Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Another striking feature of Athenian politics is its amorality. The Mytilenean debate was couched only in terms of expediency, and in the Melian dialogue the Athenians simply ruled out considerations of justice. The extension of this philosophy was the atrocious massacre at Scione. These two features of Athenian wartime politics – amorality and fickleness – are related: if all you are concerned about is your immediate good, you can easily be persuaded by a plausible appeal to that criterion to do things that under other circumstances would make you pause. This is one reason why Socrates emphasized that true morality has to be based on knowledge, because knowledge cannot be swayed, and it is also why he argued that, appearances notwithstanding, it is moral behaviour that is good for the agent.

  MAJOR SOCIAL STRESSES

  Two of the most dramatic and large-scale events that struck Athens were identified as stress factors by the historian Thucydides. In memorable passages, he described the effects of the plague on Athens in particular, and of warfare on societies in general. The first passage occurs as part of the historian’s vivid description of both the medical and moral effects of the plague. Typhoid fever struck Athens in the summer of 430, at a time of sweltering heat, when the city was packed with those who had sought safety behind the city walls from the Peloponnesian invasions of the countryside. It lasted, intermittently, for the best part of four years (with a slighter recurrence in 410) and killed three hundred of the rich, 4,400 men of hoplite status, and countless others – peasants, women, children, slaves, foreigners – who rarely show up in ancient historians’ statistics. It killed at least a quarter of Athens’s population. It can hardly occasion surprise that its effects on the minds of a generation of Athenians were so powerful:

  People had fewer inhibitions about self-indulgent behaviour they had previously repressed, because they saw how rapidly fortunes could change – how those who were well off suddenly died and how those who had formerly been destitute promptly inherited their property. The upshot was that they sought a life of swift and pleasurable gain, because they regarded their lives and their property as equally impermanent. No one had the slightest desire to endure discomfort for the sake of what men held to be honourable, because they doubted whether they would live long enough to earn a reputation for honour. In fact, what was held to be honourable and beneficial was whatever contributed to the pleasure of the moment, regardless of its source. Fear of the gods and human laws were equally ineffective as deterrents: the sight of the religious and the irreligious dying equally made people conclude that piety made no difference, and no one expected to live long enough to be taken to court and punished for his crimes.

  There is a degree of exaggeration in this account – not everyone in Athens succumbed to lawlessness, and at a state level religious practices continued more or less unabated – but only to a degree. Things would not have got so out of hand if the moral order had not already been destabilized. Nor need the nihilism of people’s reactions surprise us: in 1755 a major earthquake struck Portugal and Morocco, and the shocks, fires and tsunamis killed up to a hundred thousand people. The facts that most of the deaths were in Portugal, a devoutly Christian country, and that the earthquake struck on the day of a major Catholic festival led to widespread doubt in the existence of a benevolent deity and left an enduring legacy in the form of a weakening of Christian faith in Europe.

  I hardly need to argue that war, and especially such a drawn-out war, stresses a society, and in the second passage Thucydides reflects on the effects of warfare, and especially civil war, on people’s moral behaviour:

  In times of peace and prosperity, states and individuals hold to better principles, because they are not forced by emergencies to act against their wills. But war is a harsh teacher: it denies easy access to daily necessities and makes most people adjust their temperaments to their circumstances … People claimed the right to change the usual meanings of words to fit in with the way they were behaving. So, for instance, irrational recklessness was described as loyal courage, while looking before you leap was seen as fair-seeming attempt to disguise one’s cowardice; self-restraint was said to be a screen for the faint-hearted, and using intelligence to consider every aspect of a situation was said to make one incapable of any action at all. Impulsiveness was added to the qualities of true manliness, and taking thought for possible dangers was called a specious excuse for keeping out of danger. Ranting and raving was the mark of a man you could trust, and to contradict him was to make yourself an object of suspicion. Intelligence was shown by successful intriguing, and even greater intelligence by sniffing out intrigues.

  And he goes on to suggest how, in times of civil strife, family bonds are weakened, the most solemn oaths are pledged only because there is no other weapon to hand to wield against one’s opponents, and illegal manipulation of assemblies is rife. It is a picture of utter amorality and of distortion of traditional values – and disturbingly reminds us of how Alcibiades too was prepared to redefine terms, so that patriotism became a quality one owed only to a state that already conformed to one’s own political views. As Thucydides said, war is a harsh teacher. In one of his most devastatingly powerful plays, Trojan Women, produced in 415, Euripides showed how war forces people to betray their better selves and adopt double standards.

  Apart from the long-drawn-out war and the plague, another major stress factor, not remarked by Thucydides, was economic. As a result initially of the sheer size of the population in the late 430s (over 335,000, on the latest estimate) relative to the amount of available land, and then of the dislocation of much of the peasant population from the countryside to the city during the war, the volume of foreign trade increased enormously and began to force the city’s economy towards something recognizable as a market economy. As is common in pre-market societies, business relationships had been embedded in the structure of society; now they began to become disembedded, and the price or value of goods came to be dictated by market forces rather than by social factors such as reciprocity, ritualized barter and neighbourliness. Production began to change from being production for use (with the householding ideal of self-sufficiency) to production for gain. Commerce, rather than agriculture, was beginning to be the basis of economic life. These are major changes in a society: life would never be the same again.

