The plea makes a complex rhetorical gesture. Socrates claims to be a foreigner in his own city, even to the extent of not speaking the Attic dialect. But even at this moment, he draws attention to his mastery of Athenian oratory - begin- ning with the cliched rhetorical trope, 'Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking ...'
Like later public intellectuals, Socrates was both an insider and an outsider in his own society. Perhaps it was for this threat to Athenian civic identity, as much as anything else, that the jury decided to put him to death.
dangerous enemies, dangerous friends
Socrates spent his whole life in a city that was, even by modern standards, large. In the whole state of Athens, including the countryside that surrounded the centre (and was included in the 'city-state' or polis), there were probably about 250,000 people. The number of free-born males who counted as citizens was far smaller - perhaps only about 12 per cent of the total population.
Socrates seems to have been well known to every- body in this bustling community - citizen and non-citizen alike. He was a celebrity, familiar from his reputation, his image and his notorious sayings. But he was also person- ally acquainted with a vast number of his contemporar- ies. Aristophanes parodies Socrates and his followers in no fewer than four plays. We should remember that, in an age without television, a joke about Socrates' appearance would hardly be funny for somebody who had not seen him in the flesh. Many Athenians - including those who sat on the jury that condemned him to death - must have seen the living man walking and talking in the marketplace. Many must have had conversations with him. Socrates loved talking, and talked to as many different people as he could. The
Athenians did not have to rely on Aristophanes to form their opinion of Socrates.
At the time of his death, Socrates had never left his home town, apart from his three military expeditions. He rarely travelled even as far as the Athenian port of Piraeus, or to the Athenian countryside. 'I am a lover of learning', he told a friend on a rare trip to the country. 'Trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the city do' (Plato, Phaedrus 23od). The crowded agora - the marketplace, which was the hub of the city - was Socrates' life-blood.
In nineteenth-century terms, he was a flaneur rather than an academic in an ivory tower. As Xenophon tells us, 'Socrates spent his whole life in the open air. In the early morning he used to go to the public arcades and gymnasi- ums; around lunch-time he was to be seen in the market; and for the rest of the day, he always used to go wherever there was the greatest crowd of people' (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.10). His students came from all walks of society. Socrates talked to boys, generals, poets, farmers, metics, slaves - even, occasionally, women.
Socrates' death, then, cannot be fully understood without an account of his personal relationships. He may have been killed for his beliefs. But he was also killed because of the people he knew.
Under Athenian law, prosecutions were always brought by individual citizens. There was no such thing as a trial brought by the city - unlike in the US or the UK, where the prosecution is often 'The People' or 'The Crown'. It was a system in which personal grievances might matter a great deal. Socrates had three prosecutors: the main instigator of the trial, Meletus, and two companions, Lycon and Anytus. The three represented three different professions that had cause to hate Socrates: the poets, the politicians and the artisans. These were all groups whose traditional claims to wisdom the philosopher had questioned. It seems likely that all three prosecutors also had private reasons for bearing a grudge against him.
We know little about the main prosecutor, Meletus. He was young and Socrates had never met him before the trial. Plato comments on his dishevelled appearance: he had long hair, a hook nose and a straggly beard. There is a certain amount of confusion about the man's identity, because several other people in fifth-century Athens were also called Meletus - including the prosecutor's father, a poet who wrote drinking songs and plays. It is possible that Socrates had been rude to him. In Plato's account of the trial, Socrates describes how he cross-examined the poets - in front of a crowd of bystanders - and proved that they had no under- standing of the meaning of their own best work. It would be unsurprising if a poet who had suffered this treatment felt a little upset, especially if such a public humiliation damaged the market for his work. Perhaps, then, Meletus junior pros- ecuted Socrates to avenge his father.
We know a little more about Lycon, a politician who vehemently defended democracy. Lycon may have simply condemned Socrates for his political beliefs. But it is quite likely that he had personal reasons for the prosecution too. Socrates knew both Lycon and his son, a body-builder called Autolycus. Autolycus was murdered by the Thirty Tyrants. As we have seen, Socrates made a partial stand against the Thirty on at least one occasion. But he may well have been associated with the overthrowing of democracy. In this way, Lycon might have held Socrates partially responsible for his son's death.
In the case of Meletus and Lycon, the evidence is scanty. With the third prosecutor, Anytus, we are on firmer ground. Anytus was an enthusiastic defender of democracy, but also had personal reasons to hate Socrates. Xenophon tells us in some detail about his grudge. Anytus was employed in a tannery. Socrates warned Anytus not to confine his son's education to leather working and predicted that the son would not continue in the father's trade. Without a good supervisor, he said, the boy would go to the bad. Anytus was understandably bitter about Socrates' intervention.
There may have been any number of similar grudges against Socrates held by members of the jury. Most of his contemporaries would not have agreed with his view that criticism was a kind of social service. Socrates was quite capable of being offensive, abrasive and aggressive.
Socrates' popularity among his own followers may well have contributed to the hostility of those outside the group. Cult leaders, even leaders of a secular cult, threaten the integrity of a society. People may have feared that Socrates' disciples were loyal to Socrates before the city of Athens.
Those outside the circle may have known little about Socrates' beliefs. But they knew who was in and who was out, and Socrates' associates did not bring him credit. His circle included Phaedo, who may have been a foreign aristo- crat by birth, but had been captured in war and was working as a prostitute when Socrates asked a rich friend to secure his release; and a woman called Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, who was commonly, albeit unjustly, said to run a brothel. We are told that she taught Socrates rhetoric and matchmak- ing. Socrates was associated, then, with rich, morally corrupt toffs as well as with concubines and slaves.
One of Socrates' closest friends was a man called
Chaerophon. It was he who consulted the Delphic oracle about Socrates' wisdom, and whom Aristophanes presents as the deputy leader of Socrates' philosophical school, the Thinkery. He was mocked as creepy, dirty and faddish by the comic poets. Aristophanes compares him to a bat.
Socrates was said to have taught the avant-garde play- wright Euripides. Although it is probably untrue that Euripides actually studied with Socrates, people certainly perceived a connection between them. Socrates was imag- ined to be at the root of all the social and intellectual changes of the latter decades of the century. In his comedy the Frogs, composed five years before Socrates' death, Aristophanes associated both Socrates and Euripides with the new-fangled rejection of true expertise, in favour of mere blabbermouth- ing and rhetoric: