Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as an “ironist” shows how conversation with him could easily lead to a frustrating impasse and how the possibility of resentment was ever present. Socrates was in this sense a masked interlocutor—an aspect of his self-presentation that made him more fascinating and alluring to his audiences but that also added to their distrust and suspicion. And readers, who come to know Socrates through the intervention of Plato, are in somewhat the same situation. Our efforts to interpret him are sometimes not as sound as we would like, because we must rely on judgments, often difficult to justify, about when he means what he says and when he does not.
Even when Socrates goes to court to defend himself against the most serious of charges, he seems to be engaged in eirôneia. After listening to the speeches given by his accusers, he says, in the opening sentence of Plato’s Apology: “I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak.” Is this the habitual eirôneia of Socrates? Or did the speeches of his accusers really have this effect on him? It is difficult to be sure. But, by Socrates’ own admission, the suspicion that anything he says might be a pose undermines his ability to persuade the jurors of his good intentions. His eirôneia may even have lent support to one of the accusations made against him, that he corrupted the young. For if Socrates really did engage in eirôneia, and if his youthful followers delighted in and imitated this aspect of his character, then to that extent he encouraged them to become dissembling and untrustworthy, just like himself. Background of the trial
The trial of Socrates in 399 bce occurred soon after Athens’s defeat at the hands of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce). Not only were Sparta and Athens military rivals during those years, they also had radically different forms of government. Athens was a democracy: all its adult male citizens were members of the Assembly; many of the city’s offices were filled by lot (election was regarded as undemocratic, because it effectively pronounced some citizens better qualified than others); and its citizens enjoyed a high degree of freedom to live and speak as they liked, provided that they obeyed the law and did nothing to undermine the democracy and the public good. Sparta, by contrast, was a mixed regime based on a complex power-sharing arrangement between various elite groups and ordinary citizens, and it exerted far more control than Athens did over education and the daily life of its citizens.
There was in Athens, particularly among the well-born, wealthy, and young, a degree of admiration for certain aspects of Spartan life and government. These young men, who spent much of their time in the public gymnasia, prided themselves on their toughness, practiced a certain simplicity of style, and grew their hair long—all in imitation of Spartan ways. (As Plato and Xenophon confirm, Socrates himself shared some of these qualities. In Aristophanes’ Birds [414], the young who express their admiration for Sparta are said to be “Socratizing.”) No doubt the fact that Athens, an empire-building city with vast resources and a large population, could not defeat smaller and poorer Sparta—and, in the end, lost its empire to that rival regime—added to the allure of the Spartan political system and way of life.
Ordinary Athenians—people who had to work for a living and did not belong to any of the aristocratic families—were proud of their democratic institutions and the freedoms they enjoyed, and they were well aware that their form of government had internal as well as external enemies and critics. Furthermore, they did not think of civic and religious matters as separate spheres but assumed instead that participation in the religious life of the city, as regulated by democratic institutions, was one of the duties of all citizens and that great harm could come to the city if the gods it recognized were offended or customary religious prohibitions were violated. Religious scandal and the coup of the oligarchs
During and soon after the war with Sparta, several events revealed how much damage could be done to Athenian democracy by individuals who did not respect the religious customs of the community, who had no allegiance to the institutions of democracy, or who admired their city’s adversary. One night in 415, shortly before a major naval expedition to Sicily was to set sail, many statues of the god Hermes (who protected travelers) were mutilated, presumably by those who wished to prevent the expedition from proceeding. While the matter was being investigated, several men, including one of Socrates’ greatest admirers, Alcibiades—who had sponsored and helped to lead the Sicilian expedition—were accused of mocking a religious ceremony and revealing its sacred secrets to outsiders. Some of them were tried and executed. Alcibiades, who had been charged with involvement in other religious scandals before, was called back from Sicily to face trial. The power of his enemies and the suspicion of him was so great, however, that he decided to escape to Sparta rather than return to Athens to face the likelihood of a death sentence. Athens condemned him and his associates to death in absentia, and he proceeded to offer counsel and leadership to Sparta in its fight against Athens. In 407 he returned to Athens and was cleared of the charges against him, though he never fully regained the trust either of the democrats or their opponents. Alcibiades was only one of many followers of Socrates mentioned in Plato’s dialogues who were involved in the religious scandals of 415.
In 411 a group of 400 opponents of Athenian democracy staged a coup and tried to install an oligarchy, but they were overthrown in the same year and democracy was restored. Some of them, who were associates of Socrates, went into exile after their revolution failed. In 404, soon after the Athenians’ defeat, Sparta installed a group of 30 men (many years later dubbed the Thirty Tyrants) in Athens to establish a far less democratic regime there. The leader of the most extreme wing of this group, Critias, was part of the Socratic circle; so, too, was Charmides, another of the 30. The democrats, many of whom had left Athens when the 30 came to power, defeated them in battle, and democracy was restored the following year. (In Plato’s Apology, Socrates refers to the reign of the 30 and their unsuccessful attempt to implicate him in their crimes.) The perceived fragility of Athenian democracy
The year in which Socrates was prosecuted, 399, was one in which several other prominent figures were brought to trial in Athens on the charge of impiety. That is unlikely to have been a coincidence; rather, it suggests that there was, at the time, a sense of anxiety about the dangers of religious unorthodoxy and about the political consequences that religious deviation could bring. Two attempts to put an end to Athenian democracy had occurred in recent years, and the religious scandals of 415 were not so far in the past that they would have been forgotten. Because a general amnesty had been negotiated, no one, except the 30 and a few others, could be tried for offenses committed prior to 403, when the 30 were defeated. But this would not have prevented an accusation from being brought against someone who committed a crime after 403. If Socrates had continued, during the years after 403, to engage in the same practices that were so characteristic of him throughout his adult life, then not even the most ardent supporters of the amnesty would have objected to bringing him to trial. And once a trial had begun, it was common practice for prosecutors to mention anything that might be judged prejudicial to the accused. There was no legal custom or court-appointed judge that would have prevented Socrates’ accusers from referring to those of his admirers—Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, and the like—who at one time had been enemies of democratic Athens or had been associated with religious scandal. The law that Socrates was alleged to have violated was a law against impiety, but in support of that accusation he also was accused of having corrupted the young. His jury might have taken his association with opponents of the democracy, or with persons convicted or suspected of religious crimes, to be grounds for considering him a dangerous man.