  THE GENERATION GAP

  There was something Peter Pan-like about Alcibiades. The stories present him as an eternal youth, always challenging father-figures or authority in general, and rarely taking thought for the future. Many, in fact, saw the entire generation as in some sense immature and described the wealthy aristocrats of whom Alcibiades was the acknowledged champion as the ‘young’. The inverted commas are there because the issue was ideological as much as it was factual; the actual ages of the people involved mattered less than the fact that traditional authority was being undermined. Every generation separates itself from the previous one, but in the 420s this process was exaggerated for the first time by wealth, better education and other social stresses. Comic and tragic plays of the period portray Alcibiades-like characters involved in situations which reflect both Athenian admiration for the energy of youth and their fear of it.

  Aristophanes’ Acharnians (produced in 425) includes a lament that the older generation, the Marathon-fighters, are having rings run around them in court by smart young whippersnappers; Clouds (423, in its original version) has a young man use what he has learnt from Socrates to justify beating up his father; Wasps (422) also pits son against father (the natural way for a playwright to portray inter-generational conflict) in a debate that is explicitly designed to show how ridiculous the older generation seems to the young man. Throughout, the old men are shown as the holders of the straightforward values of past times, while the young follow all the modern fashions in dress and language and argument. Inter-generational conflict was a live issue in Athens in the last quarter of the fifth century, and especially from about 425 to 415. The youth culture not only accelerated certain cultu
ral changes, but it also contributed to the social crisis.

  In 423, in his play Suppliant Women, Euripides wrote:

  You were led astray by young men who enjoy being in the public eye and multiply wars with no regard for justice or for the citizens’ deaths they cause. They do this for a number of reasons, one because he wants to lead an army, another in order to acquire power and abuse it, another for financial gain, without any concern whether the general populace is harmed by his treatment of them.

  Eight years later, Nicias echoed these very words as he accused the Athenian people of being misled by ‘the young’ (especially Alcibiades) into wanting to invade Sicily. The common perception of the young was that they were warmongers. The ostracism of 416 was a critical moment, and Plutarch astutely remarks: ‘Basically, the contest was between the younger generation, who wanted war, and the older generation, who wanted peace, with one side wielding the ostrakon against Nicias and the other against Alcibiades.’ ‘Young’ was another way of saying ‘adventurous’, and after the Sicilian expedition ‘rash’.

  The young wanted political power too soon, it was thought, before they had the wisdom to wield it well; they frequented Socrates and other teachers, who showed them how to manipulate mass meetings, made them sceptical of religion, and taught them to disrespect their elders. When people are poor, scratching a living from the soil, as ninety per cent of fifth-century Athenians were, family values are paramount. Son succeeds father without question, and the family sticks together at all costs, younger looking after older in a rhythm as natural as the seasons. In archaic Athens even the rich lacked cushioning from the vagaries of fortune, and these values became deeply embedded at all levels of society. But imperial Athens was far better off, and wealth erodes the family. Sons who feel themselves sophisticated and educated may despise their fathers and their fathers’ ways. It was a youth revolution of the kind witnessed in 1920s New York, or 1960s San Francisco. Aristophanes hilariously portrayed the conflict in the debate and the banter between ‘Mr Right’ and ‘Mr Wrong’ in Clouds; the dynamic, sophistic Mr Wrong defeats the old fogey Mr Right.

  The young even had their own music and fashions. They wore their hair loose (as opposed to in a bun), a thing of the past in Athens, but of the present in Sparta. Spartan shoes were all the rage, and the aristocratic fashion for pederasty was also taken to be an imitation of Sparta. Alcibiades invented a type of footwear, led the way in the youthful preference for playing the lyre rather than the pipes, and started a craze for adorning the walls of one’s home with colourful scenes from mythology. As for music, a number of poets catered to the tastes of the young for variety and excitement, for something to set them apart from their elders. Conservatives disapproved of the New Music for its promotion of ‘sexual licence, barbarian emotionality, and vulgar excess’, but the young loved it for precisely these reasons.

  Alcibiades was, naturally, in the forefront of its promotion. It was not just that he was close friends with and possibly the lover of Agathon, one of the poets chiefly responsible for the new style of music, but also that when he made his triumphant, purple-splashed return to Athens in 408, he was piped into Piraeus by one of the foremost practitioners of it, on board his ship. In fact, there was no true musical revolution, and the New Music was a product of changes that had been developing for about a century, but it was perceived as subversive, just as rock-and-roll in the 1950s, though a product of older musical forms, was seen in certain quarters as the music of communism or the devil (or both). Athenian critics even wrote sophisticated attacks, assuming the ethical effects of music (the theory of which had been established a little earlier by Damon of Oa) and arguing that this new-fangled rubbish would corrupt the souls of the people. In the same way, a lot of the fear of popular music in the 1950s and 1960s was simultaneously moral and generational – the fear that children were liable to imitate the ‘degenerate’ icons of rock-and-roll rather than their parents.

