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THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

PROFILES IN HISTORY

THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

HERO, VILLAIN, CHATTERBOX, SAINT

EMILY WILSON

PROFILE BOOKS

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Profile Books Ltd 3A Exmouth House Pine Street Exmouth Market London ecir ojh xvunv.profilebooks.com

13579108642

Typ>eset in Palatino by MacGuru Ltd

info@macguru.org. uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication mav be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval svstem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othervvise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this botik is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 861977625

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For Irmogen, who always asks 'Why?'

CONTENTS

Introduction:

The Man Who Drank the Hemlock

Socrates' Philosophy

Politics and Society

Plato and Others:

Who Created the Death of Socrates? 89

' A Greek Chatterb ox':

The Death of Socrates in the Roman Empire 119

Pain and Revelation:

The Death of Socrates and the Death of Jesus 141

The Apotheosis of Philosophy:

From Enlightenment to Revolution 170

Talk, Truth, Totalitarianism:

The Problem of Socrates in Modern Times 192

Further Reading 224

List of Illustrations 237

Acknowledgements 239

1 20 52

Index 241

Introduction

THE MAN WHO DRANK THE HEMLOCK

'The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.'

Why should we still care about a man who did little in his life except talk, and who drank poison in an Athenian prison in 399 bc - over 2,400 years ago?

Some stories shape the ways people think, dream and imagine. The death of Socrates has had a huge and almost continuous impact on western culture. The only death of comparable importance in our history is that of Jesus, with whom Socrates has often been compared. The aim of this book is to explain why the death of Socrates has mattered so much, over such an enormously long period of time and to so many different people.

The death of Socrates has always been controversial. The cultures of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain relevant not because we share the beliefs of the ancients, but because we continue to be preoccupied by many of their questions, worried by their anxieties, unable to resolve their dilemmas.

The trial of Socrates is the first case in recorded history when a democratic government, by due process of law, con- demned a person to death for his beliefs. Athens, one of the world's earliest democracies, raised Socrates, educated him and finally sentenced him to death, having found him guilty of religious unorthodoxy and corrupting the young. The trial and its outcome represent a political problem with which all subsequent democratic societies have struggled: how to deal with dissent.

Socrates is, for many people in the twenty-first century, a personal, intellectual and political hero, one of the most obvious 'good guys' of history. His death is often consid- ered a terrible blot on the reputation of democratic Athens; Socrates is seen as a victim of intolerance and oppression, a hero who struggled and died for civil liberties. We look back to John Stuart Mill's classic argument for toleration, On Liberty (1859), which uses the death of Socrates as the first example of the damage that can be done by a society that fails to allow full freedom of speech, thought and action to all individuals. Martin Luther King declared on two sepa- rate occasions (in 1963 and 1965) that 'academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practised disobedience'.

It is tempting to imagine Socrates on trial as precursor to a series of great heroes who stood up for their religious or scientific beliefs, and for conscience, against unjust govern- mental oppression and restriction. We may be in danger of forgetting that it is possible not to admire Socrates.

Socrates comes to us mediated through the work of others. He may be the most famous philosopher in world history, but he wrote nothing - except some versifications of Aesop's fables, while waiting in prison for the death sen- tence. He did not write a word of philosophy. The twentieth- century French theorist Jacques Derrida defined Socrates as 'the man who does not write'. Plato's Phaedrus implies that Socrates had theoretical objections to writing philosophy, since writing is always less truthful than the direct medium of speech. Socrates probably never gave official public lec- tures or founded a philosophical 'school'. He seems to have imagined philosophy as something close to conversation.

The fact that we cannot read Socrates is one of the main reasons for his enduring fascination.

To us, the most familiar ancient accounts of the life and death of Socrates are by Plato, Socrates' student and friend. We also have the Socratic works of another student, Xenophon, whose version of Socrates is very different (as we shall see). Both Xenophon and Plato wrote Socratic dialogues - imagi- nary or semi-imaginary conversations between Socrates and other real people, on philosophical topics. These dialogues bring Socrates to life with almost novelistic detail and inti- macy.

Plato tells us that Socrates compared himself to a gadfly, whose stings are necessary to keep a sleepy horse awake. The image is so familiar that we may fail to notice that it is fundamentally self-justificatory. A tiny gadfly could never seriously harm the horse it provokes, though the horse may, in annoyance or by clumsy inadvertence, squash the fly or throw the rider. By analogy, Socrates suggests that he pro- vides helpful stimulation but no actual threat to the city. If we accept Plato's image of Socrates as a mere gadfly, we must also share his view of Socrates as harmless - and ulti- mately beneficial - to the community that chose to kill him. Plato emphasises the devastating, tragic grief suffered by the master's followers at 'the death of our friend, who was the best and wisest and most just man of all those of his time whom we have known'.

But not everybody in Athens at the time was a friend or student of Socrates. Many people surely felt that the jury reached the right verdict. The earliest book ever written about the death of Socrates was not a homage by a friend, but a fictionalised version of the case for the prosecution: the Accusation of Socrates by Polycrates, composed only six or seven years after the trial (393 bc). This work is lost, so any account of it must be speculative, but Polycrates seems to have denounced Socrates as an enemy of democracy, a man who - as the original prosecution had claimed - 'cor- rupted the young', taught his pupils to question the existing government and tried to overthrow the laws and customs of Athens. For Polycrates, Socrates was something much more dangerous than a gadfly. He was a hostile parasite, or - to use a more modern simile - a virus, tainting the whole body politic. He represented a massive threat to democracy and all civil society. Modern visions of Socrates might be very different if more work by his enemies had survived.

Many writers and thinkers in the twentieth century have tried to disentangle the supposedly good, liberal, individual- istic Socrates from the distorting lens of his wicked, menda- cious pupil Plato, who has often been seen as a totalitarian, an enemy of free speech and a proto-fascist. A book pub- lished in Britain at the beginning of the Second World War (R. S. Stafford, Plato Today, 1939) implied that siding with Plato over Socrates would be like fighting for Hitler's Germany: 'It is Socrates, not Plato, whom we need.' To attack Socrates came to seem, in the twentieth century, like a political heresy. It was equivalent to defending fascism, or attacking democ- racy itself.