The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [183]
And Socrates seems to be laughing at them.
For certain, there was much this philosopher did that sparked real pain in the hearts of democrats. Athens liked things cut and dried, as black and white as the balls in the kleroterion machine. Actions were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, gods were either officially introduced to the city or they were the demons of Athens’ enemies. This nebulous, knowing, exploratory, open-ended questioning that Socrates insisted on pursuing was just too troubling. It is perhaps because of this sense of discomfort, this aggravating, literally eccentric attitude, and not because of any ‘crimes’ he committed, that Athens’ antipathy towards Socrates mushroomed. Every juror here, don’t forget, has seen an empire won and lost, has crouched trembling in his mud-brick home as brother kills brother, has put all trust in this brilliant and burning new idea of ‘democracy’, and has watched as the hope of a commonly run city-state has wasted into personal ambition, blood-lust, arrogance, cynicism, tyranny. The gods are clearly enraged. Athena despises her own children. The milk-and-honey moment of the democracy has curdled. Athens has been brutalised.
Yet Socrates keeps about him an air of optimism, a sense of proportion, a moral certainty, an infuriating otherworldliness.
Meletus, Anytus and Lycon accuse Socrates of two abstract but fundamentally serious crimes:
Under oath Meletos the son of Meletos of Pitthos has brought a public action against Socrates the son of Sophroniskos of Alopeke and charged him with the following offences: Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by the state and of introducing other new divinities. Furthermore he is guilty of corrupting the young. Penalty proposed: capital punishment.9
Perhaps we should not be surprised that a city-state that we laud for its commitment to democracy, liberty and freedom of speech chooses to punish a maverick in their midst.
The verdict of the court is not directly recorded, but Plato has given us his version of Socrates’ response:
Many things contribute to my not being angry at what’s happened – that you voted against me – and the result was not unexpected by me, but I was much more surprised by the total number of votes on each side. For I didn’t think it would be such a small majority. I thought it would be much larger. Now it seems, if only thirty votes had gone the other way, I’d have been acquitted … So the gentleman [Meletus] asks that the penalty be death. Well, what shall I propose for you as a counter-penalty? Isn’t it clear that it should be what I deserve? So, what would that be, what do I deserve to suffer or to pay for not having led an inactive life and for not caring about what most people care for – making money, managing my affairs, being a general or a political leader and any of the different offices and factions in the city? I believe that I was really too good to go down that path and survive. I didn’t go where I would have been no help at all to you or to me, but went, instead, to each one of you in private to do the greatest good. As I say, I went there, undertaking to persuade each of you not to care about your possessions before you care about how you will be the best and wisest you can be, nor to care about what the city has, before you care about the city itself, and to care about other things in just the same way. Being this sort of person, what do I deserve to suffer? Something good, Athenians!10
The Athenians disagree. In the courtroom that May day, 399 BC, the jurors of Athens find Socrates guilty as charged.
51
AN APOLOGY
Athens’ religious courtroom, May 399 BC
SOCRATES: I’ll be judged the way a doctor would be, when prosecuted by a manufacturer of sweet-treats before a jury of young children.
Plato, Gorgias, 521e1
SOCRATES IS GUILTY.
But his