Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  The corollary of this is the degree to which the Athenian people had the power to address religious matters, even those that in our day might be the province of a synod of priests, considered to be experts in such things. In classical Athens, however, since religion was largely non-dogmatic, priesthood was not a vocation, but a position which one generally either inherited or gained by lottery. Usually intermittently, and often for no more than a year, a priest looked after the sanctuary, and saw that the rites were properly performed (by him or by someone else). Priests and priestesses scarcely felt responsible for the welfare of their ‘flocks’: it was the job of the assembled people to ensure that the channel of goodwill from the gods to the citizen body remained open, as it was their job to authorize new sacred buildings or the introduction of a new cult. The gods were so closely involved in Athenian public life (social and political) that ensuring the gods’ goodwill was the responsibility of those who held ultimate responsibility for the Athenian public.

  Where did Socrates fit into all this? Athens was, by our standards, a relatively small town, and it relied on a number of small-town mechanisms of social control, such as gossip and ridicule. Socrates was visible – ugly, loquacious and pugnacious – and had attracted attention from the comic poets and at street level (or, in Athenian terms, in the Agora). Despite the fact that, on their enrolment, the dikasts swore to bear in mind only the present charges against the defendant, and to ignore anything else they knew or guessed about him, many of them would already have formed opinions about him. We will see how easy it would have been to misunderstand Socrates’ religious views.

  ATHENIAN RELIGION

  Socrates was charged with impiety, not to be confused with ‘heresy’: in ancient Greece, there was no sacred text to whose provisions one had to adhere, no elaborate body of doctrine in which one had to believe, no professional priestly hierarchy as we understand it, no confessional books in which a writer furthered orthodoxy or heterodoxy by revealing his or her personal beliefs. Religion was largely ritualistic. One had to perform certain actions, and they presumably involved emotional commitment, but there was little dogma in the background. A great deal of religious practice was not personal, but was an obligation one automatically assumed as a member of some community or other – the civic community, the community of peasants, one’s family and household, as a craftsman or a soldier.

  The chief means of communicating with the gods were offerings and prayer. Most of these rites were based on reciprocity: either you were giving to the gods in expectation of a return from them in the future, or you were repaying them for a perceived token of goodwill. Animal sacrifices ranged from a bull ox down to a pigeon or a goose: blood was shed and fire burnt the offering and sent it as smoke up to the gods. But these were sacrifices for special occasions; daily domestic sacrifices involved tossing a bun, perhaps, or a handful of grain on to the hearth, or pouring a libation of oil, milk or wine.

  Libations and sacrifices were usually accompanied by prayers; music might be played and incense burnt, on the understanding that what was pleasing to human beings might well be pleasing to the gods. Prayers could also be offered up at any time. Gods were addressed humbly, and in an elaborate prayer you were expected to rehearse a number of their titles, out of politeness and your natural concern to make sure you got their attention. You would also mention the deity’s obligation to you: you have been a loyal devotee, you have a good record of copious sacrifices, and you expect him or her to answer your prayer in return. The gods were not always reasonable – they both were and were not similar to human beings – but in all your dealings with them you acted as though they might be.

  Apart from daily rituals, and crisis rituals such as sacrificing before battle to test the omens, the Greek city calendar was marked by festivals, some just for men, some just for women, the greatest for the whole community, including children. Whichever group was involved came together for the purpose of the festival, many of which involved a procession, perhaps carrying through the streets the cult statue and objects sacred to the deity, dancing and singing hymns, while slaves herded the animals to be sacrificed. Quite a few festivals included entertainment, where the general public got to watch athletic, musical and dramatic contests. Most of them involved communal eating; in the Greek world, meat was generally eaten only after an animal sacrifice.

  Divination was an important feature of ancient Greek religion. If you needed to know the future, a sneeze or a dream or a chance meeting or a stray remark or the pattern of a bird of prey’s flight could all be significant. Professional diviners examined the liver of a sacrificial victim before battle and, in order to judge whether the outcome would be favourable, watched to see how the tail curled in the fire, how quickly the flames spread, and so on, and went on sacrificing until they obtained a favourable omen. The biggest form of divination was consulting an oracle. The gods gave signs, but they were ambiguous and hard to interpret. If a particular shrine turned out to be good at interpretation, it could gain international recognition. In the Greek world this happened at various places, but especially at Cumae in what is now Italy, at Dodona in north-west Greece, and at Delphi in central Greece.

  A pious person, then, was one who carried out his fair share of all these rituals. But ritual action rested on a bedrock of minimal beliefs, never fully articulated until they came under threat. One had to believe that rituals were effective, and this carried with it further beliefs: that the gods took thought for human beings, and that they knew more and were more powerful than mortals. And so there were some moral features embedded within normal Greek religion, in the sense that certain acts were regarded as pleasing or offending the gods. The gods were usually concerned with justice and would see that, sooner or later, criminals were brought to book. They wanted one to be hospitable to strangers, kind to one’s friends, dutiful to one’s community and one’s parents, fierce with one’s enemies; and they believed that – in the long run, at least – arrogance and excess would be humbled.

