Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  SOCRATIC POLITICAL THOUGHT

  The attempt to reconstruct Socrates’ political views brings us as sharply up against a source problem as did the attempt to reconstruct his views on religion. If there was anything in Socratic thought on these matters that could have had a negative construction put upon it by Socrates’ accusers or by their readers, would Xenophon and Plato not have found ways to obscure matters? But Xenophon and Plato believed that Socrates’ political views were broadly right, and while this coincidence may make it impossible to disentangle what they attribute to Socrates completely from their own beliefs and opinions, it does also mean that they reflect Socrates’ political views. If there were significant differences between the political views Plato ascribes to Socrates and those to be found in Xenophon’s works, we would have no way to say which of them, if either of them, was being true to his mentor; but in fact the views they ascribe to Socrates in this respect complement one another perfectly.

  Socrates approached political philosophy via the question ‘Who should rule?’ He took rulership to be a profession: the ruler should not be partisan, but just an expert ruler. And he argued that professional rulership meant improving the lot and especially the moral behaviour of the citizens:

  We found that all the other results which one might attribute to statesmanship – and there are many of these, of course: provision of a high standard of living for citizens, for example, and freedom, and concord – are neither good nor bad. We decided that, if as a result of statesmanship the citizen body was to be benefited and happy, it was crucial to make them wise and knowledgeable.

  Wisdom and knowledge were, for Socrates, either identical with moral goodness or its necessary conditions.

  Socrates’ political views start from a single, fundamental premise, shared by all his followers: ‘Socrates said that it was not those who held the sceptre who were kings and rulers, nor those who were elected by unauthorized persons, nor those who were appointed by lot, nor those who had gained their position by force or fraud, but those who knew how to rule.’ And he believed that leadership qualities were the same whatever the scale of the domain – a city, an army, a household. It may seem innocuous, even obvious, that only experts should undertake the difficult task of government, but Socrates drew conclusions from this premise that were radical in their time. The single sentence just quoted dismisses in turn the claims of monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny as legitimate constitutions, in favour of government by experts, however many there may be.

  The incompatibility between the Athenian democracy and government by Socratic experts is brilliantly imagined by Plato, in an extended ship-of-state metaphor:

  Imagine the following situation on a fleet of ships, or on a single ship. The owner has the edge over everyone else on board by virtue of his size and strength, but he’s rather deaf and shortsighted, and his knowledge of naval matters is just as limited. The sailors wrangle with one another because each of them thinks that he ought to be the captain, despite the fact that he’s never learnt how. They’re for ever crowding closely around the owner, pleading with him and stopping at nothing to get him to entrust the helm to them. They think highly of anyone who contributes towards their gaining power by showing skill at winning over or subduing the owner, and describe him as an accomplished seaman, a true captain, a naval expert; but they criticize anyone different as useless. They completely fail to understand that any genuine sea-captain has to study the yearly cycle, the seasons, the heavens, the stars and winds, and everything relevant to the job, if he’s to be properly equipped to hold a position of authority in a ship. In fact, they think it’s impossible to study and acquire expertise at how to steer a ship or be a good captain. When this is what happens on board ships, don’t you think that the crew of such ships would regard any true captain as nothing but a windbag with his head in the clouds, of no use to them at all?

  The idea of government by experts was also Pythagorean. Pretty much all we know about Pythagorean politics is that for about fifty years, from somewhat before 500 to around 450 BCE, a number of cities in southern Italy were administered by members of the school, and that this administration was far from democratic. And Socrates was close to a number of Pythagoreans. Plato’s Phaedo, his moving portrait of Socrates’ last day on earth, consists of a frame dialogue in which a Pythagorean associate of Socrates from the town of Phleious, near Argos, asks Phaedo for an account of the conversation which Socrates had in prison with, among others, two prominent Pythagoreans from Thebes.

  If someone was an expert and was recognized as such, people would willingly obey him, Socrates believed, because they would see that he had their best interests at heart and that there was no one more effective than him at doing them good. ‘This I know,’ he said, ‘that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether god or man, is bad and disgraceful’ – and the reason he felt certain of this was that it was just obvious: naturally, all of us would obey someone we recognized as an expert, just as we do what the doctor tells us. The Socratic citizen is not finally and completely virtuous (though his leaders ideally would be), but is receptive to words of wisdom framed in an appropriate form of rhetoric; and he is receptive in this way because he appreciates that his leaders have his welfare in mind. In this way, political concord – the elusive goal of all statesmen – would be assured.

  The obedience of the majority to their wise rulers is not coerced: Socrates does not envision a totalitarian state. Were there to be a Socratic leader, his first purpose would be the persuasion, by rational argument, of as many of the citizens in his care who had ears to hear, that the focus of their lives should be on improving their souls, and his second purpose would be the establishment of the correct legislative apparatus for achieving this goal. Even if Socrates never elaborated a detailed political programme, there is nothing in his political outlook that would limit the improvement of citizens to personal contact or improving rhetoric: the city could be equipped with sufficient legislative machinery, as long as the laws promoted an environment of justice within which individuals could flourish as moral beings.

