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| Sunday, 6 March 2005 |
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Famous trials that shook the world : The trial of Socrates by Lionel Wijesiri The Athens of Socrates' time (469 BC - 399 BC) has gone down in history as the very place where democracy and freedom of speech were born. Yet that city put Socrates, its most famous philosopher, to death presumably because its citizens did not like what he was teaching.
Yet he had been teaching there all his life, unmolested. Why did they wait until he was 70, and had only a few years to live, before executing him? The trial and execution of Socrates in Athens in 399 B.C. indeed puzzles historians. What could Socrates have said or done to prompt a jury of 510 Athenians to send him to his death? Finding an answer to the mystery of the trial of Socrates is complicated by the fact that the two surviving accounts of the defence (or apology) of Socrates both come from disciples of his, Plato and Xenophon. Historians suspect that Plato and Xenophon, intent on showing their master in a favourable light, failed to present in their accounts the most damning evidence against Socrates. Socrates received the usual Athenian education in music (which included literature), geometry, and gymnastics and thereafter practised for a time the craft of sculptor, working in his father's workshop. Admonished, as he tells us, by a divine call, he gave up his occupation in order to devote himself to the moral and intellectual reform of his fellow citizens. He believed himself destined to become "a sort of gadfly" to the Athenian State. He devoted himself to this mission with extraordinary zeal and singleness of purpose. He was the most unconventional of teachers but the least tactful. He delighted in assuming all sorts of rough and even vulgar mannerisms, and purposely shocked the more refined sensibilities of his fellow citizens. Socrates, despite his foundational place in the history of ideas, actually wrote nothing. He wrote nothing because he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing. His method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was wrong. Socrates himself never took a position; he radically and sceptically claimed to know nothing at all except that he knew nothing. He referred to this method of questioning as "elenchus", which means something like "cross-examination." The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one's position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and much of our worldview today. The Western notion of dialectic is somewhat Socratic in nature in that it is conceived of as an ongoing process. The opposition to him culminated in formal accusations of impiety and subversion of the existing moral traditions. In 399 B.C. Socrates was tried for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and for religious heresies; it is now believed that his arrest stemmed in particular from his influence on Alcibiades and Critias, who had betrayed Athens. The charges were that he refused to recognise the official gods of the state, that he introduced new gods and that he corrupted the young. There was a vivid political background to the trial, but this does not mean that the charges were a sham and that the trial was really a political one. Politics, religion and education were all intertwined in the matter, and, however you looked at it, Socrates was maybe saying the right things but at the wrong time. In 404, five years before the trial, a 27-year war between Athens and Sparta had ended with the defeat of Athens. The Athenian democracy was overthrown and replaced by a group of men, subsequently known as the Thirty Tyrants, who were installed by Sparta. In the course of earning their name, the Tyrants murdered so many people that they lasted for only a year, though it was not until 401 that democracy was fully restored. Understandably, the democrats were still feeling rather insecure in 399. There were plenty of reasons to be uneasy about the presence of Socrates in the city. Two close former associates of Socrates had been involved in the tyranny. One, Critias, was the leader of the Thirty and a particularly bloodthirsty man. The other, Alcibiades was a headstrong and arrogant aristocrat, who had earlier been accused of high jinks and profanity committed. Both of them defected and treacherously fought on the side of Sparta. None of this looked good for these men's former mentor. Socrates, however, met the accusations in a spirit of defiance and, instead of defending himself, provoked his opponents by a speech in the presence of his judges, in which he affirmed his innocence of all wrongdoing, and refused to retract or apologise for anything that he had said or done. He was condemned to drink the hemlock and, when the time came, met his fate with a calmness and dignity, which have earned for him a high place among those who suffered unjustly for conscience sake. Socrates was a man of great moral earnestness, and exemplified in his own life some of the noblest moral virtues. His frequent references to a 'divine voice' that inspired him at critical moments in his career are, perhaps, best explained by saying that they are simply his peculiar way of speaking about the promptings of his own conscience. They do not necessarily imply a pathological condition of his mind, nor a superstitious belief in the existence of a 'familiar demon'. One story has it that as Socrates was leaving the court after the judgement, a devoted but dim admirer moaned that the hardest thing for him to bear was that Socrates was being put to death unjustly. "What?" said Socrates, trying to comfort him. "Would you rather prefer if I was put to death justly?" |
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