HISTORY: Why Socrates DiedBy Robin Waterfield, Faber & Faber, 253pp. £20
TOWARDS THE evening of a spring day in Athens in the year 399BC, an elderly man, poorly-dressed, stoutish, with a conspicuously ugly but interesting face, stood in the dock of the people’s court, before a jury of 501 of his fellow-citizens. He had just been condemned to death “for impiety and corrupting the youth”, and was asked by the presiding magistrate whether (as was the custom in Athenian law) he wished to propose an alternative penalty for himself, on which the jury would then vote, in the second stage of the proceedings.
Normally the defendant in such circumstances would propose a large fine, and often get away with it, but Socrates (for it was he), surveying the court with his mischievous, pop-eyed gaze, declared that, in his view, his “services” to the Athenian people, especially to the young, merited “free meals for the rest of his life in the Town Hall” – the award customarily given to Olympic victors. The jury voted to confirm the death penalty.
And so one of the most remarkable philosophers who ever lived died in prison, by the (self-inflicted) means of drinking hemlock – and, mainly thanks to the literary genius of his chief disciple, Plato, the Athenian democracy has had to bear the disgrace ever since.
What Robin Waterfield, the distinguished translator of Plato (and of many other Classical Greek authors), has done, in this most incisive and readable book, is to explore the historical and sociological background to what has always seemed a disgraceful (and rather uncharacteristic) act of intolerance by the Athenian state.
He takes a fairly large swing at the topic, it must be said, by devoting the whole centre of the book, The War Years (pp. 51-136) to an account of the origins and course of the Peloponnesian War, the great war of Athens with Sparta (and their allies on either side) which convulsed the Greek world from 431 to 404 BC, causing immense destruction and trauma in Athenian society in particular.
I have been having to concern myself with this event, mainly through Thucydides’s immortal account of it, for the last 60 years or so, but Waterfield certainly managed to keep my interest, and even provide me with some new insights, and he will certainly do the same for the majority of readers.
It has been customary, over the last half-century – and with much justification – to make comparisons between the ideological struggle of Athens and Sparta, and the late and unlamented Cold War between Russia and the West. It is in the midst of this ideological struggle that the career of Socrates must be situated.
IF WE ASKhow the Athenian people could have behaved so harshly to this apparently harmless, rather jolly old boy, it helps to consider this historical context. To put ourselves into the shoes of the average indignant parent or outraged politician of the later fifth century in Athens, one must think of the 1960s in the Western world, when a new generation was shaking off the traditions and ideals of their elders, and turning, mostly peacably but sometimes violently, to new ideas and odd-sounding gurus.
I don’t suppose the names Herbert Marcuse or Timothy Leary ring much of a bell now, but when I was in Berkeley, California, in the mid-1960s they certainly did, and the reputation of Socrates among the older generation in Athens in the 420s and 410s would be comparable to a mix of them both – though, admittedly, without the LSD.
But in the end no one really nasty emerged from the cauldron of disaffected youth in California (apart, perhaps, from Charles Manson) – though you had such phenomena as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades in Europe. No one, though, managed to bring down a western state.
This, however, was the case in Athens, in the persons of two characters who were quite closely associated with Socrates: the flamboyant and self-willed young aristocrat Alcibiades, and the sinister, right-wing intellectual Critias (who, as it happens, was a first cousin of Plato’s mother). Alcibiades ended up doing more than anyone to bring about a Spartan victory in the war; and Critias headed up a bloodsoaked puppet regime of pro-Spartan oligarchs for a short time after Athens’s defeat in 404.
Plato and other followers of Socrates, such as Xenophon, do not seek to deny these connections, but do try to play them down – Alcibiades abandons Socrates before he learns virtue, and Critias never really got on with him at all. But in the Athenian mind they were closely connected, and it was inevitable that in the aftermath of the war, once democracy has been restored, someone was going to go after Socrates in the courts – despite the amnesty that had been declared.
All this Waterfield paints for us in a manner both learned and lively. He harbours a great affection for Socrates, as do we all, but he has no illusions as to the undemocratic tendencies of his teaching.
John Dillon is regius professor of Greek (Emeritus) in Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent works include
The Greek Sophists
(2003) and
Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece
(2004)