  The only qualification on his call for true statesmen was his belief that perfect wisdom is unavailable for any human being, in any sphere of activity. Above all, we cannot see the future, and so we have to pray to the gods that the consequences of our actions turn out well. The unattainability of perfect knowledge does not undermine his search for expertise. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,’ as Robert Browning said: ideals are worth striving for, and Socrates always held out the possibility of the existence of true moral experts, who knew what justice was and therefore had a reliable standard by which to see to its instantiation in the world. And if Athens was to be where such experts arose, under Socrates’ guidance, then Athens was going to have to change to accommodate them.

  NEITHER DEMOCRAT NOR OLIGARCH

  Socratic leaders rise to the top simply by demonstrating their expertise to a receptive audience, or by being trained by already existing experts. There would be no point to the democratic lottery, and Socrates inveighed against it. He used to say that just as it would be nonsense to use a lottery to choose athletes to represent the city at the games, or to choose public doctors, or any other kind of expert, so it would be equally nonsensical to expect the lottery to produce competent politicians. But the lottery was fundamental to Athenian democratic egalitarianism; elections were used rarely, only when it was felt to be essential to favour those with specific abilities. A Socratic principle was that if something could be tackled by human intelligence, that was the instrument best used; only if something is completely incomprehensible, like the future, should one resort to the gods (by prayer or divination). But the use of the lottery in the Athenian democracy was equivalent to turning to the gods – to praying, so to speak, for the right leaders. Socrates countered this: if there are competent statesmen, use them.

  Socrates likened a good statesman to a herdsman, whose job it is to look after his flock.
The image has become a comfortable cliché, but that should not disguise the fact that it is fundamentally undemocratic: democratic officers did not have the unchecked power of a herdsman. Just as Socrates was explicitly opposed to the lottery, so, in the case of genuinely talented politicians, he was implicitly opposed to many of the democratic safeguards, such as annual elections and many-headed committees, which served to check the power of individuals.

  Socrates did not shrink from the corollary to his call for expertise in government: the contention, familiar from the critics of democracy, that democratic government puts power into the hands of the ignorant masses – that the ‘mass wisdom’ on which democratic procedure was predicated was an oxymoronic fiction. On the contrary, because of their ignorance the masses are easily misled by speakers who aim to flatter and persuade rather than to educate, as a true statesman would. In keeping with this, Socrates believed that deliberation with oneself or with just a few others was the best means for reaching the truth, not public, mass deliberation. Not that mass deliberation is by its very nature doomed to failure, but reaching the truth requires freedom from the pressure of time or partisan interests, both of which are more likely to play a part in public meetings than in a small group.

  But the masses, in the mass, are a source of corruption and are riddled with false values. One can acquire virtue only under the right conditions, and manual work is a major impediment. Such snobbery about work was typical of upper-class Greeks, but we should not be too quick to judge. Before the days of universal education, the condition of the poor was in many respects benighted, and the sentiment lingered long: even in the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume opined that ‘poverty and hard labour debase the minds of the common people’. Socrates, anyway, thought the cobbler should keep to his last – that butchers, bakers and oil-lamp makers were generally equipped only to recognize the value of a true leader, and otherwise should stick to their areas of expertise, leaving politics to dedicated political experts, on the bizarre principle, later taken up by Plato, that each person properly has one and only one job to do. This is why Plato admits that for Socrates the Spartan and Cretan constitutions were models of good government, because these societies were highly structured. If Plato went on to develop political views based on a stratification of society into workers and experts, he was hardly breaking away from his mentor.

  Plato also has Socrates criticize the most eminent democratic politicians of Athens’s past as useless: ‘Pericles made the Athenian people idle, work-shy, garrulous and mercenary … There’s never been a good statesman here in Athens … These men from Athens’s past made the city bloated and rotten.’ In short, democracy is a case of the morally bankrupt leading the intellectually incompetent. Plato has Socrates describe himself as the only true politician, because he was the only one who was concerned with the moral education of his fellow citizens, which should be the primary task of all statesmen.

  Despite his misgivings about democracy, Socrates still chose to spend his life in Athens. Does this not show that in fact he preferred the democracy to other constitutions? Socrates himself addressed this issue, but the reason he gave for staying in the city was not that he preferred its constitution, but that he was obliged to respect its laws: by the accident of having been born and having grown up in democratic Athens, he had, as someone who was committed to the rule of law, taken on this obligation. This forms part of his explanation of why he did not defy the court ruling and escape from prison as he could have. We may guess that another reason for his having stayed in Athens was that it gave him the freedom to pursue his life’s work. He stayed, not because he was satisfied with Athenian democracy as a political system, but because he was allowed (for a long time, anyway, before the special circumstances of his trial) to pursue his vision.

