‘‘It was a time of terror that executed or banished one-tenth of the population in Athens” That’s a common impression, but it’s wrong. The “Euthyphro" pictures Socrates arriving for the preliminary hearing. But he gets no farther than the portico of the examining magistrate. There he engages in a long and inconclusive conversation with Euthyphro, the defendant in another case. The subject they discuss is the proper definition of piety or holiness. It’s charming, but tells us nothing of what happened when Socrates went in for his own arraignment. Why do you think Plato chose to be so uninformative? A lawyer might surmise that he blocked out as much as he could of the specific charges because they were too damaging and too hard to disprove. Do you see the same defensive strategy in Plato’s “Apology"? I do. Socrates evades the charge that he did not respect the city’s gods, and proves instead that he is not an atheist. But he was not charged with atheism. We never learn what was meant by corrupting the young. The reader of Plato’s “Apology” comes away with the impression that this wonderful old philosopher was condemned simply because he had spent his life exhorting his fellow citizens to be virtuous. How do you account for his condemnation? I believe the case against Socrates was political and that the charge of corrupting the youth was based on a belief — and considerable evidence — that he was undermining their faith in Athenian democracy. I f so, why wasn't the charge brought earlier? He had been teaching for a long time. A quarter century before the trial, Socrates had already been attacked in Aristophanes's play “The Clouds" for running a “think tank” whose smart-alecky graduates beat their fathers. I f they thought him the source o f such subversive teaching, why did the Athenians wait until 399 B.C., when he was already an old man, before putting him on trial? Because in 411 B.C. and again in 404 B.C., antidemocrats had staged bloody revolutions and established short-lived dictatorships. The Athenians were afraid this might happen again. * * * I haven t found that in Plato. Plato didn’t intend that you should. Those are the realities his “Apology” was calculated to hide. Plato was a genius, a dazzling prestidigitator, with all the gifts of a poet, a dramatist and a philosopher. His “Apology” is a masterpiece of world literature, a model of courtroom pleading, and the greatest single piece of Greek prose that has come down to us. It rises to a climax which never fails to touch one deeply, no matter how often it is reread. I read the “Apology” in the original for the first time last year, slowly and painfully, line by line. When I came to the noble farewell of Socrates to his judges, it gave me chest pains, it was so moving. I gladly offer up my angina in tribute to its mastery. “ I go to die,” Socrates says, “and you to live, but which of us goes to the better lot is known to none but God.” Even Shakespeare never surpassed that! But these very qualities also make Plato’s “Apology” a masterpiece of evasion. Is there any way to check Plato's picture o f the trial against the views o f the average Athenian? We do have one piece of evidence which shows that even 50 years after the event, when there had been ample time for reflection and remorse, the Athenians still regarded the trial as political, and the verdict as justified. Where did you find that? In a speech by the famous orator Aeschines, the great rival of Demosthenes, in the year 345 B.C., just 54 years after the trial of Socrates. This bit is well known to scholars but its significance has never been fully appreciated. With the clue Aeschines provides, we may begin to reconstruct the Athenian political realities. Aeschines cited the case of Socrates as a praiseworthy precedent. “Men of Athens," he said to the jury court, “you executed Socrates, the sophist, because he was clearly responsible for the education of Critias, one of the Thirty anti-democratic leaders.” Who was Critias? He was the bloodiest dictator Athens had ever known, a pupil of Socrates at one time, and a cousin of Plato’s. Aeschines was saying in effect that the antidemocratic teachings of Socrates helped to make a dictator of Critias, who terrorized Athens in 404 B.C. during the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and just five years before the trial of Socrates. Critias seems to have been the most powerful member of the Thirty. But why doyou give so much weight to one sentence in one man’s speech to an Athenian jury court 50 years after the trial? Aeschines could not have swayed the jury by that reference unless he was saying something about the relations between Socrates and Critias which was generally accepted as true by the Athenian public opinion of the time. Though 50 years had passed, the dictatorship of Critias and the Thirty Tyrants must still have been a hateful memory. Justly or unjustly, Socrates's reputation still suffered from his association with Critias. The reference to Critias and Socrates proved effective demagogy. Aeschines won his case. How do you account for the deep and enduring prejudice against Socrates in his native city? To understand this, one must touch on a damaging fact few historians have explained, or even mentioned, so great is the reverence for Socrates: Socrates remained in the city all through the dictatorship o f the Thirty Tyrants. Why do you put that in italics? Because that single fact must have accounted more than any other for the prejudice against Socrates when the democracy was restored. The Thirty Tyrants ruled only about eight months, but it was a time of terror. In that period they executed 1,500 Athenians and banished 5,OCX), onetenth or more of the total population of men, women, children and slaves. When the Thirty Tyrants took power, they murdered or drove out of the city all who were of the democratic party. A few months later, the moderates who had originally supported the Thirty Tyrants began to flee, especially after Critias murdered their leader, Theramenes. He, who had been one of the original Thirty Tyrants, was executed without a trial when he began to criticize the Thirty Tyrants for their brutality. Socrates was neither exiled with the democrats nor forced to flee with the moderate oppositionists. He did not suffer at the hands of the Thirty Tyrants, unlike his chief accuser, Anytus. who lost much of his property when he fled and joined the fight to free the city. Socrates, in Plato's “Apology," calls himself “the gadfly" of Athens, but it seems his sting was not much in evidence when Athens needed it most. How does Plato handle this in the "Apology"? He never mentions Critias, or his past as a pupil of Socrates, not does he dwell on the fact that Socrates stayed in the city all through the dictatorship. Instead Plato has Socrates represent himself as a man above the battle of politics. How does Plato do that? He has Socrates tell of two incidents in which he defied unjust orders, once under the democracy, and again under the Thirty Tyrants. Under the democracy, he was presiding officer in the Assembly during the famous trial of ten generals accused of misconduct for failing to succor survivors and recover the bodies of the slain after a naval victory. Socrates said he blocked the attempt to condemn them in one proceeding, because the law called for a separate trial for each man. He added that he did so "although the orators were ready to impeach and arrest me." Under the Thirty Tyrants, Socrates said, he had also resisted an unjust order. Socrates and four others had been ordered to arrest a wealthy resident alien whom the dictatorship wanted to kill so they could seize his property. Such executions for revenue purposes were common under Critias. Instead of obeying the order, Socrates says, "I simply went home, and perhaps I should have been put to death for it, if the Government had not quickly been put down." But he himself neither helped put it down, nor tried to warn the victim, nor made a protest. Though he was always preaching virtue, he did not. like the Hebrew prophets, call such un- virtuous rulers publicly to account. But few modern readers know enough to resist Plato’s beguiling narrative, and it serves to distract attention from the fact that nowhere in the ancient texts do we find Socrates resisting or deploring the overthrow of the democracy, nor welcoming its restoration. With the jury, this silence must have outweighed his eloquence. The dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants was the dictatorship of the wealthy landed aristocracy to which Plato and Critias belonged. This was the social circle from which most of Socrates's followers were drawn. Athens understood this, though the modern reader often doesn’t. * * * Does Xenophon — our other "witness" on the trial — confront these compromising political circumstances? Xenophon does so in his "Memorab i lia ” by quoting an unnamed “accuser.” This accuser has been variously identified as one of the accusers at the trial or as a contemporary prodemocratic orator named Polycrates whose "pamphlet” on the trial of Socrates has since disappeared. In any case. Xenophon's quotations from this accuser and his answer to these accusations provide us with some conception of the prosecution's case against Socrates. In so doing. Xenophon discloses much that Plato hides. 17
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