Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  The ten archons proved themselves to be no more than Spartan puppets, by asking for aid from Sparta on the grounds that the democrats were, in effect, in revolt against Sparta. The Spartans gave the Ten, who were financially as well as morally bankrupt, a loan to hire mercenaries who, under the command of Lysander and his brother, were to blockade Piraeus by land and sea. This half-hearted response was a sign of a sea-change in Sparta. The Spartan authorities had long been concerned about Lysander’s ambitions: he had proved himself a ruthless and brilliant commander in the last decade of the war, but had also shown that he was not averse to hero-worship from the people he conquered, and to installing governments that were loyal to him personally. When he began to achieve some success against the rebel democrats in Athens, his enemies in Sparta got busy: he was known to be close to the Athenian oligarchs, and they made out that he was planning to make Athens his personal domain.

  One of the two Spartan kings, Pausanias, led an army against Piraeus and took over command from Lysander. But faced with stiff resistance from the democrats (though at one point he nearly defeated them just outside the north-western city walls), and with the growing reluctance of important Spartan allies to interfere in Athens, Pausanias chose a course of reconciliation. He persuaded Thrasybulus and the democrats that the archons wanted an end to hostilities, and after some prevarication the archons agreed.

  The peace was negotiated under the auspices of the Spartans on the spot. In the short term, the two sides agreed to lay down their arms, and the Spartans withdrew, leaving the Athenians to sort out their own affairs. The chief provisions of the agreement that was hammered out were that all confiscated property was to be returned, while anyone who wished could go and join the oligarchs who had already fled to Eleusis, which was to be a semi-independent enclave. They had ten days to register, and another twenty to get out of town; they would henceforth be banned from holding office in Athens.

  As for reparations, the survivors among the fifty-one oligarchic governors of Athens and Piraeus, if they stayed in the city, would face an investigation of their conduct while in office, and the normal penalties if they were found to have transgressed, but only the most egregious crimes, such as murder, would be punished; there was no war crimes tribunal. As a sop to the oligarchs, their conduct would be investigated only by juries of the better-off members of society, to prevent vindictive action from the lower classes. The face of democracy would only be improved by a display of mercy. Athenian understanding of democratic citizenship was closely related to equality: for a while, no one could occupy the moral high ground, because that was exactly what the Thirty had tried to do with their programme of purging the city of what they saw as immoral elements. So the restored democracy would be lenient.

  In late September 403, the democrats processed from Piraeus back to Athens to sacrifice in gratitude to Athena on the Acropolis. It was a magnificent occasion, with deliberate echoes of the Panathenaea, the most democratic festival of the ritual calendar. An interim board oversaw the transition back to full democracy, and ensured the continuation of the overhaul of the laws. There was friction, but the Spartans never took it upon themselves to interfere – even when in 401, just a couple of years before Socrates’ trial, the restored democrats decided to suppress the last remaining oligarchs and reunite Eleusis with Athens. On the pretext that at least some of the oligarchs were beginning to hire mercenaries with a view to retaking Athens, the democrats attacked Eleusis and bloodily put an end to its status as an oligarchic enclave.

  AMNESTY?

  Against all the odds the peace worked. Apart from the reduction of Eleusis in 401, blood was not shed in recrimination, and Athenian democracy continued and flourished for another eighty years. The Athenians were naturally inclined to brush the civil war under the carpet as much as they could: after all, large numbers of them had been involved in or had connived at the rule of the Thirty, and they needed to forget their collective guilt. Dozens of years understandably passed before ordinary citizens in Germany began to face up to their or their parents’ complicit roles in the Holocaust.

  Despite this attempt at collective amnesia, the early years of the restored democracy were tense. Thrasybulus was remembered not just as the heroic leader of the resistance movement, but also as the one who kept trying to persuade the Athenians to persevere with the conciliatory mood of the times. His repeated efforts would not have been required if there had been no friction, and he was not always successful: one of the first actions of the restored democracy was to reduce the level of support the knights received from the state towards the expensive upkeep of their horses, and within a couple of years three hundred knights were sent to fight for the Spartans against Tissaphernes in Asia Minor on the grounds that (as Xenophon tendentiously put it) ‘democracy would only benefit if these Athenian horsemen went abroad and died there’. They had served the Thirty too well. The clubs were curtailed, and it was more or less impossible for those who had supported the Thirty in any way to gain election to important political positions in the subsequent decades.

  The conciliatory veneer did little to stop people referring in court to their own or their opponents’ actions during the reign of the Thirty, as a way of embellishing their own characters and slurring those of their opponents. And this went on for many years: nothing casts so long a shadow in the collective memory of a people as civil war. When a court was sitting to assess someone’s fitness for office, this was a particularly good opportunity for someone to bring up the past, since a man’s character was expressly on trial. Other trials too almost explicitly offered the jury the chance to avenge themselves on the Thirty in the person of the defendant. Lysias’s Against Eratosthenes is an attack on a member of the Thirty, not for any recent crime, but precisely for having been a member of the Thirty and for having in that capacity ordered the murder of his brother; his Defence of Mantitheus shows that Mantitheus had been accused of having served the Thirty as a knight, and his Defence against the Charge of Subverting the Democracy does the same for an unnamed defendant. As Andrew Wolpert has said: ‘Peace was never final; rather, it was reinvented and renegotiated every time a conflict erupted between members of the former factions and every time a citizen recalled the period of unrest.’

