Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Ironically, recent Athenian history had itself provided the impulse to dispute the preferability of co-operation over competition. Athens had spent fifty years (roughly 480–430 BCE) building up a mighty economic empire. Naturally, this had entailed both diplomatic and military aggression in the pursuit of self-interest, and the city had benefited enormously. Athens made itself wealthy beyond the previous imaginings of the ancient Greek world (and so left us its legacy of faded glory in the ruined buildings on the Acropolis and elsewhere), and resisted all attempts from both inside and outside to instil moderation. Individual citizens, from the poorest to the richest, found themselves better off too. There was enough money for the democracy to pay the poor for various forms of service to the state, traders and bankers flourished, and the rich grew richer by buying land abroad or by financing commercial ventures at home or overseas. It seemed, then, as though in foreign policy competitive values did everyone good, while co-operation did no more than maintain the lesser status that had obtained in the past.

  The question which served as a focus for enquiry into these matters was, simply, ‘What is virtue?’, meaning ‘What does it take to be an outstanding human being?’ The question was particularly poignant for Athenian aristocrats. It had previously been assumed, especially by them, that it was an easy question to answer: they were the best, and this was proved by the fact that the gods had granted them wealth and all the other blessings. Virtue was an innate and hereditary aristocratic gift, which brought with it certain necessary consequences, such as the ability to master other people, to rule. But what became of the old aristocratic virtues when egalitarianism was rampant, competition was suspected as often as it was admired, and the people not only had the power to make or break a man who partook in public life, but had effectively set themselves up as judges of what was and was not virtuous behaviour? How could one achieve the success of a Cimon, Themistocles or Pericles? The new politicians who achieved prominence from the 420s, in the wake of Pericles’ death, were often not even from the old aristocratic class, and yet they took it upon themselves to rule. Was rulership not an innate quality, then? Was it something teachable, as Protagoras and others claimed, something anyone of any class or background could acquire?

  The social crisis made these burning issues. The fabric of Athenian society was beginning to come apart at its most vulnerable seam, that of the tension between the elite and the ordinary citizens. Liturgy-avoidance is a test case. The liturgy system seemed perfect, a way to channel the competitiveness of the super-rich into service for the state. The rich were required to fund, at their own expense, either a festival liturgy (such as the training and financing of a chorus for a dramatic or choral festival, or the training of young horsemen for a torch-race) or a military liturgy (above all, maintaining a trireme for a year, before it was someone else’s turn). The liturgist had to spend a certain minimum, of course, to get the job done (somewhere between one thousand and four thousand drachmas – roughly £100,000 to £400,000 – depending on the liturgy), but he had discretion in how much more to spend, in order to outdo his rivals and win further goodwill from the people. It seemed, as I say, to be perfect: the state needed liturgists, and liturgists had a safe environment for their competitiveness.

  In practice, towards the end of the fifth century, at least some of the wealthy came to resent their liturgies. After the Sicilian expedition and the revolt of its tribute-paying allies in the subsequent years, the city was extremely hard pressed financially, and the rich were being squeezed for more taxes just as their income was plummeting. At the same time, the fully fledged democratic system made it possible for politicians to win the people’s favour by dispensing state funds to them, rather than by spending their own money: liturgy was no longer the main way to gain the required popularity and prominence for oneself and one’s descendants; liturgists were no longer getting the return they wanted on their expenditure, and they felt exploited. In a paperless society such as classical Athens, it was easy to conceal one’s wealth; there was no land registry, and it was easy to hide cash and other assets. The rich were allowed to assess the value of their own assets and submit the estimate to the Assembly; some of them began to lie.

  Athenian democracy had institutionalized a number of ways to curb the competitiveness of the elite and exploit it for democratically acceptable purposes, while formerly aristocrats had largely been content to scale back their competitiveness for the good of the community and for the sake of concord. But now the elite were beginning to break free of these bonds and to return to their Homeric roots. That is why in the 430s Athenian politics became polarized between democrats and oligarchs: for the first time, the elite were dissatisfied with democratic values and needed slogans with which to identify their own interests. The conflict between competitive and co-operative values became highly charged and emotive – and so Alcibiades, in his desire to be a Homeric hero, was tarred with the brush of tyranny, since he clearly had little respect for the boundaries of collectivism or democracy.

  The moral and social crisis in Athens was triggered by, among other things, the questioning of inherited values. Socrates, the great questioner, was of course instrumental in this. His image of himself as a horsefly, sent by the god to stir the somnolent city into wakefulness, is very precise. A horsefly swoops in, settles somewhere, bites and flies off again. Everywhere he settled – every individual he interrogated – is taken to represent the inherited conglomerate (the horse), not to be an individual whose irritation begins and ends with the individual himself. But Socrates was in a sense a conservative, in that he reacted against the fact that customs had been questioned without being replaced by anything constructive. He tried to teach his followers to question in a productive manner, in a way that would reveal underlying assumptions and help others to make moral progress. He felt he had something to offer Athens, even if at his trial the Athenians terminally rejected his vision of what makes a good citizen and what makes a good state.

