Why Socrates Died Read online

  by the same author

  XENOPHON’S RETREAT: Greece, Persia and the End of the

  Golden Age

  ATHENS: A History, from Ancient Ideal to Modern City

  HIDDEN DEPTHS: The Story of Hypnosis

  PROPHET: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran

  For Kathryn

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Key Dates

  Maps

  THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES

  1 Socrates in Court

  2 How the System Worked

  3 The Charge of Impiety

  THE WAR YEARS

  4 Alcibiades, Socrates and the Aristocratic Milieu

  5 Pestilence and War

  6 The Rise and Fall of Alcibiades

  7 The End of the War

  8 Critias and Civil War

  CRISIS AND CONFLICT

  9 Symptoms of Change

  10 Reactions to Intellectuals

  THE CONDEMNATION OF SOCRATES

  11 Socratic Politics

  12 A Cock for Asclepius

  Glossary

  References

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  1. Bust Of Socrates.

  (DE 002607 (RM). Capitoline Museum, Rome/Corbis)

  2. Bust Of Alcibiades.

  (ALG 216937. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Alinari/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  3. Antonio Canova: Socrates Summons Alcibiades From His Lovers.

  (Kunsthalle, Bremen. Leihabe Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1981. Photo: A. Kreul, Kunsthalle, Bremen)

  4. Archaic Herm.

  (National Archaeological Museum, Athens. © Hellenic Ministry Of Culture/Archaeological Receipts Fund)

  5. Alcibiades Ostraka.

  (American School Of Classical Studies At Athens, P 4506, P7310, P19077, P 29373 and P29374)

  6. Giambettino Cignaroli: Death Of Socrates.

  (Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest)

  Bust of Socrates. A Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze original, and fairly typical of the genre. Socrates became instantly identifiable by his looks and somewhat pugnacious demeanour, though this bust slightly downplays his ugliness. Known to scholars as ‘Type B’ Socrates busts, they may stem from an original by Lysippus, one of the most famous sculptors of the fourth century BCE.

  Good busts of Alcibiades are surprisingly rare, given his ubiquity in our literary sources. This one, a Roman copy of a Greek original, preserves something of his virile good looks, but makes him look far more Roman than Athenian.

  This wonderful sculpture has been attributed to Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), but is perhaps the work of Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850). Drawing on the Platonic tradition, that Socrates was the only one who could save Alcibiades from the snares of the world, here a very stern Socrates summons, by force of personality alone, a reluctant Alcibiades from the arms of two young women.

  A well-preserved herm from about 550 BCE. Herms were placed at change-over points such as crossroads and doorways. The erect phallus was apotropaic: the herm warded off bad luck and so ensured prosperity for the street or building. They were especially common in Athens, and their mutilation in May 415 BCE was an act of outrageous sacrilege, probably carried out as part of a failed oligarchic coup.

  These unassuming ostraka are of fascinating historical value. They are the only ones that have been found with the name of our Alcibiades, dating from the 416 ostracism. Ostraka are broken pieces of pottery, and the names of the candidates for ostracism were written on them. Provided at least 6,000 such votes were cast, the man with the most votes was sent into exile for 10 years. Alcibiades was a candidate, but avoided being sent into exile.

  Giambettino Cignaroli: Death of Socrates. Cignaroli (1718–1770), from Verona, painted this work in the Neoclassical style in the early 1760s for Count Karl Firmian, then the Austrian governor of Lombardy (Upper Italy), who was a keen ancient historian and patron of the arts. It was originally paired with a Death of Cato.

  Preface

  Everyone has heard of Socrates, and even if they know little or nothing else about the man, they usually know that he was put to death by his fellow Athenians in 399 BCE. The events surrounding Socrates’ death have become iconic – more discussed, portrayed or merely mentioned – than any except those surrounding the death, some four hundred years later, of a Jewish prophet called Yehoshua. In fact, the two trials and executions often seem to meld in people’s minds, so that Socrates too becomes a kind of martyr – a good man unjustly killed for his views, or for being an outstanding individual in a collectivist society, or something like that. Do a web search for ‘Socrates and Jesus’ and you will see what I mean. But Socrates would have been the last to want to leave a cultural icon unexamined, and that is what I do in this book: examine all the evidence in order to reach a fuller understanding of Socrates’ trial and execution than has been achieved before.

  Socrates’ trial was a critical moment in ancient Athenian history, and so provides a very good lens through which to study a complex and perennially fascinating, somewhat alien society. That is my second intention: to provide a readable account of as much Athenian history as is necessary to fill in the background of the trial. For we will, of course, never understand the trial without being able to enter, as fully as possible, into the mindset of the Athenians who condemned him to death. This is a book about classical Athenian society as much as it is about Socrates, and especially about the social crisis that Athens endured in the decades immediately preceding Socrates’ trial.