  Nevertheless, scholars have invariably spoken of a general amnesty after the civil war, imposed by the restored democracy as a way of rapidly healing wounds, and in order to prevent the system becoming clogged with an avalanche of recriminatory lawsuits. The amnesty was supposed to apply to everyone, except the original sixty-one oligarchs (the Thirty, the Piraeus Ten, the Eleven, and the ten archons who took over after the fall of the Thirty), and even to them if they stayed and survived an assessment of their actions while in power. It was supposed to stop anyone proceeding against anyone else for crimes committed before the agreement.

  Though some of the details are unclear, the reconciliation agreement of 403 between the men of Piraeus and the men of the city was, first, a property deal: everyone (or his heirs, if the Thirty had killed him) was to regain his original property, or comparable property if the original had already passed to a third party, except for the Thirty and their henchmen, who were free to go to Eleusis if they wanted. Second, if any of the Thirty and their henchmen chose to stay in Athens and submit to trial, the verdict of that trial was to be taken to be final. There was to be no reprise on either issue. It is this ‘no reprise’ provision that has been taken to be a general amnesty, a pardon for all past crimes, but it clearly falls short of such a blanket amnesty, since it refers only to the two provisions of the agreement. The term used is common in ancient Athenian contract law and it always refers to the specific terms of a specific agreement. So the fact that there was to be no reprise on either the property deals or the verdicts handed down against those of the oligarchs who stayed in Athens does not amount to a blanket amnesty on all crimes committed before 403. This will prove important for understanding Socrates’ trial. Even those scholars who believe th
at there was a political subtext to the trial tend to think that it had to be conducted at the level of innuendo, since open reference to Socrates’ pre-403 associates and their undemocratic politics was banned. But without the amnesty in the background, the picture of the trial looks very different.

  A CONSERVATIVE ERA

  The ‘no reprise’ condition was one of several reconciliatory moves. Not the least important was the radical overhaul of the legislative system. Scrutiny of the laws had started in 410 and had continued, despite regime changes, with the board responsible for the work merely receiving, like the British Civil Service, somewhat different instructions from the different regimes. The board had originally been tasked with reinscribing the ‘laws of Solon’, the earliest of which dated from the beginning of the sixth century, but since these were scattered, the job took longer than the four months initially assigned to it. In any case, it turned out that what was required was not just fresh, legible inscriptions, centrally available in Athens itself; the board successfully argued that they had to do something to iron out inconsistencies and obscurities as well. So the work turned into a major and fundamentally important exercise, requiring a number of years. It was still not quite finished in 404, when the civil war interrupted it.

  In 403, a new Legislative Board of fifteen hundred was appointed, to complete this process of rationalizing the laws; the overhauled code was written up on papyrus and stored in the Metroön, with the most important laws inscribed on stone for public viewing. From then on, no law passed before 403 was to be valid, unless it formed part of the new inscriptions and transcriptions: 403 was the start of a new era for Athens, as 1792 was designated ‘Year One’ in revolutionary France. Moreover, no uninscribed law could validly be referred to in court or enforced, and no decree could override a law; a law was understood to be applicable to all Athenians, while decrees applied only to a segment of the population, or even to a single individual. Further regular reviews of the laws were to be undertaken as seemed desirable, but the passage of a proposal into law now involved several hurdles, as Peter Rhodes explains: ‘It was deliberately made difficult to have a law enacted: it could be done only at a certain time of the year; the proposer had to examine the existing code and if necessary propose the repeal of any law with which his new law would conflict; the proposal had to be displayed in public and read out at three meetings of the assembly; and the nomothetae [the Legislative Board] who finally pronounced on it were not any citizens but men who had taken the oath and registered as jurors (inter alia, men of thirty and over).’

  But the ongoing work assigned to the Legislative Board was even more important. From then on, no laws could be passed solely by the people’s Assembly. They gave their approval to a proposed new law, but the Legislative Board had the final say, once they had considered the implications of the proposal, and in particular whether it conflicted with any other existing laws. The Assembly was allowed the final vote only on decrees. This appeased the oligarchs, because no longer could the people, led by some demagogue, insist that whatever they decided on any given day was right (as at the trial of the Arginusae Six); and the democrats were content with being back in power, and with an end to civil strife, so that they could get on with restoring Athens’s status and economic conditions, and with healing wounds. Concord, then, was the new watchword, and in theory the only standard by which major issues were to be judged was whether or not it enhanced the collective good.

