Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  Pretty much everyone of any importance in Athens took sides, and those who could not tolerate the Thirty left Athens for elsewhere, even if not actively to participate in rebellion. It was a time of wretched chaos, with people moving into and out of Athens with as many possessions as they could carry. The refugees leaving the city had either been dispossessed of their property or were fleeing for their own and their family’s safety. Those who stayed chose to stay, in the sense that any of them could have joined the exodus and found temporary accommodation elsewhere; it cannot be argued, then, that mere residence was neutral. Socrates would have been welcome in oligarchic Thebes, where he had close associates among the Pythagoreans who flourished there, and which had already taken in other exiles, including Thrasybulus.

  All those who remained after the eviction were regarded as sympathizers; this is proved by the fact that, after the restoration of the democracy, they were all offered the opportunity to leave Athens and take up residence in the oligarchic enclave of Eleusis, where most of the Thirty had already fled. Lysias wrote his Defence against the Charge of Subverting the Democracy for a man who had, like Socrates, remained in Athens during the regime of the Thirty; a lot of it consists of a fairly desperate attempt to argue that residence in Athens at the time was not a sign of allegiance to the Thirty. Socrates must at the very least have known that his remaining in Athens, with his friends and associates in power, would look like approval, and that since he was a figurehead his actions would be noticed and assessed; and until the Leon episode, which Plato implies occurred towards the end of the regime (because the Thirty had no time to put him to death), he had done nothing to distance himself from them. So it was either approval, or stupidity, or inappropriate indifference.

  Things were only made worse by the intentions of the Thirty to turn Athens into a Spartan-style society and by Critias’s published eulogies of Sparta. Socrates and his followers had long been known or at least widely reputed to be attracted to Sparta. Not that they wanted to decamp and live there, but they liked the sound of a more structured society, if not also its oligarchic regime. How could Socrates not have seemed a sympathizer? It did not take great intelligence or sensitivity to see what kind of people the Thirty were; it did not take Thrasybulus and hundreds of others long to see what was going on, and we should not rate Socrates’ intelligence or sensitivity as less acute than theirs. Socrates must have been attracted to the Thirty at least to the extent that he was prepared to give them time, to see if their intentions for Athens coincided with his own.

  We do not have to look far to see what the attraction was: Critias was promising the moral reform of Athens; he wanted to purge the dross and leave only the gold of a few good men and true, who would manage a now-virtuous city. This crusade is so close to Socrates’ political ideal that some must have wondered whether Socrates was actually Critias’s adviser. No doubt Socrates soon became disillusioned when it became clear that Critias’s means of implementing his fine-sounding policy included mass executions and expulsions, and no doubt that is why he refused to help them when they asked him to arrest Leon (who was indeed killed without trial), but by then it was too late: he had already become tainted by association with the Thirty. Even great philosophers can be naïve.

  Socrates was caught by his desire to see the moral regeneration of Athens. In Apology Plato has him undertaking this task single-handedly, while throughout Recollections of Socrates Xenophon has him trying to educate others to become moral leaders of the city:

  On another occasion, Antiphon asked him how it was that he expected to make others good at politics when he himself did not take part in politics … Socrates retorted: ‘Which would be the more effective way for me to take part in politics – by doing so alone, or by making it my business to see that as many people as possible are capable of taking part in it?’

  He advised people first to set their own houses in order; only when they could control themselves (the foundation of all morality) could they hope to take control of some larger entity, such as the state. Socrates’ task was to teach his students how to search for justice, so that they could exercise moral leadership. For most people, it would take a lifetime to learn how to discipline their appetites and emotions and thinking, and that would be enough; they would never turn to politics. But there were a select few who Socrates clearly hoped would develop into the kind of gifted and moral rulers he wanted to see. Xenophon even reports him as saying, in a conversation set in 407 BCE, that as a result of the social crisis Athens was now ready for moral regeneration.

  I feel no qualms in attributing to Socrates a somewhat millenarian frame of mind as regards Athens’s future. Anyone with any sense could see that radical changes were likely, and perhaps inevitable. The old citizen-state ideal was one of self-sufficiency, to guarantee its autonomy and freedom from external influences. This ideal, however, was far more realistic when it was formulated, some two hundred years before Socrates was born; by the middle of the fifth century, it was well out of date. Short of a radical austerity drive and a drastic culling of the population, Athens was never going to be self-sufficient again. The simplest of economic factors – shortage of grain, timber and minerals – had driven the city to acquire a maritime empire, and the bell could not be un-rung. The empire had not only caused scores of Greek states to think of themselves as less than independent, but it had also forced a similar network on to Athens’s enemy, Sparta. And the rewards of empire, or even just of interdependence, were self-evident in Athens’s enormously increased wealth. If Athens no longer had an empire, someone else was going to. Others were forming confederacies or leagues, a process that was accelerated by the scale of the new kind of warfare, in which a citizen militia no longer sufficed: states needed allies, and money to hire professional soldiers. It was the last possible moment in Greek history for Socrates’ political ideal, the last time when states such as Athens would be small enough to make it realistic to think of a select group of statesmen steering the state towards moral perfection.

