Socrates’ own jury had arrived with violent prejudices. They had been influenced by Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates, and felt that the philosopher had played a role in the disasters that had befallen the once-mighty city at the end of the century. The Peloponnesian War had finished in catastrophe, a Spartan–Persian alliance had brought Athens to her knees, the city had been blockaded, her fleet destroyed and her empire dismembered. Plagues had broken out in poorer districts, and democracy had been suppressed by a dictatorship guilty of executing a thousand citizens. For Socrates’ enemies, it was more than coincidence that many of the dictators had once spent time with the philosopher. Critias and Charmides had discussed ethical matters with Socrates, and it seemed all they had acquired as a result was a lust for murder.
What could have accounted for Athens’s spectacular fall from grace? Why had the greatest city in Hellas, which seventy-five years before had defeated the Persians on land at Plataea and at sea at Mycale, been forced to endure a succession of humiliations? The man in the dirty cloak who wandered the streets asking the obvious seemed one ready, entirely flawed explanation.
Socrates understood that he had no chance. He lacked even the time to make a case. Defendants had only minutes to address a jury, until the water had run from one jar to another in the court clock:
(Ill. 4.4)
I am convinced that I never wronged anyone intentionally, but I cannot convince you of this, because we have so little time for discussion. If it was your practice, as it is with other nations, to give not one day but several to the hearing of capital trials, I believe that you might have been convinced; but under present conditions it is not so easy to dispose of grave allegations in a short space of time.
An Athenian courtroom was no forum for the discovery of the truth. It was a rapid encounter with a collection of the aged and one-legged who had not submitted their beliefs to rational examination and were waiting for the water to run from one jar to the other.
It must have been difficult to hold this in mind, it must have required the kind of strength accrued during years in conversation with ordinary Athenians: the strength, under certain circumstances, not to take the views of others seriously. Socrates was not wilful, he did not dismiss these views out of misanthropy, which would have contravened his faith in the potential for rationality in every human being. But he had been up at dawn for most of his life talking to Athenians; he knew how their minds worked and had seen that unfortunately they frequently didn’t, even if he hoped they would some day. He had observed their tendency to take positions on a whim and to follow accepted opinions without questioning them. It wasn’t arrogance to keep this before him at a moment of supreme opposition. He possessed the self-belief of a rational man who understands that his enemies are liable not to be thinking properly, even if he is far from claiming that his own thoughts are invariably sound. Their disapproval could kill him; it did not have to make him wrong.
Of course, he might have renounced his philosophy and saved his life. Even after he had been found guilty, he could have escaped the death penalty, but wasted the opportunity through intransigence. We should not look to Socrates for advice on escaping a death sentence; we should look to him as an extreme example of how to maintain confidence in an intelligent position which has met with illogical opposition.
The philosopher’s speech rose to an emotional finale:
If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place. The fact is, if I may put the point in a somewhat comical way, that I have been literally attached by God to our city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of a gadfly … If you take my advice you will spare my life. I suspect, however, that before long you will awake from your drowsing, and in your annoyance you will take Anytus’s advice and finish me off with a single slap; and then you will go on sleeping.
He was not mistaken. When the magistrate called for a second, final verdict, 360 members of the jury voted for the philosopher to be put to death. The jurors went home; the condemned man was escorted to prison.
5
It must have been dark and close, and the sounds coming up from the street would have included jeers from Athenians anticipating the end of the satyr-faced thinker. He would have been killed at once had the sentence not coincided with the annual Athenian mission to Delos, during which, tradition decreed, the city could not put anyone to death. Socrates’ good nature attracted the sympathy of the prison warder, who alleviated his last days by allowing him to receive visitors. A stream of them came: Phaedo, Crito, Crito’s son Critobulus, Apollodorus, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes, Ctesippus, Menexenus, Simmias, Cebes, Phaedondas, Euclides and Terpsion. They could not disguise their distress at seeing a man who had only ever displayed great kindness and curiosity towards others waiting to meet his end like a criminal.
(Ill. 5.1)
Though David’s canvas presented Socrates surrounded by devastated friends, we should remember that their devotion stood out in a sea of misunderstanding and hatred.
To counterpoint the mood in the prison cell and introduce variety, Diderot might have urged a few of the many prospective hemlock painters to capture the mood of other Athenians at the idea of Socrates’ death – which might have resulted in paintings with titles like Five Jurors Playing Cards after a Day in Court or The Accusers Finishing Dinner and Looking Forward to Bed. A painter with a taste for pathos could more plainly have chosen to title these scenes The Death of Socrates.
When the appointed day came, Socrates was alone in remaining calm. His wife and three children were brought to see him, but Xanthippe’s cries were so hysterical, Socrates asked that she be ushered away. His friends were quieter though no less tearful. Even the prison warder, who had seen many go to their deaths, was moved to address an awkward farewelclass="underline"
‘In your time here, I’ve known you to be the most generous and gentlest and best of men who have ever come to this place … You know the message I’ve come to bring: goodbye, then, and try to bear the inevitable as easily as you can.’ And with this he turned away in tears and went off.
Then came the executioner, bearing a cup of crushed hemlock:
When he saw the man Socrates said: ‘Well, my friend, you’re an expert in these things: what must one do?’ ‘Simply drink it,’ he said, ‘and walk about till a heaviness comes over your legs; then lie down, and it will act by itself.’ And with this he held out the cup to Socrates. He took it perfectly calmly … without a tremor or any change of colour or countenance … He pressed the cup to his lips, and drank it off with good humour and without the least distaste. Till then most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well [narrated by Phaedo]; but when we saw he was drinking, that he’d actually drunk it, we could do so no longer. In my own case, the tears came pouring out in spite of myself … Even before me, Crito had moved away when he was unable to restrain his tears. And Apollodorus, who even earlier had been continuously in tears, now burst forth into such a storm of weeping and grieving, that he made everyone present break down except Socrates himself.