Socrates: A Man for Our Times (12 page)

VI

The Demoralization of Athens and the Death of Socrates

S
ocrates lived in a relatively open society, Athens, and was able to pursue his quest for wisdom and virtue and “examine” young and old, rich and poor, for the best part of half a century in complete freedom. There is no record of the authorities trying to inhibit his teaching or philosophizing at the time, though what he taught, especially on the subject of justice and wrongdoing, was often contrary to the Athenian consensus, and must have shocked the right-thinking. Nevertheless, his career as a teacher was not without its dangers. Athens was the most successful of the Greek city-states in terms of creating wealth, art, and ideas. For much of the fifth century B.C., it was the cultural capital of the civilized world. But because of its success, it was a hazardous place, both for politicians and for those who lived by their intellects. Intense competition generated artistic and cerebral innovation on a scale never before seen in history, but also envy, spite, personal jealousies, and vendettas. These were most notable among the elite but the citizens as a whole were notoriously volatile, critical of their leaders and all prominent persons, easily swayed, and vengeful toward those who failed in public enterprises or angered them by what they conceived as arrogance or pretension. It was a celebrity society in which celebrities could be torn to pieces as well as exalted. In some ways it was like New York, “the quintessential fast-track city,” as Richard Nixon called it. In Athens, success was intoxicating but failure heavily punished.

Moreover, during the last phase of Socrates’ life, Athens was a demoralized place that could suddenly turn ugly. In the Acropolis and the Agora, there was the strong if intermittent scent of the witch hunt. The sunlit years of the Periclean ascendancy never returned. Darkness fell with the great plague of 430 B.C., which killed most of Pericles’ own family and eventually him. The plague destroyed the city’s once peerless self-confidence. It appeared to be a judgment on Athenian hubris. It also decimated the ranks of the elite, destroying some of its ablest members. It had a perceptible effect on Athens’s military and naval manpower, making it far more difficult to replace battle losses. The days when Athens’s population was perceptibly growing were over. The plague reduced it by a quarter. There was little sign of recovery in Socrates’ lifetime.

No leader was found with the dynamic energy and vision to replace Pericles, none with the consistency of purpose to wage successfully the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) he had undertaken. Leadership fell into volatile and irresponsible hands. First came Cleon, the brutal demagogue, who in 422 invaded Thrace but, after some initial successes, was defeated and slain at Amphipolis. There were periodic truces and long pauses when both Sparta and Athens licked their wounds. Then Alcibiades, Socrates’ friend and would-be lover, came to the helm. He was not so much a demagogue as an adventurer, whose ultimate loyalty was to himself. In 416–415 B.C., he vociferously supported a grandiose plan to send a naval and military expedition to Sicily to subdue Sparta’s important ally, Syracuse. The plan was opposed by the general Nicias (470–413 B.C.), who had emerged as a moderate in opposition to Cleon and was generally in favor of peace. But the plan was adopted nevertheless, and both Nicias and Alcibiades appointed to command, an unwise arrangement, to put it mildly. The expedition was large and splendidly equipped—“the most magnificent ever dispatched from Athens,” according to Thucydides. Socrates watched the preparations with misgivings. He was never a pacifist and had fought heroically for Athens in his day, but he thought war was usually unwise and the struggle to the death with Sparta suicidal for Greece, as indeed it proved. The fact that both Alcibiades and Nicias were friends of his made his position difficult.

In the event Alcibiades was soon recalled to Athens to face charges of polluting the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important of the private cults at Athens. This was typical of the riotous, drunken behavior in which he and his rich friends indulged. No contemporary writer tells us what exactly Alcibiades and his gang did or why they did it, and the whole business is as much a puzzle to me as the mysteries themselves. Fearing conviction and execution, Alcibiades then deserted Athens and went to Sparta to give advice on how they could destroy the expedition he himself had advocated, planned, and commanded. But he soon quarreled with the Spartans, too, and thereafter oscillated between the two sides in the war until he was murdered in Phrygia in 404 B.C. As he never failed to boast about his relationship with Socrates, and what he had learned from him, he was a serious embarrassment—and a danger—to the old philosopher, now in his middle sixties.