  Socrates was famous: we have more evidence about him, and about Alcibiades, his beloved (who also features prominently in this book), than any other two figures from classical Athens. But even this good fortune may be two-edged. Socrates himself wrote nothing, and almost all the evidence about him comes from two of his followers, Plato and Xenophon, both of whom had their own agendas and reasons for writing. Among these reasons was a desire to exculpate their mentor – to make their fellow Athenians wonder why they ever condemned him to death (in this respect, at least, he truly resembles Jesus). So we may have a greater number of words about Socrates than about any comparable ancient Athenian, but every single word needs to be weighed and treated with caution. And the same goes for Alcibiades, a flamboyant, larger-than-life character whose image became exaggerated over the years, until he became an archetypal dandy, profligate and sexual omnivore, whose tyrannical political intentions could be read off from his private life. As if the dubious source material did not make the work difficult enough, at the heart of this book is a trial. The nature of Athenian society, and of the legal system in particular, means that very few trials – and none of those on social charges such as those of which Socrates was accused – were concerned only with the explicit charges. So all the evidence needs a judicious approach.

  Socrates himself wrote nothing, as I have said, and there is a temptation to understand this as an eloquent way of asserting his mistrust of the written word. It is true that he preferred the flexibility of living conversation and the spark of pre-verbal knowledge that can occasionally be transmitted in such circumstances, but it is more to the point to remember that disseminating one’s ideas by means of the written word was still very rare in his day. But he did have views and opinions, and we need to unearth them from the pages of those who wrote about him, while recognizing that it will never finally be possible to disentangle Socrates’ own views from those of his followers.

  I have long believed that the historical Socrates is pretty irrecoverable, but also that it would be sheer stupidity to deny that he cast a shadow over the works of Xenophon and Plato. Scholars often cling
hopefully or desperately to a distinction between the ‘historical’ Socrates of Plato’s earlier dialogues, and the character ‘Socrates’ who seems to speak for Plato’s own ideas in later dialogues. I no longer believe in this distinction, except that in the light of Plato’s genius the shadow of the historical Socrates becomes harder to discern; but in order not to beg the question, I have avoided using Plato’s later dialogues for anything except corroborative evidence. I make far more use of Xenophon’s testimony than has been normal in the scholarly study of Socrates for the past hundred or so years – but I have already groused enough in print about the neglect of Xenophon, so I will say now only that without his help we are never going to gain a rounded picture of Socrates, or even of just his trial.

  Socrates was a philosopher, one of the most influential the world has ever seen. Naturally, then, in this book I make quite a bit of use of philosophical texts. But I do not want to alarm any reader who associates ‘philosophy’ with ‘density and complexity’, or even with ‘futility’. Neither of these is a fair reaction to the majority of the ancient philosophers, for whom philosophy was, above all, a practical exercise in self-improvement. These early philosophers were dealing with real issues, problems arising from real life, so their work was not futile; many of them were trying in part to reach the ordinary educated man, and when they were making this attempt they did not write with density and complexity. At any rate, the Socratic works of Plato and Xenophon should more properly be classified as intelligent fiction than as tough philosophical textbooks.

  In any case, this book is a work of history, and I scarcely scratch the surface of Socrates’ philosophy. But in locating political concerns at the heart of Socrates’ enterprise, I do present a revisionist picture of his thought. In this book, however, I write not as a philosopher but as a historian, and from a historian’s point of view the evidence for a more politically engaged Socrates is as plentiful as that for many reconstructions of the period.

  The lofty pedestal that Socrates occupies is due above all to the write-up Plato gave the events surrounding his trial and death. In this version, Socrates became the superbly haughty philosopher, concerned with nothing except his mission to investigate and promote profound moral values. But this picture is a Platonic fiction and has generated the troubling result that, just as Socrates has become apotheosized above the common concerns of humanity, so his philosophy and even philosophy in general (for which Socrates remains the figurehead) is considered to be best studied ahistorically. There is of course some validity in this, since philosophers deal with abstract principles and questions, but there is a danger of distortion if Socrates (or perhaps any philosopher) is read without knowledge of his times.

  So Socrates has been through many incarnations, as successive intellectual, spiritual and artistic movements have appropriated him and remade him as the type or antitype of their own ideals. This mythmaking process began a few years after his death and has not yet ended. One way to describe the aim of this book is to say that I have tried to get behind the myths, to uncover the historical person and locate him in his contemporary context. For Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was a moral hero, and it was above all his trial and death that revealed him as such to the world. This veneer, polished and thickened by centuries of acceptance, needs to be chipped away if we are to gain as undistorted a picture of Socrates as we now can. He may indeed turn out to be a moral hero, a great and innovative thinker, and one of the founders of western civilization – but he may also appear at last as a human being, subject to human frailties.

  One of the primary tools I have used to tackle the veneer is Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades. There are sound, practical reasons for this: of all Socrates’ friends and acquaintances, we know far more about the notorious Alcibiades than anyone else. There is also the fascination of the pairing of these two opposites – a fascination which has long attracted poets (e.g. Hölderlin), sculptors (e.g. Canova) and painters (e.g. Regnault). Socrates frittered away a modest fortune, while Alcibiades flaunted his obscene wealth; Socrates contained his appetites, while Alcibiades indulged them; Alcibiades was a fervent imperialist, wedded to the notion that might is right, while Socrates insisted that it was never right to harm anyone under any circumstances; Socrates focused on inner change as the foundation for moral action in the outer world, while Alcibiades ignored his soul and preferred to conquer the world as he found it. And yet they were a couple, of sorts, and Alcibiades became the vehicle for Socrates’ political aspirations. We will not understand Socrates without understanding Alcibiades; hence his prominence in this book.

