The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [31]
And so we might expect Socrates to be more than a little nervous about his impending trial.
Yet Xenophon reports that the old philosopher spends no time whatsoever fussing about what he will say to the jury. He accepts in the pre-trial examination that the charges are just (if not justified), and looks forward to the trial proper with an academic interest. Here’s the exchange between Socrates and a friend of his, Hermogenes, written in the form of a dramatic dialogue – as Plato might have set it down.
HERMOGENES: Is it not necessary to consider, Socrates, something you can say to defend yourself?
SOCRATES: Do I not seem to you to have spent my whole life preparing my own defence?
HERMOGENES: How?
SOCRATES: By going through life doing nothing unjust. I think that is the greatest defence.
HERMOGENES: Do you not see how often the Athenian court is misled by a speech into putting to death one who has done no injustice, and how often one who has committed an injustice, has given a speech that moved the court to pity, or by speaking in a clever way, has been acquitted.
SOCRATES: Yes, by Zeus, and twice now I have attempted to think about my defence but my divinity opposes me.21
For weeks now Socrates himself, his friends, Crito, Phaedo and Plato amongst them, priests, traders, scampering low-born children (here illegally; remember you had to be over eighteen, a fully-fledged citizen to show your face in the Agora22) coming and going at their liberty – they would all have had the chance to see what Socrates was said to have done, the crimes he needed to defend himself against. Written in deep red on a plaster wall, Socrates’ full charges were set out:
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.23
Shading their eyes to pick out the words as they headed for home, drinking in the cool of the evening air, Athenians must have tut-tutted at such a thing.
And now, in May, six to eight weeks on from the pre-trial, at the Archon’s religious court, at the outset of the trial itself, with so many gathered in one place and with the sun climbing, the atmosphere would have been closer, fuggish, expectant. Socrates, we are given to understand, is walking unprepared into the packed courtroom. Even so, the philosopher must surely have read his publicly shaming charges, heard them whispered by the gossips of the city and bemoaned by his friends, and now he will hear them repeated again. The burning question Athens must have asked itself is: how will the philosopher choose to respond?
5
THE FIRST BLOOD SACRIFICE
Religious law-court, Athens, May 399 BC
If you think that by killing people you’ll put a stop to anyone criticising you because you don’t live as you should, you’re not thinking clearly … The best and easiest course is not to restrain others, but instead to do what you need to do to be as good as possible.
Plato, Apology, 39d1
A BLOOD SACRIFICE STARTED THE LEGALITIES in earnest.
Today the oath stone is the only thing that feels secure in the boggy rectangle of the old religious court, the Stoa Basileios; archaeologists have to lay planks to cross safely. Marshy grass clumps around the few, marooned, listing, classical remains; a rude train from the leafy suburb of Kifissia to