  The increasing internationalism of political life meant that the citystate was rapidly becoming a dinosaur. No one can accurately predict the next phase of evolution of anything as complex as a society, but it is possible to predict that evolution is bound to take place. The only secure bridge between the past and the future is principle; the ways in which principles are applied must be left up to future citizens. Socrates dug beneath the formulations of Athenian morality to see what principles underlay and underpinned them; these were what he wanted his students to carry through to the next generation. Those who lacked this insight, however, or who chose to hide their heads in the sand, could see Socrates’ questioning only as an attempt to undermine the foundations. The general culture of a city was held to educate its citizens, and conservative Athenians thought their city had done a pretty good job: they had defeated the Persians, gained control over an empire, enriched themselves, made Athens the glory and the cultural centre of Greece. They accused Socrates of rocking the boat, without realizing that the boat was already rocking of its own accord.

  ALCIBIADES’ ROLE

  There is a distinct and easily observable pattern, in both Plato’s and Xenophon’s works, to Socrates’ dealings with talented young men with political aspirations. First, he flirts with them, letting them understand that he can satisfy their ambitions; then he exposes their failings, by demonstrating either that they lack personal morality (‘How can you expect to take control of the state when you cannot even control yourself?’) or that they lack the expertise to shine in their chosen field. Finally, having shown them their defects, he may agree to take them into his select circle.

  In Plato’s Alcibiades we see Socrates working on his star pupil. Socrates claims to have had his eye on Alcibiades for some time, but now at last his little internal voice has let him approach him. Alcibiades’ natural advantages – he is the best-looking young man in Athens, from the greatest family of the greatest city in Greece; he is well connected
and wealthy – have led him to treat all his other suitors with disdain. Socrates expects to do better. Why? Because he is aware that Alcibiades (despite being aged only nineteen at the time) wants to be the leading statesman not just in Athens, not just in Greece, not just in Europe, but in the entire known world. Socrates is the only one who can help him attain this ambition, but Alcibiades must curb his arrogance and submit to his questions.

  It turns out that Alcibiades knows nothing that will help him fulfil his ambitions: his knowledge, based on a standard upper-class Athenian upbringing, is either politically irrelevant, or inferior to that of experts. The chief topic on which Alcibiades is ignorant, but which he needs to know if he is to be a competent statesman, is the nature of justice. He acts as if he knows what it is, but he does not, and the inherited conglomerate has failed to teach him this as it fails in other respects too, wherever an issue is complex or disputable. Perhaps, Alcibiades suggests cannily, a politician does not need to know justice, but only what is expedient. But Socrates aggressively exposes his ignorance of the nature of expediency as well.

  Under Socrates’ probing, Alcibiades becomes aware of his crippling ignorance of vital matters. In Aeschines of Sphettus’s version of this conversation, Alcibiades is so overcome by this awareness that he bursts into tears, lays his head on Socrates’ lap, and begs him to become his teacher; but Plato’s Socrates has not yet finished. It is no consolation, he goes on, that almost all other Athenian politicians are equally ignorant; that does not excuse Alcibiades’ ignorance. If he is to play a major part on the world stage, not just in Athens, he is bound to come across a better class of rival.

  Having deflated Alcibiades, Socrates introduces a constructive suggestion: above all, Alcibiades needs self-knowledge, if he is to be a competent statesman, capable of creating concord in the city. Knowing oneself is caring for one’s self, but what is the self? The true self is not the body, which is no more than an instrument, but the soul or mind (and Socrates cannot resist adding that this is what makes him Alcibiades’ only true lover, because he loves him for his soul, not for his body). But the soul can know itself only by looking, as in a mirror, at goodness, either in another soul or in the divine realm. Until we know ourselves, we cannot know the good, and cannot know what is good for ourselves, or for others, or for a state. Without such knowledge, a politician is likely to do more harm than good; he must impart his own goodness (characterized as justice and self-control) to his fellow citizens, and plainly he cannot do so unless he is good himself. Until he has gained this condition of virtue, a man should not take up politics, but should apprentice himself to someone better than himself. Alcibiades is converted, and promises to stick as closely to Socrates in the future as Socrates has to him in the past.

  But the very last words of the dialogue are pessimistic: ‘I hope you do persevere in this,’ Socrates says, ‘but I have my doubts. I don’t doubt your natural abilities, but I can see how powerful the city is, and I’m afraid it might defeat both of us.’ This is Plato’s way of signalling that Alcibiades did not turn out the way Socrates had wanted, and he does the same, somewhat more subtly, in Symposium too. Xenophon adds that Alcibiades was initially attracted to Socrates because he thought he could help him to achieve his political ambitions, and that Socrates was the only one who could tame him, but that Alcibiades was soon corrupted away from Socrates by the lure of beautiful women and powerful friends. Worldly success came easily to him, and so he felt he no longer needed Socrates’ guidance. This became the standard story of the relationship between the odd couple in the later Platonic tradition. But Aeschines of Sphettus included the poignant rider that Socrates had expected the strength of his love to enable him to reform Alcibiades, even though doing so would be ‘as difficult as getting milk and honey from a dry well’.

