, in order to divert attention away from their own ignorance, people have gone around slandering Socrates and fuelling prejudice against him.

  The next few pages of Plato’s Apology are taken up with a short dialogue between Socrates and Meletus, in the course of which Socrates sarcastically ties his prosecutor up in knots over the issues of subverting young men and of atheism; for all the guardedness of his responses, Meletus is made painfully aware that he is not Socrates’ intellectual equal. Since there was almost certainly no provision for such dialogue in Athenian courtroom procedure, this too is a feature of Plato’s Apology that we can safely take to be fictional; and, again, it was one that was imitated, though at considerably less length, by Xenophon in his version. Plato used it, presumably, as a way of letting his readers know one or two of the things Meletus had said in his speech; he had stressed that the proper source of education for young men was the family-based perpetuation of what Sir Gilbert Murray called the ‘inherited conglomerate’ – the moral and religious code passed down, by example and oral teaching as much as by instruction, from generation to generation – and he had accused Socrates of being an outright atheist.

  Socrates goes on to affirm his commitment to his philosophical mission. It was given to him by Apollo, and it would be arrogant sacrilege to abandon it, even on pain of death. He compares himself to the Homeric hero Achilles, who had to choose between a short, brilliant life and a long, undistinguished one, and insists that he will not stop philosophizing even if the court makes it a condition of his acquittal that he should do so. He claims that, so far from being a source of corruption, his service to the god is the best thing that has ever happened to Athens. He likens the city to a sluggish, dozing horse, and himself to a horsefly, sent by the god to stir it out of its slumbers, and at risk of being swatted dead by the horse’s tail.

  But if this is his job, why has he not played a greater part in Athenian public life, as a more direct way to galvanize the city? Because, he says, there is no place for an honest man in the city’s politics. His supernatural voice has consistently prevented him from playing a part in the city’s public affairs, and the reason must be that had he done so he would have been put to death long ago. As it happens, in the normal course of events he found himself in a position of some responsibility once in 406, when he tried to stop what he saw as an immoral procedure; and once in 404 or 403, during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, they wanted him to arrest Leon of Salamis, but he refused, again on the grounds of the immorality of the proposed action. Despite his evident survival, he says that both times he was in danger of death, and so he uses these cases to support the point tha
t, had he chosen to act politically, whatever the regime, he would have been killed. And then he winds down his speech with a couple of stock rhetorical points: the prosecution’s claim that he corrupts people is undermined by the fact that none of the relatives of those he is supposed to have corrupted have ever taken him to court; and he refuses to demean himself by employing the kind of pity-arousing tactics that others employ in court when threatened by the death sentence.

  Socrates was found guilty by a narrow margin: ‘If a mere thirty votes had gone the other way, I’d have been acquitted.’ In other words, on the assumption that there were five hundred dikasts at the trial, 280 voted for his guilt and 220 for his innocence. Then it was his turn to propose a counter-penalty, in face of his prosecutors’ demand for death. Since he believed that he was the best thing ever to have happened to Athens, he semi-seriously proposed, according to Plato, that he be fed at public expense for the rest of his life. This was an extraordinary honour, usually reserved for those who had conspicuously enhanced the honour of the city, perhaps by winning an event at the Olympic games, or for the descendants of those who were taken to have established democracy in Athens. Socrates was just being provocative. In a more serious vein, pleading his well-known poverty, he proposed that he be fined one hundred drachmas (the cost of a small flock of sheep and goats, say), which was promptly increased by the offers of friends, including Plato, to three thousand drachmas.

  This was the kind of penalty the court might have accepted, but Plato’s Socrates had gone out of his way to alienate wavering dikasts by his arrogance, and a majority still voted for the death penalty. What kind of a majority? A late biographer says that eighty dikasts changed their vote because they were angry at Socrates for his arrogance: that would make it 360 against 140, and this is the figure most scholars accept. But Socrates’ own words (in Plato) suggest a different story: after the death penalty had been passed he addressed the 220 who voted to acquit him as true dikasts – a strange thing to call them if some of them had subsequently voted to put him to death. In other words, it is possible that fewer voted to put him to death, so that the margin was perhaps as little as 260 against 240.