  Most fundamentally, piety also required that one believe in the existence of gods. Rituals can always be performed by people without belief or commitment, but for practical purposes belief and action were taken to be mutually supporting: your performance of ritual indicated that you believed in the gods, and your belief in the gods underpinned your performance of ritual. This is reflected, in fact, in the ambiguity of the charges that Socrates faced in court. As I translated it earlier, the central sentence of the affidavit went as follows: ‘Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges.’ But the sentence could also be translated ‘Socrates is guilty of failing to perform the customary rites for the gods traditionally recognized by the state.’ If Socrates failed to worship them in the prescribed manner, he might as well not have believed in them, and if he did not believe in them, he would hardly be worshipping them in the prescribed manner. Hence both Xenophon and Plato talk as if Socrates was suspected of outright atheism.

  Even given the ritual basis of Greek religion, atheism and agnosticism, in senses of the words that we would recognize today, were possible as responses to belief in the existence of the relevant gods, in their involvement in the lives of human beings, and in the efficacy of the means of communicating with them. The acts of communication kept the gods happy with you and your community. This is why impiety was taken to be such a serious crime. The gods looked after Athens as a whole, helped it to prosper in politics, warfare and agriculture, and allowed its citizens to have fair hopes for the future, as long as they performed the traditional sacrifices and rites and avoided pollution. Any major catastrophe affecting the state as a whole was automatically assumed to be due to the anger of the gods. The very fabric of the state depended on the goodwill of the gods, and this in turn depended on everyone’s playing a part, not just in the public festivals of the city, but also in domestic rituals. Patriotism and piety were inseparable. Socrates knew the risks when he came to court on these charges. If your politics wer
e suspect, you could be put to death for damaging olive trees attached to a temple, let alone for angering the gods in the way he was accused of doing.

  AGNOSTICISM AND ATHEISM

  Atheism, or at least disbelief in the traditional gods, spread far more widely in the fourth century, as philosophers developed their own, often bizarrely magnificent views of the divine. But in the fifth century BCE and even earlier there were thinkers who were forerunners at a time when most Athenians were less inclined to be flexible in religious matters.

  Among Socrates’ contemporaries, Protagoras of Abdera famously expressed his agnosticism by saying, pompously but precisely: ‘Where the gods are concerned, I am not in a position to ascertain that they exist, or that they do not exist. There are many impediments to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life.’ Protagoras’s profound scepticism paved the way for the view expressed by Prodicus of Ceos that what men call gods were simply important natural phenomena or people (Dionysus, then, was no more than the inspired human being who invented viticulture). The philosopher Democritus of Abdera denied the immortality of the gods and argued that religion was based on fear. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon seems to have invented the familiar and powerful argument that the patent unfairness of the world (in which, for instance, innocent children die in agony) proves that the gods take no thought for us. Diagoras of Melos, a poet of otherwise little consequence, argued that means of communicating with the gods were ineffective, and fled Athens in order not to face a trial for having revealed some of the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Diagoras was so famous as an atheist that just to call someone ‘the Melian’ (as Aristophanes called Socrates in Clouds) was to call him an atheist, and his crimes were long remembered.

  The frequency with which characters in written works express atheism shows that such ideas were current in Athens towards the end of the fifth century. Above all, Euripides so loved to include such challenging ideas in his plays that Aristophanes mocked him for it: he had a garland-seller complain that Euripides had almost put her out of business, because no one wanted garlands for religious ceremonies any more. In some famous lines, the tragedian first whisks us through the development of civilization, up to the point when open lawlessness had been brought under control by the invention of laws. But what about secret crimes?

  Next, since the laws made it impossible

  For people to commit obvious crimes by force,

  They began to act in secret. This was the point, I think,

  At which some shrewd and clever man first

  Invented fear of the gods for mortal men, so that

  The wicked might have something to fear, even if

  Their deeds or words or thoughts were secret.

  So that is why he introduced the divine, saying:

  ‘There is a god, and he teems with life undying.

  He shall hear all that is said among mortals

  And shall see all that you do.

  Your evil schemes, plotted in silence,

  Will be noticed by the gods. For intelligence

  Is one of their qualities.’ With these words

  He introduced the crucial doctrine

  And covered up the truth with a fiction.

  In other words, the idea that the gods exist is a mere human invention, and so is the notion that they take thought for the human race. There is no point at all, then, to any of the rituals by which we attempt to communicate with them. Religion is founded on a deliberate lie; it is just a means of social and political control. Nor do Euripidean characters stop there: others doubt the existence of gods on the grounds that we patently do not live in a world governed by just gods, or on the grounds that the gods, as described in the traditional tales, act immorally and so license immoral behaviour among humans too, or that they are no more than projections of human needs.

  Almost all of the most potent arguments against the existence of a divinity or the validity of worship were deployed by Socrates’ contemporaries, and this fact exacerbates the puzzle of Socrates’ trial. Since the Athenians were clearly prepared to tolerate impiety in some contexts, we will be forced to look deeper than the charge of impiety to see why Socrates was taken to court.