  Socrates could see that Alcibiades had the energy, the talent and the position to go far in any field. Socrates wanted to produce one or more philosopher-kings to see Athens over its period of crisis and to revitalize the city’s moral life; this is what he had in mind for Alcibiades. It may well be also what he had in mind for others among his students who showed similar potential: Charmides, Euthydemus Dioclou and Critobulus of Alopece, the son of Socrates’ old friend Crito, all appear in this kind of role in Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates – and we should add Critias as well, except that for obvious reasons no Socratic writer showed Socrates grooming the future mass murderer for political life. The list should probably contain the name of Xenophon himself, since, when serving abroad, he showed a strong inclination to set himself up as king or tyrant of an overseas colony. And in the dialogue Theages (included in Plato’s corpus, but written by an unknown contemporary), Theages is introduced to Socrates as the teacher best able to satisfy his desire for political power. The brief dialogue ends inconclusively, with Socrates saying that he will take the young man on if his supernatural voice lets him, but it confirms that Socrates was remembered for helping ambitious and talented young men become expert statesmen.

  As for Alcibiades, when Socrates looked back on the career of his brightest hope, he must have thought to himself, ‘What a waste!’ Perhaps he even voiced this opinion aloud to some of his disciples, because Plato perfectly summarized the point, in the context of explaining why philosopher-kings, those who combine ability to rule with ability to do their communities good, were so thin on the ground. A naturally talented young man will be courted and flattered by others for their own purposes:

  ‘What do you imagine he’ll do in this situation,’ I [Socrates] asked, ‘especially if he happens to come from a wealthy and noble family within a powerful state, and is also good-looking and well built? Don’t you think he’ll be filled with unrealizable hopes, and will expect to be capable one day of managing the affairs not only of Greece, but of the non-Greek world as well? In these circumstances, won’t he get ideas above his station and puff himself up with affectation and baseless, senseless pride?’ – ‘He certainly will,’ he [Adeimantus] said. – ‘Now, suppose someone gently approaches him while he’s in this frame of mind and tells him the truth – that he’s taken leave of his senses and won’t get them back, as he should, without working like a slave for it – do you think it’s going to be easy for the message to penetrate all these pernicious influences and get through to him?’ – ‘No, far from it,’ he said. – ‘And,’ I went on, ‘supposing his innate gifts and his affinity with the reasonableness of what’s being said do in fact enable him to pay attention, and he is swayed and attracted towards philosophy, what reaction would you expect from those others, when they think they’re losing his services and his friendship? Won’t they do and say absolutely anything to stop him being won over? And as for the person who’s trying to win him over, won’t they come up with all kinds of private schemes and public court cases to stop him succeeding?’

  And a few pages earlier, he attributed ‘horrendous crimes and sheer depravity’ to just such a person, someone who is brilliant but has been corrupted by pandering to the people’s whims. No one doubts that these passages refer, without naming names, to Alcibiades and, at the very end of the quoted excerpt, to Socrates’ trial. In the context of a discussion about philosopher-kings, it confirms Socrates’ aspirations for Alcibiades – and his regret in Republic about the corruption of Alcibiades is pointed, since Republic sketches an ideal state of a kind that the historical Socrates might have wanted Alcibiades to play a major part in. Socrates’ followers were almost as obsessed with Alcibiades as their master himself was; one of the central questions addressed by Plato in Republic was precisely how to get a person who is motivated by desire for prestige and honour to devote himself to philosopher-rulership.

  Some time during the three-year siege of Poteidaea, Socrates went into a trance for the best part of twenty-four hours. What was he doing? Was he a mystic who had penetrated the cloud of unknowing? Was he thinking? Was he cataleptic? In any case, twenty-four hours is a very long time to spend in motionless contempl
ation (whether rational or mystical), and attests to Socrates’ remarkable powers. The only other significant aspect of the episode is that on coming to himself Socrates offered a prayer to the sun, which was then rising, and went on his way. The literary sun of northern Greece in the late 430s is the only certain light that can be shed on this episode, but it was surely extraordinary enough to represent some kind of turning point in Socrates’ life – a new beginning, the start of a new day. I want to suggest, somewhat fancifully, that the turning point had to do with Alcibiades, with whom Socrates was spending a great deal of time during the campaign – that during these twenty-four hours Socrates first conceived the political dimension of his mission, to take this boy in hand and train him as a philosopher-king, and to find others too.

  Socrates could see that the long-feared world war was about to begin; he knew that it would be vital, whatever the outcome, for Athens to emerge from the other side of the war with men of principle in charge, and so he decided to focus on teaching the young, and especially on training them in morality and politics. Hence Plato portrays his first question, on returning from Poteidaea, as a concern for the attainments or promise of the young men of the city – and it is Charmides, who was to become one of his select group of politically promising young men, to whom he is introduced. Pericles had Damon, Protagoras and Anaxagoras to help him form his policies and present them; the sophists in general often had the aim of turning out competent statesmen; Socrates wanted to play the same role, in his way, for the next generation of Athenian statesmen. It was a momentous decision, and he paid for it with his life.