Why Socrates Died

by Robin Waterfield

  TWELVE

  A Cock for Asclepius

  Xenophon preserves a tidy story. After the trial, as Socrates was being taken off to prison to await execution, he was accompanied by a few of his followers, some of whom were deeply distressed. One of them said that what he found particularly hard to bear was that Socrates had done nothing to deserve such a death. Socrates replied with a laugh: ‘Would you feel better if I did deserve it?’

  The story may be faintly amusing, but it overstates its case. Even his most devoted followers must have recognized that their mentor was sailing close to the wind. We may even wonder why condemnation had not happened earlier. Condemnation or acquittal in the Athenian legal system often depended more on whether or not the defendant was perceived or suspected of un-Athenian activities, than on whether or not he had committed the crime. And the weight of the un-Athenian activities that Socrates was either involved in or was suspected of being involved in is impressive.

  He was a clever arguer and taught young men to be clever arguers; he usurped their fathers’ roles in education and in general was perceived to be subversive of inherited values; he was either a sophist or indistinguishable from one; in his youth he had dabbled in atheistic science and even now his religious views were highly unconventional; he was suspected of being the leader of a weird cabal; he had irritated many prominent Athenians with his interminable, aggressive questioning; he had taught Alcibiades, the mocker of the Mysteries, the most corrupt of a corrupt generation, oligarch and possibly would-be tyrant, a pro-Spartan traitor who was widely held to be responsible for the loss of the war; he was close to others who had either mocked the Mysteries or desecrated the herms; he was close to Critias, the ideologue of the brutal Thirty, and others of that circle; his political views were elitist and smacked of the same programme of moral regeneration of Athens by ‘enlightened’ leaders that Critias had attempted to instigate; he was thought to be in favour of a Spartan-style con stitution; he had stayed in Athens during the regime of the Thirty; at his trial, he was defiant and openly hostile to the democratic courts and the inherited conglomerate. Iconic historical moments, such as Socrates’ trial, will always be hijacked by partisan interests, but to try to make the trial depend on any single issue is a serious distortion of the facts.

  Worst of all, he surrounded himself with men whom he presumably infected with these same views. Both Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socratic works are peopled by undesirable characters; anti-democrats outnumber the non-aligned or the pro-democrats by a considerable factor. Of the fifteen interlocutors that Plato shows conversing with Socrates whose political affiliations we know, five are democrats and the rest are villains and traitors. Socrates was known to have taught and loved Alcibiades and Charmides; he taught Critias and Euthydemus, who was Critias’s beloved; another of the Thirty, Aristotle of Thorae, was at least in the Socratic circle, as was Cleitophon, who helped to prepare the ground for the oligarchy of 411 and was on the margins of the oligarchy of 404; at least seven of those who fled into exile as a result of the scandals of 415 were close associates; Xenophon was a student, and he was banished in the 390s from Athens for his anti-democratic and pro-Spartan leanings; in general, Socrates moved in the circles of those who were or were suspected of being oligarchs, and was close to the politically suspect Pythagoreans. Socrates could have been condemned just on the strength of his unfortunate associates and students, by those dikasts who knew nothing of his political and religious views.

  But Socrates had been irritating people with his questions since about 440, was known to be the teacher of arrogant young men by the end of the 430s (his first mention in an extant comic fragment), and, whether or not my speculation about a conversion moment at Poteidaea is right, seems to have been committed to a political path for at least thirty years before his trial. To judge by the references to Socrates in the comic poets, his heyday was in the 420s and 410s, and he had somewhat dropped out of the limelight for at least a decade before his trial. It was twenty-four years since Aristophanes and Ameipsias had made him the most notorious atheist and subversive intellectual in Athens. Why take the elderly philosopher to court just then, in the spring of 399 BCE?