  SOCRATIC PIETY

  We are never going to be absolutely certain that we can reconstruct the elements of Socrates’ conception of piety. A certain amount of avoidance of potential quicksands is bound to have taken place in our sources, since one of their concerns was to make their mentor’s execution appear deranged. Nevertheless, the Socratic writers were committed to quasi-factual writing: ‘What if Socrates had discussed piety with Euthyphro outside the office of the King Archon? What might he have said?’ And so we can confidently use the evidence of Plato and Xenophon, as far as it goes, while suspecting that it might fall short of the full picture.

  If Socrates was impious, either he failed to carry out his ritual obligations, or he denied one or all of the three central tenets of Greek worship: the existence of traditional gods, their involvement in the lives of human beings, and the efficacy of ritual for communicating with the gods. Xenophon says that Socrates carried out his ritual obligations: ‘Everyone could see that he sacrificed regularly at home and also at the public altars of the state.’ We can take Xenophon’s word for this, because it is far more likely that Socrates was suspected of impiety because of his beliefs, not his actions – in other words, that even though he might have fulfilled his ritual obligations, they were suspected of being meaningless for him.

  Socrates’ view of the gods rested fundamentally on the belief that they were always and only good. Xenophon, for instance, has Socrates invent the argument from design: the main manifestation of their goodness is that they have arranged the world in such a way that everything is useful for us human beings. They have given us sunlight so that we can see and rain so that plants can grow and feed us; they have given us fire to warm our bones and light our ways, and to enable us to develop the arts and crafts; they have made our teeth perfect for breaking up food, our hands perfect for life-preserving skills, and so on: Xenophon’s Socrates does no more than outline the kind of way he would have us think about everything.

  Plato’s Socrates showed how the belief in the gods’ essential goodness could clash with ordinary Greek thinking about the gods: ‘Since the god is good, he cannot be responsible for everything, as is commonly said … He and he alone must be held responsible for good things, but responsibility for bad things must be looked for elsewhere and not attributed to the god.’ In normal Greek thinking about the gods, Apollo, for instance, was not just the god of light and culture, but also the bringer of plagues; Poseidon made earthquakes. Nevertheless, just as it is inconceivable to us now that anyone could get into trouble for stressing the goodness of the gods, so it was just as inconceivable then. Even Homer, the founder of much Greek thinking about the gods, has Zeus complain at one point that humans attribute their troubles to the gods, when in fact they bring them on themselves. If Socrates was guilty of impiety, this belief of his is not the place to look for it. At the most, he could be considered mildly eccentric in this respect.

  One of the consequences of Socrates’ belief in the absolute goodness of the gods, however, looks more promising. He must also have held that many of the traditional stories about the gods were wrong, because they portrayed the gods behaving immorally – quarrelling, fighting, castrating their fathers, committing adultery, lying and so on. And Plato has Socrates himself wonder out loud whether his disbelief in such stories could have played a part in his prosecution. But this is a red herring: several of Socrates’ contemporaries also had reservations about the propriety of some of the myths, and in general rationalization of myths and legends was a minor industry, involving a number of admired writers. Perhaps the most strident was again Euripides. In a typical passage, he has Heracles say: ‘I cannot believe that the gods either acquiesce in illicit affairs or put one another in chains. I have never believed these things �
� Any true god needs nothing. These are just the debased tales of poets.’ In criticizing the myths, and trying to purge Greek religion of false views of the gods, Socrates was in distinguished company, with not a trace of a prosecution among them.

  In any case, these stories were not gospel to ancient Greeks. Every tragic playwright tampered with the myths and legends for the purposes of the play he was composing. There is a danger of ignoring the metaphorical character of some Greek thinking about the gods. They did not literally believe that the gods lived on the top of Mount Olympus, because they could clamber up there and fail to find them; if they portrayed their gods as young and beautiful, this does not necessarily mean that they thought of them as young and beautiful, but only that they were trying to encapsulate some features of divinity by applying the attributes ‘young’ and ‘beautiful’. It is likely that they took all the stories with generous pinches of salt – which paved the way for the kind of rationalizations that Socrates and some of his contemporaries preferred, and which therefore suggests that Socrates was not thought impious because of disbelief in the literal level of the myths.

  There is one more consequence of Socrates’ belief in the goodness of the gods to consider. If the gods are good and can only ever be the source of good things, why bother to sacrifice to them? Besides, if the gods are self-sufficient, as Plato has Socrates come close to suggesting, they need nothing from us. Or again, to suggest that the gods are to be won over by sacrifices is to reduce piety to vulgar trading. It is true that Xenophon’s Socrates is conventionally pious where sacrificing was concerned, but could this be a whitewash?

  Socrates’ belief in the goodness of the gods could have led him to reject sacrifice only if sacrifice is seen as a rite of propitiation required by beings who are not always good. But sacrifice and the accompanying prayer need not be restricted to such a purpose. You can use them to ask the gods for something good, if it seems good to them too, and that falls well short of vulgar trading. Socrates’ sacrificing seems to have been of this kind: