The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [182]
50
THE SCAPEGOAT
Religious court of the Archon Basileus, 399 BC
He was the first person who really talked about human life; and he was also the first philosopher who was condemned to death and executed.
Diogenes Laertius,
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Socrates, V1
SO WE ARRIVE AT THAT MAY morning in 399 BC. Socrates stands in front of 500 of the few remaining Athenian citizens and is charged with disrespect for the city’s gods, with introducing new divinities and with the corruption of the young. We cannot imagine the philosopher in a religious court on that day in 399 BC without recalling the heady, dreadful history that has been played out in the streets, the theatres and the homes all around the law-court. And knowing that bloody, disrupted history, we should be shocked by the apparent coolness with which Socrates treats his own trial.2
The philosopher is insouciant, apathetic. Standing there in the packed courtroom in his shabby clothes (no flaxen linen for him, although this would have been available), woven, almost certainly, in one of the gynaikeia of the city,3 the master of words appears diffident, as if he has no taste for this particular drama, as if he perceives it all to be a sham.
His naïvety is distasteful – it seems to mask some kind of misplaced superiority. Athens has prided itself on its legal system, on its ability to bring men to justice in front of their peers. But Socrates confesses that he has had no time for such legalities. Not only that, but the Athenians also know that he has cast aspersions on the lot-selection system itself – the very apparatus that has been the envy of the known world and has kept the democracy a democracy for so long.
‘But, by god,’ the accuser said, ‘he made his companions despise the established law, saying that it was foolish to establish the rulers of the city by lot, and that no one would want to make use of a captain chosen by lot, or a builder, or a flute-player, or any other arts, any of which do far less damage when their practitioners make a mistake than do those who make a mistake about affairs of the city.’ And such arguments, the accuser said, raised up young men to look down on the established constitution, and made them violent.4
In the heads of the Greeks, this disdain was doubly offensive. They believed it was the power of the gods that had guided those white and black balls in the kleroterion to their slot. Nothing happened during this age and in this land without the gods’ say-so. The kleroterion machine was not just an agent of random selection, but of potent kleromancy – a divine, magical process that should not be mocked.
And then, despite the fact that Socrates has spent more than sixty years in Athenian society, the philosopher, in Plato’s version of events, informs the court of a peculiar anomaly:
The fact is that this is the first time I have come before the court, even though I am seventy years old. I am therefore an utter foreigner as far as courtroom speaking goes. So now I make what I think is a fair request of you: disregard my manner of speaking. Pardon me as I speak in that manner in which I have been raised, just as you would if I really were a foreigner.5
Gallingly, this cocky philosopher doesn’t seem to take the privilege of a fair trial seriously.6 The man who is accused of poisoning democracy with words has the chance to use words in self-defence, yet he acts the dolt, the innocent. He refuses to play word-games. Socrates’ professed ignorance of typical democratic activity might have been endearing to start off with, but by this stage in his life, and with the troubled back-story of Athens, it has become intensely infuriating.7 Here were clod-footed deme-men, who for the first time in human history had been given the chance to be proactive politicians, and someone like Socrates cracks a gag about not knowing how to vote when he serves a term on the Boule, the council.8 Here were men who had lost fathers, brothers, sons in the recent civil wars when oligarch death-squads