  Like other intellectuals, Socrates became a target only once he was perceived as a threat to public order. His links to the Thirty changed his status from harmless eccentric to undesirable. He had been living on borrowed time ever since the defeat of the Thirty in 403. This is not to say that the charge of impiety was, in some Stalinist sense, just a cover for a political trial: religion and society were so intimately connected that to charge Socrates with impiety was already to accuse him of being socially undesirable. The corruption charge was also implicitly political, since everyone would immediately have thought of the ‘young’ – Alcibiades, Critias and the oligarchic set of the 420s and 410s. There had been dark mutterings about the influence of Socrates over these baneful characters.

  The general atmosphere was not at all conducive to Socrates’ acquittal. The main topic of serious conversation after the fall of the Thirty was ‘How did we come to this?’ All the controversial figures and events of the previous thirty years were being rehashed and mined for significance; and the arguments about where they went wrong, and how they could have let the empire slip out of their grasp, often came back to the part Alcibiades had played in their downfall, or the part he might have played in restoring the city’s fortunes, had he been allowed to, or had he been a little less … less Alcibiades. And the people looked on Socrates differently because of his association with the Thirty. As one who had stayed in Athens during their regime, Socrates had already been offered the opportunity to leave Athens and take up residence in Eleusis. He had refused; for a figurehead, a trial was the logical next step.

  THE PROSECUTION TEAM

  We now have the context to speculate about the motives of Socrates’ prosecutors – Meletus of Pitthus, Lycon of Thoricus and Anytus of Euonymon. There were several men called Meletus within the relevant time-frame, but we know so little about them that we cannot even be sure how many there were. It is attractive to think that the Meletus who prosecuted Socrates is the same as the Meletus who had prosecuted another high-profile case of impiety, against Andocides, a few months earlier; this would give us a consistent picture of a religious conservative with the democracy at heart. But Plato has Socrates describe his Meletus as ‘young and unknown’, an unsuitable description for the prosecutor of Andocides, once one of the wealthiest men in Athens and a notorious anti-democrat.

  There was also a Meletus who was involved in the arrest of Leon of Salamis during the regime of the Thirty. Since Socrates refused to take part in this arrest, his posthumous defenders would have made a lot of the involvement of one of his prosecutors; and besides, if this Meletus were our Meletus, Socrates could hardly have said that Meletus was unknown to him. But we know from Andocides’ defence speech that the Meletus who prosecuted him was also the one who took part in the arrest of Leon. In that case, our Meletus, Socrates’ Meletus, is left out in the cold. His father may have been a writer of tragedies, of no great distinction. His obscurity makes it plausible to think that he was little more than a front man for the other two prosecutors, Anytus and Lycon, who were far more prominent figures in Athenian public life. This is confirmed by Socrates’ words after the guilty verdict: ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt that if Anytus and Lycon had not stepped up to prosecute me, Meletus would have become liable to the thousand-drachma fine for not having obtained a fifth of the votes.’ The weight of Lycon and Anytus tipped the scales against Socrates – and it should come as no surprise that it was political weight.

  We know very little about Lycon, except that he achieved some prominence as a democratic politician in the 400s, but the most plausible conjecture for his hostility towards Socrates is that he associated him with the Thirty, who had murdered his son. Lycon (if it is the same Lycon) features in Xenophon’s Symposium, set in 422 BCE, when he was apparently on cordial terms with Socr
ates. But many years had passed since then, and the death of his beloved son may have turned his mind.

  The most ominous of the accusers was Anytus. His political ascent is lost to us, and he first appears at the top of the tree, as a general, in 409. Pylos, on the south-western tip of the Peloponnese, had been in Athenian hands since 425, but had just been retaken by the Spartans. Anytus was entrusted with the task of recovering this important bridgehead. Bad weather prevented him from doing so and, as they so often did with unsuccessful generals, the Athenians decided to prosecute him, but he was acquitted – thanks to bribery, apparently.