  So the Athenian young had different fashions and a different code of ethics (which seemed to the older generation to be no morality at all), and were in favour of war. Along with their imitation of aspects of Spartan culture, they were often suspected of oligarchic tendencies, of ‘disdaining equality with the common people’. Despite the fact that many of the herm-mutilators were over thirty years old, it was apparently still plausible to think of it as a youthful prank. Both it and the profanation of the Mysteries were associated with the clubs, well-known venues for young, oligarchically inclined aristocrats.

  But admiration or at least tolerance of youthful excess came to an end with the sobering Sicilian catastrophe; the impious scandals of 415 and the failure of the expedition discredited the policies and the lifestyle of the young set. Their heyday had lasted only a decade, but thereafter fathers were busy reclaiming social prominence from their sons and education from the so-called ‘sophists’. The young had been allowed to take over for about a decade because the older men had been stupefied by the new rhetoric, disillusioned by Pericles’ defensive strategy in the war and overwhelmed by the changes that threatened the old moral code. But now the call from all sides was for a restoration of ‘the constitution of our fathers’.

  THE INHERITED CONGLOMERATE UNDER STRESS

  In the opening pages of his magisterial, wonderful Republic, the philosopher Plato held a mirror up to Athenian society in the throes of a moral crisis. The setting of this phase of Republic would make his readers think of some time in the 420s BCE. Cephalus of Syracuse (the father of the speech-writer, industrialist and democrat Lysias) explains the traditional view of justice, and when Socrates begins to probe, he walks away: to many people, it was simply unthinkable that the inherited conglomerate, the family-based perpetuation of the moral and religious code, should be questioned. There will always be those who think that, in the sphere of public morality, it is simple common sense just to say, ‘It has worked for many years. Why rock the boat?’

  The baton passes, in Plato’s dialogue, to one of Cephalus’s sons, and Socrates questions him with the intention of finding a firmer foundation for moral behaviour; ever the perfectionist, he does not accept that a moral code can work as long as it covers only the majority of cases, or that our focus, day by day, is on dealing with the complexity of particular cases as best we can, not with abstract principles or absolute ideals. He wants to find a loophole-free moral position. Then the orator Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, representative of the new education (Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias and Alcibiades in Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates adopt similar positions), bursts in and sneers at all conceptions of justice: properly understood, justice is no more than the interest of the ruling party. In a democracy, the weak use justice to restrain the strong, and so, when faced with a choice between acting justly and acting to improve one’s personal position, only a fool and a weakling would choose the former.

  The inherited conglomerate naturally held that justice and all the virtues were good things – good for the community, and therefore good for the individual, since he was contributing towards the glue that bound the community together and kept him and all his fellow citizens safe and sound. If the community prospered, every individual citizen prospered. It was good, then, to pay your friends, enemies and deities what you owed them; it was good to display courage in fighting alongside your fellow citizens for your city; it was good to exercise self-restraint; it was good to be pious towards your human and divine superiors; it was good to channel your intelligence towards society’s benefit as well as your own. But these generalizations overlook how hard it is to justify the idea that virtues are supposed to benefit their possessors, when they often cost the agent personal inconvenience or, in extreme cases, pain and distress. The immediacy of personal suffering, or even its prospect, tends to override abstract issues. In Republic, one of Socrates’ interlocutors develops a thought-experiment involving the possession of a magical ring of invisibility, and concludes:

  There is no one who is iron-willed enough to m
aintain his morality and find the strength to keep his hands off what doesn’t belong to him, when he is able to take whatever he wants from shops without fear of being discovered, to enter houses and sleep with whomever he chooses, to kill and release from prison anyone he wants, and generally to act like a god among men.

  On this analysis, every human being is driven by the desire for self-gratification to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

  All societies have to find a balance between co-operative and competitive values. They cannot afford to suppress the energy of individuality completely, but neither can they afford to let it destabilize the status quo. But, as the life of Alcibiades illustrates, in Athens in the last quarter of the fifth century, elite resentment of democracy had reached the point where some aristocrats insisted on the right to develop their own talents and follow their own predilections, even at the risk of offending their fellow citizens or transgressing the inherited moral code. Painters and sculptors began to portray their subjects with greater individuality; playwrights showed some of the difficulties with rampant individualism; in the middle of the 420s, after seventy-five years of restraint, tombs and their offerings abruptly began once again to be lavish, indicating a swing away from group-orientation to individuality and aristocratic competitiveness. Aristocrats resented the fact that the state had usurped many of their traditional paths to glory. There were a few arenas where they could gain prestige – politics, the courts, athletics – but even here the shine was taken off their glory by the fact that they were rewarded by democratic consensus. It seemed to them as though being a good citizen and being a true man were incompatible.