Socrates' Apology: The Background

Author: * Sileinos Socrates - 1 Post on this thread out of 12 Posts sitewide.
Date: Apr 23, 2005 - 14:27

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates

In 404 B.C. the long war between Athens and Sparta ended with the crushing defeat of Athens. Chief among those held responsible for her humiliating defeat was the notorious Athenian playboy, Alcibiades. It was Alcibiades whose eloquence and enthusiasm had persuaded the Athenians to expand the war overseas with a great naval expedition to Sicily. That fateful adventure, led by Alcibiades himself as supreme commander, ended in disaster. So many ships were destroyed that the Athenians had barely enough left to defend their city and seaport against the Spartans. Moreover, just before that ill-fated expedition had sailed -- perhaps on the very eve of their departure -- a band of drunken revellers had committed impious acts of sacrilege against the merchants and middleclasses by mutilating their Herms: they had knocked off the erect phalluses from the stone statues of Hermes that many Athenians erected to guard their doorways and streetcorners. Alcibiades was suspected of having been one of the drunks who had emasculated the statues. Not only was Alcibiades blamed for the Sicilian Disaster and implicated in the Desecration of the Herms. Forseeing how the war would now end, that unprincipled opportunist betrayed his city into the hands of her enemies by showing the Spartans exactly where they could breach the long walls that protected Athens' lifeline, the road from the city itself to the Piraeus, her port on the Aegean sea. Once the Spartans penetrated and seized that lifeline, Athens was cut off and strangled and died, and the three-decades old war was over.

To prevent the democratic war party in Athens from regaining power, the Spartans now imposed on the city a repressive regime of thirty oligarchs ("oligarchy" = "rule by the few"). The Spartans trusted these wealthy Athenians because for years they had been trying to make a separate deal for peace with the Spartans. Led by the cruel Critias (see 32a-d), they were called "The Thirty Tyrants" because they reminded many Athenians of the tyrants who had ruled their city in earlier times, before they had become a democracy. Within eight months, however, the Thirty Tyrants were overthrown, the democratic party was back in power, and a movement was afoot to find and punish all those who had been associated with the tyrants.

One such collaborator or sympathizer -- or was he only a scapegoat? -- was the philosopher Socrates. In 399 B.C. Socrates was summoned before a jury of 500 Athenian citizens on charges of impiety and corruption of the city's youth. His chief accuser was the politician Anytus, assisted by the poet and religious zealot Meletos and the rhetorician Lycon (23e). Despite -- or because of -- his spirited and aggressive defense, Socrates was found guilty, and condemned to die by drinking a cup of hemlock poison (the still-prescribed powerful sedative konium, formerly extracted from a plant of the carrot family similar to Queen Ann's Lace). No one knows, even today, just why Socrates was so feared and hated by so many Athenians that they felt he had to be stilled or killed. But the tyrant Critias had been one of the rich young men who had attended his lectures and his devastating street-corner humiliations of prominent citizens and tradesmen. And the impious traitor Alcibiades (as even Plato would later admit in The Symposium) had been so close to Socrates that he had tried (vainly, says Plato) to become his lover.

Of the speech that Socrates gave at his trial to defend himself against the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth no written record remains, and perhaps none ever existed. Some time after his trial accounts of it were written by two of Socrates' students: by the general Xenophon in his memoirs or Memorabilia; and by the philosopher Plato, in his Apology of Socrates. (The word "apology," by the way, is simply the Greek legal term for a speech by the defense -- usually by the defendant himself -- and does not have the modern sense of an admission of guilt.) Though he claims to have been present at the trial (34a, 38b), Plato has his own agenda, which involves using his martyred teacher as a spokesman and apologist for his own ideas, including his famous Theory of Ideas. Even so, the focus of Plato's Apology is not on abstract ideas or theories but on the courage of Socrates as man and philosopher facing a crowd demanding that he shut up or die. At this moment of truth Plato shows his beloved teacher defending two famous but paradoxical claims: (l) the paradox of knowledge, in which Socrates is proved to be the wisest of men because he alone knows his own ignorance (in the things that really matter): Socrates is wise because he knows that he knows nothing (about virtue and justice and the like; 20e-23c). The second, and even more startling, claim is that the only good is doing good. and therefore (2) "nothing bad can happen to a good man" (41d, 30c, 40c-41d). Upon these two pillars of Socratic wisdom rested two later schools of philosophy. Upon the Socratic paradox that wisdom lies in knowing that one knows nothing rested the later philosophy of Scepticism. And upon the Socratic paradox that nothing bad can happen to a good man rested the later philosophy of Stoicism. The connecting link between these two unusual claims is Socrates' famous dictum that "The unexamined life is not worth living" (38a).

FOR FURTHER READING:
The numbers above in parentheses are the traditional paragraph and line numbers to Plato's Apology. To read it online, in Benjamin Jowett's classic translation, go here:
The Apology of Socrates
Available on-line is a line-by-line commentary on Plato's Apology by Kelley Ross, Commentary on the Apology of Socrates at www.friesian.com/apology
For a sympathetic treatment of Plato’s idealized portrait of his teacher, see A.E. Taylor’s classic little book, Socrates. For an attempt to reconstruct a more realistic Socrates based on a variety of historical sources, see Who Was Socrates? by the Canadian Plato scholar Albin T. Winspear.