  At the end of the Peloponnesian War, Anytus was initially a supporter of the Thirty, or at least of Theramenes, but when ideology became more important than friendship he fled into exile to join Thrasybulus’s resistance movement, abandoning his valuable business to the rapaciousness of the Thirty. He rapidly became one of the leaders of the resistance, to be mentioned in the same breath as Thrasybulus himself. He was equally prominent after the civil war, especially as one of the architects of the attempt to reconcile democrats and oligarchs and promote social concord. In a dialogue set in 402, Plato said that the Athenian people were choosing Anytus for the most important positions in the state. He was plausibly described as one who served the democracy well, and as a man of power in the city.

  His career after 399, however, is obscure. In popular tradition, the Athenian people regretted killing Socrates and took it out on the prosecutors, with various stories giving various versions of their gruesome ends. None of these moral tales is trustworthy. In any case, we are not now concerned with what happened to the prosecutors after the trial. The point is that two prominent democrats, one of whom was a hero of the revolution against the Thirty and still an eminent democratic politician, prosecuted Socrates; Socrates was undoubtedly being tried for his association with Critias. And this is precisely what we find that Athenians themselves believed: some fifty years later, in 345 BCE, Aeschines cited the case of ‘Socrates the sophist’, saying that he had been executed for teaching Critias.

  After 403, Athenians wanted to stabilize the democracy, to prevent further oligarchic coups. This mood was so prevalent that, barring strong opposing reasons, the trial of a man such as Socrates, by these prosecutors, would inevitably be seen as politically motivated. With hindsight, we identify 404–403 as a great watershed in Athenian history, but hindsight must not blind us to the fact that Athenians at the time did not know that they had defeated the forces of tyranny and narrow oligarchy once and for all (or at least until the democracy was overwhelmed by an external power); they thought they were still fighting these internal enemies, shoring up the democracy. There had been an interval of seven years between the oligarchy of 411 and that of 404, so the relatively peaceful passage of a mere four years up to 399, or only two years since the final defeat of the oligarchs at Eleusis, would not seem to be grounds for complacency. Moreover, the Thirty had been imposed on Athens by Sparta, with the help of Persia, and neither of these two influences on Athenian events had evaporated. If it is true that Anytus was known as one of the architects of post-war concord, he had, for the sake of the democracy, to make an exception in the case of Socrates.

  ANYTUS’S PROSECUTION SPEECH

  There was an incredible amount of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence stacked up against Socrates. Just from this alone we could draw up a list of things we might reasonably guess that the prosecutors might have said, but we do not have to resort entirely to guesswork, since at least some of the content of their speeches can be gleaned from three sources. The first two of these are the defence speeches written by Plato and Xenophon, since from time to time they appear to be responding to points that had been raised by the prosecution speeches; the third, and the most important, is a pamphlet published by Polycrates in 392.

  Polycrates was an Athenian rhetorician, best known for writing paradoxical pieces defending famous villains or attacking famous heroes. None of his work survives, but some of it is reflected by others. His defence of the legendary Egyptian king Busiris, for instance, who had the nasty habit of slaughtering visitors to his country, met with an extended response from Isocrates. His other famous work was the Prosecution Speech against Socrates, which purported to be the speech Anytus had delivered at the trial. Its purpose was to advertise Polycrates’ wares as an aspirant to the speech-writing profession and to express support for the democracy. It met with responses from both Xenophon and, centuries later, Libanius of Antioch (and presumably from unknown others in between).

  Polycrates’ pamphlet has long been sidelined as a way to reconstruct Anytus’s speech, because most scholars believe that, since the end of the civil war in Athens, there had been a general amnesty that forbade reference to any crimes or alleged crimes committed before 403. Since Polycrates’ pamphlet plainly contravened such an amnesty (for instance, by charging Socrates with having been Alcibiades’ teacher), it seemed safe to ignore it. But we now know that there was no blanket amnesty. Socrates’ prosecutors could have said pretty much anything they wanted at his trial (as they could have done even if there had been a blanket amnesty, as long as they did not refer specifically to pre-403 people and incidents; but that would have seriously weakened their case), and so there is nothing in what is recoverable of Polycrates’ Prosecution Speech against Socrates that debars it from genuinely reflecting Anytus’s actual speech. And this is what Xenophon suggests too: early in his Recollections of Socrates, when he refers to Polycrates’ work, he attributes the arguments to ‘the prosecutor’ (or ‘the accuser’), which looks very like a reference to Socrates’ trial and to one of his three prosecutors.