  The ordering of the laws was important not just for stability, but also for deciding the overriding issue of the day: who was to count as Athenian? The Thirty had severely limited the number, and others had other proposals, but the new government reaffirmed Pericles’ law of 451: things had lapsed somewhat during the war, but once again, from 403 onwards, citizenship was to depend on both one’s parents having been citizens. This reaffirmation of the past responded to a need that was powerful enough for them initially to refuse citizenship to those foreigners who had helped Thrasybulus during the civil war, even though he had offered it to them. The organization and archiving of the laws was important for the restored democracy in part because it made it possible for anyone to refer to laws in order to confirm what it was to be Athenian – that is, what laws he was subject to, what his obligations and privileges were.

  To the victor, the spoils. The restored democracy gained the right to settle the debate over which faction got to claim that it was restoring the ‘constitution of our fathers’. The mood of the times was as conservative as the slogan implies; whim was to be banished, whether it was the whim of oligarchs or of the assembled people. Published and at least semi-transparent laws were the new guides, supported by better bureaucracy and a more uniform language in official documents. The prohibition on appeal to unwritten laws reminded aristocrats that their instinctive claim to leadership was, in a sense, no longer legal. Written laws seemed objective, impersonal, infinitely repeatable, not arbitrary. The very act of writing a law down gave it apparent permanence and stability. Post-Thirty Athenians wanted freedom from the destabilizing influence of mavericks; Critias and Alcibiades were gone, and they were not to be resurrected.

  CRISIS AND CONFLICT

  NINE

  Symptoms of Change

  Social crisis manifests in different ways in different societies, but war-torn Athens, the Athens of the last third of the fifth century BCE, was affected by a striking list of stress factors. Old certainties were being undermined by prolonged warfare, morally subversive ideas, population displacement, relative poverty following a period of relative prosperity, the polarization of rich and poor, turbulence with occasional outbursts of violence, even civil war (especially disturbing since Athens had been so free of civil strife, compared with many Greek states), the reorganization of the law code, changes of fashion, and changes in the economic structure. If these do not add up to a social crisis, it is hard to see what might.

  Athenian society was not in meltdown, but it was far from tranquil. Perhaps a useful parallel would be the tumult experienced by much of the ‘first world’ in the 1960s. The ‘hippie revolution’ was a genuine social crisis, and a number of important social ideas took root which have caused permanent changes in areas such as business practices, healthcare, religion, treatment of the environment, attitudes towards women and tolerance of ‘alternative’ lifestyle choices, to name only the most important. But North American or European society after the changes was still recognizably the same as it was before. Historians in the future will look back and find plenty of continuities, and some of them will doubt the relevance of the term ‘crisis’, as do some historians of classical Athens; but anyone who lived through those times had no doubt that it was precisely applicable. Apart from anything else, dozens of young people around the world were legally killed by the authorities for trying to bring about these changes, so it should come as no surprise that the Athenian crisis, one aspect of which was also inter-generational conflict, could also prove deadly – as it did for Socrates, charged with corrupting the young.

  Social crises do not occur unless there is a critical level of dissatisfaction with the way things are. Although there were rumblings as early as the 430s, when political divisions in Athens became sharper and gave aristocrats a focus for their discontent, 415 was the watershed year, when all the latent tensions were brought out into the open and helped to queer the Sicilian expedition, which more or less ended Athenian hopes for a successful outcome to the war. The effect of the stresses was only accelerated by the realization that, unless the gods or Alcibiades could produce a miracle, defeat was assured. Apart from any of the other critical factors, imagine yourself an Athenian living, day after day, year after year, with the knowledge that before long you would become subject to your deadliest enemy.

  But that was one of the few certainties of the time. What particularly characterizes the Athenian crisis is uncertainty, the inability to stay on track. Above all, the oligarchic coup of 411 is plain evidence of crisis. So are the ext
reme reactions that marred the wartime landscape: the massacres at Scione and Melos, the legitimizing in 410 of the death penalty for ‘enemies of democracy’, the witch-hunt of 415: even if there was a genuine threat to the constitution, panic was never going to be the best way to deal with it. These are clear signals from a society under stress.

  The notorious ‘fickleness’ for which the critics castigated democracy was also a symptom of panic – of first over-reacting and then having to find ways to compensate. Within a day or two in 433 BCE, the Athenians voted first not to interfere in Corcyran affairs and then to do so – a decision that played a major part, as they knew, in provoking the Peloponnesian War. In 430 they deposed and impeached Pericles, only to reinstate him the following year. Within twenty-four hours in 428, they changed their minds about how severely to punish Mytilene. In 415, they were wholeheartedly committed to the Sicilian expedition, but after it had failed, they took no responsibility themselves: ‘It was as if they themselves had never voted for the expedition: they were angry with the politicians who had recommended it, and with the oracle-experts, the seers and others whose divinations had encouraged them to expect to conquer Sicily.’ They banished and cursed Alcibiades in 415, recalled him in 408, and banished him again a few months later; they felt he was dangerous, but this arbitrary treatment betrays weakness and a crisis of confidence: they were not sure they could contain him. They insisted that they had the right to try the Arginusae generals in 406, but a few days later they changed their minds and punished some of those who had insisted on the mass trial.