  CRITICS OF DEMOCRACY

  There were those, especially among the ‘young’, who thought they had the cure for society’s ills: get rid of democracy. There had been oligarchic stirrings earlier in the century, though we know little about them, and certainly not enough to estimate the level of their threat to the democracy. In any case, there was nothing as concerted or as articulated as in the last third of the fifth century. The polarization of oligarchy and democracy, and so the development of theoretical notions about them both, began when the realpolitik tension between Sparta and Athens became bound up with political issues, such that each state came to represent one of these two constitutions. This was the time when aristocratic instinct – the innate certainty that they were the natural rulers of Athens – hardened into something more political. The fundamental oligarchic argument was that they should have politi cal power commensurate with their resources and their contributions to the state, but many understood this to mean exclusive power.

  The attempt by Thucydides Melesiou (not to be confused with the historian, Thucydides Olorou) to unite his fellow aristocrats in opposition to Pericles, under this kind of elitist banner, ended in defeat and Thucydides’ ostracism in 443. The next major phase of the clash came in the 420s with Cleon’s rhetorical and fiscal attacks on the knights, which exacerbated the aristocrats’ desire to protect their wealth against the erosive effects of the war. At the same time, they were united by a common enemy: the new breed of nouveaux riches populist politicians, stereotyped by the historian Thucydides’ biased portrait of Cleon. At least Pericles had been ‘one of us’, an old aristocrat.

  By the end of the 420s, the critics of democracy had begun to articulate their vague resentments into something resembling a political programme. It was not enough for them just to insist that democracy flew in the face of nature by promoting equality: Athenian democracy to a certain extent recognized inequalities, and found ways to channel the ambitions of the elite towards democratic ends. Nor was it enough for them to rely o
n slogans such as eunomia (the ‘lawfulness’ of a well-structured society) in response to democratic isonomia (‘equality before the law’), or to insist on the naturalness of hierarchy (‘proportionate equality’) as opposed to the artificiality of absolute equality. A more sophisticated and elaborate response was needed.

  The roll-call of contemporary critics of Athenian democracy, during its flourishing in the fifth and fourth centuries, is impressive. It includes not just men of action, such as Alcibiades and Critias, but just about all the intellectuals who come to mind: the playwrights, both comic and tragic (though their personal positions are more or less impossible to assess, since it is only their characters who voice opinions), the orators (occasionally, and usually just for tendentious purposes), the historian Thucydides, philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates and Aristotle, and pamphleteers such as the anonymous author of The Constitution of the Athenians who is familiarly known as the ‘Old Oligarch’. They had a limited number of points to make, and they made them more or less forcefully (Aristotle, for instance, was more concerned to imagine an ideal constitution than to criticize deviations from it), but the points they were making were essentially those that were repeated over the centuries and left Athenian democracy with a poor reputation up until the nineteenth century. There have always been many who agreed with Alcibiades that Athenian democracy was ‘unequivocal folly’.

  First, some argued that the masses were innately stupid and over-emotional, and remained so thanks to lack of education; moreover, since economic circumstances largely determined human behaviour, the fact that the masses worked made them less moral than the rich; therefore, democracy was the perverted rule of the morally inferior over the morally superior. Democracy was by definition the rule of the working class, whose members had neither the money nor the leisure nor the education to do the kind of long-term and objective thinking that government required. The idea that mass decision-making could be superior to individual wisdom was a joke. This is still a live issue in political philosophy: a recent book takes as its starting point the fact that ‘Democracy is not naturally plausible. Why turn such important matters over to masses of people who have no expertise?’ In ancient Athens, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the elite felt that they did have such expertise, handed down from generation to generation ever since the good old days of aristocracy. For many Athenian aristocrats, oligarchy was not so much a political philosophy as a gut reaction.

  Second, they felt that democracy was a kind of tyranny of the weak over the strong, a violation of the natural hierarchy, too egalitarian and open. Democracy made laws in its own interest (but even the critics acknowledged, wryly, that all political systems are self-serving) and gulled the credulous by calling this ‘justice’. Democracy tended to confuse freedom with lack of restraint, lawlessness and anarchy, or at least promoted the sovereignty of the people rather than of the law, with attendant dangers. As a kind of tyrant, democracy favoured flatterers and yes-men, and exploited the wealth of others for its own purposes; it governed by whim, and the masses were therefore fickle and easily led by demagogues and self-interested speakers, especially into over-confidence or vindictiveness.

  Third, democracy’s preference for committees over individuals, and for the annual change of administrative positions, made it inefficient. It stifled initiative, favoured the average and failed to make use of experts in government. Democracy had too much power for its own good: elite fear of chastisement by the democracy made them less inclined to put their abilities in the service of the state. And in particular, democracy was hopeless at foreign policy: witness the follies and the final catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War. The masses were more likely than the elite to be belligerent, because the elite were linked by xenia to their peers abroad, had a better understanding of foreign affairs, and naturally wanted to protect their foreign estates.

