The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [184]
Socrates’ accusers have spoken, and now the water-clock has been filled afresh to give the defendant his modest allotted time to put across his point of view. At last Socrates stands on the bema (the speaking platform), as he very self-consciously has not done throughout his time as a citizen in the Assembly. This trial was of the type known as agones timetoi – assessed trials; the court recognised that a level of guilt was in question and therefore the punishment should be equally calibrated. It was up to the man in the dock to suggest his own penalty. The philosopher who delighted in picking an argument now has to argue his way out of a death sentence.
Socrates has listened to the case against him – a fundamentally serious one, corruption of the young and denial of the city’s gods – in the religious court of Athens. Eye-witnesses (Plato himself was at the trial) tell us the place was a bear-pit that day: much heckling, jangling, scolding.
Once the hubbub has died down, Socrates has the chance to speak.
It is worth waiting to hear what the philosopher has to say: this is, after all, the man who has been accused not for his deeds, but for his words. And by all accounts, his clever command of the human tongue was exquisitely painful. Alcibiades once breathed that Socrates’ moderated voice and way with words was like that of ‘the music of Marsyas [a satyr fond of rivers]2 who only had to put his flute to his lips to bewitch mankind’.3
Now Socrates can outfox the sly gentlemen who have trapped him here.
But the speech that Socrates makes in response to his conviction (as recorded by Plato)4 is short and to the point. He states that he has lived his life for the benefit of Athens; he deserves reward, not punishment.
SOCRATES: I’m not a clever speaker at all – unless they call a clever speaker one who tells the truth. If this is what they mean, I’d agree that I’m an orator, though not the way they are. As I say, they’ve said almost nothing that’s true. But you’ll hear only the truth from me, and yet not, by god, Athenians, in beautifully crafted language like theirs, carefully arranged with words and phrases. Instead, you’ll hear things said by me without any planning, in words as they occur to me – for I assume that what I say is just – and none of you should expect anything else.5
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that the danger of written words is that they can’t answer back. And of course the doubly dangerous thing about speaking in public is that anyone can. Because now Socrates suggests an incendiary thing.
And so the man proposes the penalty of death. Well then, what shall I propose as an alternative? … Now what is fitting for a poor man who is your benefactor? … There is nothing, men of Athens, so fitting as that such a man be given his meals in the prytaneum … For he [an Olympic victor] makes you seem to be happy, while I make you happy in reality … So if I must propose a penalty in accordance with my deserts, I propose maintenance in the prytaneum.6
Commemorate me as if I were an Olympic hero, he says. Honour me as you do the very greatest in the city. Give me the hearty spread that you dish out to the prytany council. Free dinners in perpetuity at the state’s expense, in recognition of the good I have done – naturally that is what I deserve.
We can still feel the heat of the crowd’s rage in the court of the Archon Basileus as they shout Socrates down. The citizen-jurors hold the philosopher’s life in their hands, and yet he mocks them.
‘I beg of you gentlemen,’ says Socrates, ‘let me speak without interruption. He [Chaerephon] asked the god whether there was anyone in the world wiser than I, and the Pythia responded that in fact there was no one.’7
Socrates has already taunted the men – shifting on their jurors’ stone seats – with the suggestion that he is the wisest man in the world.
And, men of Athens, do not interrupt me with noise, even if I seem to you to be boasting; for the word which I speak is not mine, but the speaker to whom I shall refer it is a person of weight.