  The very nature of Polycrates’ writing points in the same direction. Like his more illustrious predecessor Gorgias of Leontini, he was known for writing paradoxical pieces, designed to display rhetorical skill in an unlikely cause. The name of the game was not the truth, but rhetorical display. But neither Gorgias’s nor Polycrates’ repertoire was restricted to paradox. If the Prosecution Speech against Socrates were mere entertainment, Xenophon would not have bothered to respond to it, since no one would have taken it seriously. There is a good possibility that Xenophon’s ‘accuser’ is in fact Anytus, and so that we do know at least a little of what Socrates’ prosecutors said in their speeches.

  The basic tactic of a prosecution speech in the Athenian courts was to admit personal involvement, attempt to convert private to public anger by claiming to be acting in the public interest and by pointing out the defendant’s criminal record and depraved, anti-democratic character, and argue that the preservation of the city depended on a guilty verdict. It is likely, then, that Anytus began with some such generalizations, before proceeding to the meat of his speech. Little of what follows is fanciful, though I have of course written it up myself; otherwise, it is based on the various later writings that seem to reflect the prosecution speeches.

  Gentlemen, I will not take up much of your time. My friend Lycon, whose record on behalf of the city is known to you all, has yet to speak. Besides, you have already heard Meletus speak, and demonstrate that this man before you, Socrates of Alopece, is an out-and-out atheist, the leader of a weird cabal, and a sophist who teaches young men corrupt and subversive skills – teaches them to bypass honest citizens such as their fathers and their family friends in favour of his new-fangled, impious and immoral notions. He is no true citizen, but an acolyte of a god not recognized by the state. But I will say no more about the charge of impiety, so ably covered by my colleague, and will focus on the charge of corruption.

  I do not need to take up your time because in all likelihood you already know what kind of man Socrates is; you have seen him in the Agora, surrounded by a gaggle of effeminate, lisping young men, and a scattering of emaciated older men. He also hangs out in the gymnasia, but I doubt many of you have seen him there, because you have better things to do with your time than ogle boys’ bodies. And what does he do? What show does he put on for his audie
nce? He latches on to one of you and forces you to submit to his questions. And these are not innocent questions. No, he does not ask you the time of day or the way to Taureas’s wrestling-school. To the great amusement of his disciples, he ties you up into sophistic knots and shames you, claiming to demonstrate that none of us knows what goodness is. He cleverly gives the impression that he himself does have such knowledge, though no one has ever heard him say what it is.

  He supports his slippery arguments by reference to anti-democratic poets, and by these means he claims to show that our inherited values, which have nursed our fair city to greatness, are so riddled with inconsistencies as to be worthless. He perverts the ideas of our most noble poets, making out that Hesiod claimed that one should commit crimes in order to make a living, while our forefather Homer made Odysseus out to be a thief, said that the very Trojan War was a form of theft, and encouraged the thrashing of poor people – of you, the honest citizens of Athens. Well, let me remind him of what the great Hesiod said: ‘Often all the citizens of a community suffer as a result of one bad man.’

  And there can be no doubt that this man has harmed our community. Our city is founded on the values handed down by our fathers – yet Socrates teaches young men to ignore their fathers as useless, as incapable of teaching virtue, and encourages them to despise the laws and traditions. He feels himself to be so far above the city’s morals that he would not stoop to teach others to lie and steal, and to do these things himself. His students typically think of themselves as smarter than their uneducated fathers – and where did they get that notion from? Socrates says that clever sons should restrain their ignorant fathers, in case their ignorance leads them to harm themselves. He equates ignorance, as a form of mindlessness, with insanity, and so calls you all insane!