  Fourth, the people mishandled public money. This mismanagement manifested above all in paying the poor for public service in the courts and Assembly and for military service, and in an ambitious programme of enhancing the city with monumental buildings. As if these measures were not enough, the democracy had also taken the state into a cripplingly expensive war. The rich felt that they were forced to support these costly schemes, even though they disapproved of them politically.

  Despite being somewhat of a ragbag, united only by distaste for the common enemy, these are powerful criticisms. It is obvious why Critias and the Thirty felt that what they were doing was a moral mission. All the same, the critics failed to acknowledge that one of the great advantages of living in the Athenian democracy was precisely that they could voice such criticisms with impunity. The very stability of the democracy was what gave it the self-confidence to foster relative freedom of thought and even criticism. Perhaps for this reason the critics were not generally revolutionaries, calling for the violent and immediate overthrow of democracy: they were intellectuals, constructing hypo thetical alternatives, or even just hoping to temper democracy; at the most, we get the occasional hint of a policy of non-cooperation with the democracy.

  Curiously, it would be hard to draw up a similar list of counterarguments by democracy’s supporters. Only a few isolated passages develop in a piecemeal fashion anything like a theory of democratic virtues, while others (such as Pericles’ famous Funeral Speech in Thucydides) are too complacent to contribute much ammunition to any debate (it is eulogy of Athens, not political theory). Democracy was more performance than theory, and was constantly evolving. Nevertheless, various ideas and arguments crop up here and there: the egalitarianism of democracy, and the idea that the possession of common goals reduces discontent and increases concord, without any need for a hierarchy; the belief that almost every citizen has the mental capacities necessary for socialization and contribution to debate, so that there is such a thing as collective wisdom. Those in favour of democracy denied the equation of pluralism with anarchy, and claimed that accountability was self-evidently a good discipline for a commu nity’s officers to work under.

  The debate was won by the democrats, not because they had the best arguments, but because their opponents had the worst track record. The scandals of 415, Alcibiades’ arrogance and, above all, the brutality of the Thirty Tyrants were plain facts that needed no theoretician: if this was what oligarchy was like, democracy was clearly preferable. Oligarchs never fully recovered the moral high ground. Active dissent fizzled out in the fourth century and took with it much of the social crisis. After the rule of the Thirty, it was left to philosophers to formulate criticisms; the men of action had been silenced and democracy had been restored. There was only one loose end: Socrates.

  TEN

  Reactions to Intellectuals

  Crises bring out the worst in people, not least because they look for someone to blame. In the closing third of the fifth century BCE, many Athenians picked on intellectuals. They were perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the educators of the ‘young’, and what they taught them was subversive and dangerous nonsense – subversive because it undermined traditional views, and dangerous because in the days of the dominance of traditional views Athens had prospered, but now the gods had withdrawn their favour from the city and it was losing a disastrous war.

  There are surprises here for those brought up with a rosy view of classical Athenian society. It is strange to think that those who were laying the foundations of the entire western intellectual tradition were not necessarily welcome in their time. Was democratic Athens not one of the most open and tolerant societies ever? What about Pericles’ boast?

  Where our public lives are concerned, we live in the state like free men, and the same goes for the lack of suspicion with which we deal with one another in our daily pursuits. We do not react with anger if one of our neighbours indulges himself, nor do we put on the kind of ill-humoured expression which, for all its actual harmlessness, is bound to cause offence. Although we deal comfortably with one another in our private live
s, in our public lives a deep respect stops us from doing wrong, because we obey the authorities and the laws.

  For all that this generous view of Athenian tolerance was perpetuated uncritically by generations of scholars even well into the twentieth century, it can be maintained only at some distance from the facts. And though it is true that Pericles’ speech is the greatest statement of Athenian perfection, it is also true that it was a Funeral Speech, designed to reconcile grieving families and concerned citizens to the losses they had already sustained in the war with Sparta, and to encourage them to face further losses with relative equanimity. Besides, Thucydides made no claim to absolute accuracy in the speeches he reports, and may have had his own agenda: creating a picture of Athenian perfection would, for instance, contrast nicely with the amorality of certain Athenian actions later in the war.

  EDUCATION

  Education in classical Athens was limited: there were few teachers and not many students, and they were not required to do very much. Up until the age of six or seven, all children were raised at home by their mothers and slaves – especially, if the household had one, by a slave called a paidagōgos (literally a pedagogue, a ‘child-leader’), whose job it was to mind the young master’s manners and moral education at home, and to look after him when he was out of the home. During this period the child’s education consisted largely of stories – exactly the same myths and legends with which we are still familiar today. Most children remained at home for longer, either because their parents could not afford or did not care to send them to school, or because their parents preferred to bring in a private tutor, or because they were girls, who scarcely needed educating. ‘Suppose’, imagines Xenophon’s Socrates at one point, ‘we want to entrust someone, after our deaths, with the education of our sons or with the guardianship of our unmarried daughters?’ Sons might be educated, but daughters were to be protected until they were passed into someone else’s care. Nevertheless, some girls were taught to read and write, and those boys who were destined for no more than their father’s trade learnt the rudiments of arithmetic at home.