Nicias, too, proved an embarrassment, for in action he was an indecisive general, given to trusting soothsayers and diviners rather than his own military instincts. Despite reinforcements, the Sicilian expedition ended in total disaster, the soldiers slaughtered or left to starve to death in the quarries outside Syracuse, and the commanders, including Nicias, executed. It was the greatest military debacle in the entire history of Athens, an unmitigated defeat redeemed only by the magnificent prose in which Thucydides relates it.

The war dragged on, Athens making valiant but increasingly desperate, even despairing, efforts to rebuild a navy, to ensure food supplies, and to prevent the Spartans from destroying what was left of her empire. In 406 B.C., an Athenian fleet won the victory of Arginusae, so called after the islets between the major island of Lesbos and the mainland of Asia. This was an important success for the beleaguered city, but it was frittered away by the Athenian politicians. The losses on both sides had been heavy. The Spartan fleet was destroyed, but Athens lost twenty-five ships and over four thousand mariners. Instead of congratulating the commanders on their success, the politicians decided to indict the naval commanders for culpable negligence in not doing enough to save the lives of their men. The prosecution was outrageous in itself, but it was further marred by two irregularities. First, the politicians proceeded by a process in which the verdict was reached not by a sworn jury but by a simple vote in the Assembly of citizens. This made it the equivalent of the notorious Bill of Attainder process which, in late Plantagenet and Tudor England, cost so many innocent men and women their heads. Second, the Assembly was forbidden to try the eight accused commanders individually but was told to judge them collectively by a single vote. This was against one of the central principles of Athenian jurisprudence and was plainly unlawful.

Socrates, as it happened, was directly involved in this scandalous proceeding. Though declining politics, he always did his constitutional duty as a law-abiding citizen, and this involved serving from time to time in the Senate of Five Hundred, and on this occasion on the committee of procedure, or
prytanes
, which decided the agenda for the Assembly. The committee, no doubt prompted by Socrates, protested the illegality and unconstitutionality of the proceedings. But the prosecuting politicians, backed by a mob formed by the families of the dead sailors, bullied the committee members, threatening to add their names to the indictment and so have them condemned and executed. One by one, the committee members gave way. Socrates alone continued to protest and refused to play any part in a legal farce that in effect was mob law. This took courage, and he was lucky to escape with his life. All the commanders were condemned en bloc, and six were promptly executed (two had escaped). In this desecration of Athenian justice, Socrates alone had upheld the rule of law.

Three years later, he again took a solitary stand against moral and legal anarchy. Athenian reverses resumed after the fleeting victory of Arginusae; the brutal, arrogant, but highly efficient Spartan commander, Lysander, proved invincible on both land and sea. In 405 B.C., he destroyed what remained of the Athenian navy at Aegospotami and blockaded the port of Piraeus, starving the Athenians and forcing them to capitulate in the spring of 404 B.C. As was his practice in taking over Athenian colonies and allies, he suspended the existing democratic constitution of Athens, replacing it by what we would call a junta of oligarchic aristocrats. This was led by Critias, a man well known to Socrates and first cousin to Plato’s mother. In concert with Theramenes, who led the more moderate antidemocrats, he asked Lysander, whose troops now occupied the Acropolis, for help. Lysander forced the Assembly to suspend the constitution, draw up a new one, and appoint a body of Thirty Tyrants to rule the city. The Thirty, with Critias at their head, seized dictatorial power. They appointed a new executive under their control, set up a board of ten to rule Piraeus, removed democrats from all offices, and began a reign of terror against their enemies, personal and political. Theramenes begged Critias to appoint a new Assembly to give the regime legitimacy, and a list of 3,000 citizens was drawn up but never published. In the end, Critias executed Theramenes, together with an estimated 1,500 other prominent opponents. Others were exiled, and most of the remainder fled.