  It will not do to argue, as several influential commentators have, that, even if Socrates was no democrat, he still thought democracy better than the alternatives – that he did not really believe that moral/political experts would ever be found, and so did not really believe that there was a viable alternative, and limited himself to a little constructive criticism of democracy. His criticisms are too fundamental for that. And was his lifelong search for experts no more than a gesture, from someone who never expected to find them? Socrates believed that a small group of even somewhat imperfect political experts was preferable to democracy, with its reliance on the lottery and on the illusion of mass wisdom. Besides, the people of Athens clearly saw Socrates as an enemy of democracy; if Socrates was even tepid about democracy, we can legitimately wonder why, given that he stayed in Athens during the rule of the Thirty, those murderous creatures did not put him to death and the relatively benign democracy did.

  It is irrelevant that Socrates counted among his lifelong friends the ‘loyal democrat’ Chaerephon. Most of us are, and all of us should be, open-minded enough to have friends with different political views from our own. In any case, the way that Socrates introduces Chaerephon in Plato’s Apology points in entirely the opposite direction. Socrates says that not only was Chaerephon a loyal democrat, but that ‘he also shared your recent exile and restoration’. The reference is to the period when the Thirty were in charge of Athens – when democrats fled the city (or were put to death) and were restored only after the nasty little civil war. And Socrates admits his distance from these events: he does not say ‘our’ recent exile and restoration, but ‘your’ – as he must, because it was well known that he had stayed in Athens during the regime of the Thirty.

  Is this not sufficient evidence on its own to prove that Socrates was some kind of oligarch? Far from it, because pretty much the same reasons that make Socrates no democrat make him no oligarch either. Oligarchy is the rule of the few – a greater or lesser number in different states, but always defined as those with certain property and/or birth qualifications. But – logically, at least – Socratic rulers are not necessarily wealthy or high-born; they are simply those with the requisite knowledge. Socrates inclined more towards oligarchy, because philosopher-kings (we might as well use the Platonic term, since, as thoughtful scholars recognize, in Republic Plato describes a political system with which Socrates would have felt comfortable) were bound to be few, and because the rich were the only ones with the leisure to acquire the kind of expertise he demanded of his rulers; but Socrates could not have approved of any existing oligarchy, which would strike him as government by the ignorant just as much as democracy. It was not a wealth or birth elite he was interested in, but an educated elite; he wanted a literal ‘aristocracy’ – ‘rule by the best people’, who were equipped to rule not by breeding, nor by money, nor by eloquence, but by their ability to know the good and how to make it happen. Socrates was not interested in this or that constitution, only in seeing that Athens, or some version of it, was the right kind of moral environment. Perhaps his failure to come up with detailed political provisions was due to his hope that a reformed Athens would have considerably less need of legal and judicial apparatus.

  SOCRATES’ MISSION

  What of the inescapable fact of Socrates’ remaining in Athens during the regime of the Thirty? The Thirty made Athens an exclusive zone: ‘All those who were not on the list [of the Three Thousand] were forbidden to enter the city.’ This presumably means to enter the city for political purposes, since it is hard to see how the regulation would have been enforceable at the city gates, and of course shopkeepers and everyone else needed to enter to do business. So in what sense did Socrates remain in the city? Did he live there? His ancestral deme, Alopece, lay not far south of the city walls, but that proves nothing: very many people lived away from their ancestral demes. It is hard to picture Socrates outside of the centre of Athens, where he could continue to accost people and talk to them and his circle of admirers, even during the regime of the Thirty. Otherwise, Xenophon’s claim that their ban on teaching the ‘art of words’ was aimed specifically at Socrates makes no sense at all. It may be an implausi
ble claim in itself – the ban looks like a prohibition of rhetorical training rather than of Socratic teaching methods – but it still makes no sense for Xenophon even to suggest it unless Socrates remained active in Athens during the time of the junta. Socrates undoubtedly stayed in Athens in the only important sense; it does not matter where he slept at night, but he continued to go about his work there.

  Socrates’ remaining in Athens demands attention, especially since it is ignored by more philosophically inclined commentators, following the lead of Plato and Xenophon. What was Socrates’ relationship with the Thirty? Xenophon did his best to defend Socrates by making out that they tried to curb him by legislation, and went on to retail a conversation in which Socrates disputed the matter with both Critias and Charicles, and widened the rift between him and them. Plato communicated the same message by telling how the Thirty tried to involve Socrates in their schemes by getting him, along with four others, to arrest a wealthy and distinguished Athenian citizen called Leon of Salamis (a known democrat), so that they could kill him and confiscate his assets; Socrates flatly refused and just went back home instead, leaving the others to get on with the nasty job.

  If these are attempts to whitewash Socrates, they are scarcely convincing. The conversation with Critias and Charicles looks fictional, and the story about the arrest ends with a significant whimper, not a bang: if Socrates saw Leon’s arrest as illegal or immoral, why did he not protest? He did nothing more than return home – hardly a courageous moral stand. Both Plato and Xenophon skate over the significance of the fact that Socrates chose to remain in Athens. Whether or not he was one of the select Three Thousand deemed worthy of citizenship in the New Model Athens (and he may well have been), he still chose to stay. His affiliations reached right to the very top, with Critias and Charmides and Aristotle of Thorae his pupils and friends, with his half-brother Patrocles and other students on the margins of the Thirty, and with views that the oligarchs could well have taken to be compatible with their own.