  But they were not only opposites. Both men pushed the envelope in their respective ways (and so came to be accused of impiety, or ‘un-Athenian activities’); both men were admired and feared in almost equal measure; neither expected to adjust to the city, but expected the city to adjust to them; both were in a sense scapegoats; both in their interlocking, divergent ways fused two of the greatest and most enduring trends of fifth-century Athenian culture – politics and philosophy.

  In both cases, however, the city proved stronger. Perhaps that was inevitable – even inevitable enough to be foreseeable. In Euripides’ Hippolytus a stubborn, self-absorbed young man quarrels with his father and is driven into exile and killed; in Aristophanes’ Clouds a teacher, from whom a young man learns how to rationalize and escape the consequences of beating up his father, is attacked in retaliation by the father. But Euripides’ play was produced in 428 BCE, thirteen years before Alcibiades’ first period of exile and twenty-four years before his assassination, while Clouds was first produced in 423, twenty-four years before Socrates was taken to court by a society proclaiming itself ‘the constitution of our fathers’.

  I have spent a little time here outlining the considerable obstacles presented by the evidence for Socrates and Alcibiades. But despite these obstacles, I believe that the issues underlying and surrounding Socrates’ trial are recoverable with a good degree of certainty, even if in order to achieve this recovery we have to take a somewhat roundabout route through relevant aspects of Athenian history. No straightforward route does justice to the complexity of the trial: at stake were impiety and religious innovation, recent developments in education, Socrates’ unique personality, various prejudices against him and others associated with him, recent history, politics and political ideologies. If I present the evidence as a jigsaw puzzle that only slowly begins to make sense, this is meant to reflect the mind of an imaginary contemporary of Socrates, asking himself, if he was free of prejudice, why this man was put on trial, and why he had to die. The several answers that would gradually dawn on him are the pathways taken in this book.

  Socrates’ trial has occasionally brought about something like collective guilt, as if justice had miscarried and an innocent man were condemned to death. In the late 1920s, a Greek lawyer called Paradopoulos applied to the highest court in Athens to have them reverse the verdict of the ancient trial. The court replied, naturally, that this matter was outside its jurisdiction; there is no substantive continuity between ancient Athenian and modern Greek law. In any case, we should not condemn the ancient Athenians for condemning Socrates: as he himself was the first to acknowledge, he was tried and found guilty in accordance with the due processes of law. If in this book I try him all over again, I do not think he would be too dismayed.

  Acknowledgements

  This is the first book of mine written from start to finish in rural Greece, my home. Trips to libraries from here are time-consuming and costly. I wrote to many academics around the world asking for offprints of their work, and received nothing but generosity and kindness, in the form of the majority of the offprints I had asked for, and some extras too. Too many people were involved to name one by one, so I thank you all collectively. Collective thanks also go to the staff of the Library of the Institute of Classical Studies, London; the British Library; the Library of the British School at Athens; the Blegen Library of the American School of C
lassical Studies at Athens; and the library of the University of South Florida at Tampa.

  As for individuals, I corresponded over details with Philip Buckle, Ed Carawan, Paul Cartledge, Bill Furley, Debra Nails, Robert Parker, Jeffrey Rusten, Stephen Todd and Julian Waterfield, while Michael Pakaluk allowed me to post a query on his ‘Dissoi Blogoi’ site. My thanks to all of them, and also to my friend Dimitris Peretzis for stimulating conversations, and not least for his play Saint Alcibiades, the brevity of whose run in October 2006 at the Athenais theatre in Athens belied a work of rare emotional and intellectual power. As usual, I met with nothing but meticulous care from my copy-editor, Eleanor Rees, and cartographer, András Bereznay. And nothing would have happened without my commissioning editors: Walter Donohue of Faber and Faber in London, Bob Weil of Norton in the States, and Chris Bucci of McClelland and Stewart in Canada.

  Several people gave generously of their time and read the penultimate draft of the book in its entirety: Paul Cartledge, Kathryn Dunathan, Andrew Lane, Debra Nails and Bob Wallace. They seem to have enjoyed the experience, and I certainly profited from their comments. The book is also dedicated to Kathryn, because we were married about two-thirds of the way through the writing of it. I have no idea whether the book is better because of this, but I am.

  Lakonia, Greece, May 2008

  Key Dates

  BCE

  c.630 Attempted tyranny of Cylon

  621 Dracon’s law code

  594 Solon revises Athenian constitution and law code

  561–510 Peisistratid tyranny

  508 Cleisthenes’ reforms

  490 First Persian invasion of Greece; battle of Marathon

  480–479 Second Persian invasion of Greece

  477 Delian League formed