Thus Athens acquired a Vichy-style regime, sustained in power by the Spartan troops in the Acropolis, playing the role of the Nazis. Socrates was obviously unhappy about it all. Not only was Critias his former pupil, but so was Charmides, one of his chief associates, the brother of Plato’s mother. However, once the executions began, he denounced them publicly as unjust and unlawful. According to Xenophon, he was summoned before the Thirty and told to cease conversing with the young men immediately. He refused and was dismissed by Critias with threats. Critias might have had him executed. But his tactic, rather, was to get Socrates involved in the acts of the regime and to share its moral responsibilities. Socrates was instructed, with four other citizens, to seize a wealthy man, Leon of Salamis, confiscate his property, then kill him. The four obeyed, and Leon was, in fact, murdered. Socrates refused to have any part in this atrocity and simply went home. He expected to be arrested there and executed in his turn. He might have fled from Athens like so many others, but nothing would persuade him to leave his beloved city. It was now near the end of the year, and events turned against Critias. He had been unable to establish his authority over Piraeus, where many armed democrats had gathered. He went down there in person to see what he could do and was killed in a battle with the exiles under Thrasybulus. His associates were now deposed by the moderates, who negotiated terms with the democrats. The democratic system was restored in the summer of 403 B.C., and the rump of the Tyrants fled to Eleusis, where they were massacred three years later.

Thus ended this woeful episode in Greek history, leaving Socrates desolate and shaken but with his honor intact. He was, however, in some ways a marked man, being associated with three politicians who in these years of Athenian failure and disgrace had been credited by the citizenry with much of the blame for it—Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides. All three figure largely in Plato’s writings about Socrates, and Charmides had a dialogue named after him: He it was whom Socrates, unusually, encouraged to enter politics, and this was known. I think it unlikely that Critias, who was only nine years younger than Socrates, had been a pupil of his in the usual sense, but all three had come under his influence, and this was certainly known too. Now all three were dead, but none had been punished, strictly speaking, under Athenian law, after due process. So justice was unsatisfied. We must remember that about 1,500 Athenians had been judicially murdered or simply slain without any kind of trial, and their families and dependents were clamoring for revenge. Who was to be thrown to them? What about Socrates? Was he not the man who had argued against revenge as justice? And said that retaliation was wrong? All the more reason why he should suffer now.

One of the defects of the Athenian system of justice was that no clear distinction was made between the public and private interest in seeking the prosecution of wrongdoers. The state could, and did, prosecute. But so could private individuals, on behalf of the public. And they frequently did so. The law did not differentiate between a public crime and a private tort (wrong) as in England and the United States. Nor were there separate courts to underline the difference between public and private motivations in seeking legal redress. If, in the case of Socrates, matters had been left to the state authorities, it is most probable that he would have been left alone. The state had enough to do without taking on an old man in his late sixties. There had been revolution and counter-revolution in the law no less than in the Athenian polity. When the democrats returned to power, one of their first acts was to appoint a commission to revise and codify the entire body of law, which had been left in confusion by the Thirty Tyrants and their Spartan masters. It did not finish its work until the year 400 B.C. There were many private suits pending, launched by the families of the murdered victims, to recover their confiscated property. The courts were crammed with angry and frustrated litigants.

But there were in Athens men who conceived it their moral duty to punish Socrates or at least force him to leave Athens. One such was Anytus, a wealthy democrat who claimed he was acting from the highest motives in prosecuting Socrates. Plato, in
Meno
, calls him a well-bred man. But he was not well educated. He did not distinguish between Socrates and the Sophists, and his hatred of Sophists was passionate. In all likelihood, his mind on this topic had been shaped by Aristophanes’
Clouds,
which not only presents Socrates as a Sophist but accuses him of disgraceful and dishonest behavior. It is an instance of the dangers of unbridled and mendacious “satire.” Anytus was not exactly the model of upright probity he claimed to be. He had been a general who in 409 B.C. had failed to prevent the loss of Pylos. He was threatened with prosecution but escaped by bribery. Perhaps for this reason he did not constitute himself the principal prosecutor.