In an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of democracy at MetaFilter, someone commented: “A democracy killed Socrates”. I’ve heard this line of argument before (in fact, there are whole books on the subject – I.F. Stone’s The Death of Socrates, if it’s still in print), but I thought I’d post some thoughts about it here.
My position is that, in the context of the times, the Athenian democracy was at least arguably right to execute Socrates. The argument rests on three points:
1. The only account we have of his trial is a hagiographic account by his pupil, Plato;
2. Socrates was not a blameless genius; and
3. Even on Plato’s account, Socrates antagonised the jury at his trial.
The first point to make is that the only record of Socrates’s trial is that of Plato. We don’t know whether his account of the trial is accurate, and we don’t, of course, have the arguments of the accusers. Any reading based on the existing sources must be partial.
It’s also important to understand the context in which the trial happened (the second point). A few years before the trial, the Athenians had lost the long war with Sparta, and the democracy had been overthrown, to be replaced by the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, led by Kritias. The Tyrants put to death many supporters of the democracy, and were eventually overthrown in a brief but bloody civil war, whereupon the democracy was restored.
Kritias had been a pupil of Socrates, whose hostility to democracy was well-known. The charges that Socrates faced clearly referred to his relationship with Kritias (he was charged with ‘introducing new gods, and corrupting the youth’. Aischines, speaking a couple of decades later, addresses a jury saying something like (I don’t have the reference to hand), “Do you not remember how your fathers put to death the sophist Socrates, because he had been the teacher of Kritias and the Tyrants?”.
Imagine that the US Government was overthrown by a bloody neo-con dictatorship, and then – when the democracy had been restored at the cost of tens of thousands of lives – someone wanted to put William Kristol on trial.
Finally, even on Plato’s soft-focus account, Socrates antagonised his jury. He was found guilty by a small majority, whereupon the prosecution and the defence had to propose penalties. The prosecution proposed the death penalty, and Socrates proposed a tiny, insignificant fine – and even that under pressure from his friends. With those offers on the table, it is hardly surprising that a jury chose death – by a larger majority than they had condemned him.