The Trial of Socrates Revisited

Abstract

Different sorts of people have been revisiting the trial of Socrates for almost 2,500 years: philosophers, political theorists, politicians, jurists, historians, journalists and artists. Each has his or her own agenda for reconstructing the motives of the prosecution, the thinking of the jurors, and the apparently perverse behaviour of Socrates himself. This paper examines some of the more influential approaches to Socrates (including those of his contemporaries, Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes), and attempts to set them in appropriate contexts. By way of a conclusion, there is an exploration of the background and context to the trial itself, taking into account recent work on Athenian law, religion and punishment, closing with an attempt to explain the significance of the likely location of the law-court, within the Agora or city square of Athens.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of European Review of History for offering space for this paper, the original of which was written for the Manchester conference ‘The Trial in History’. Although I have tried to make this version accessible to non-Classicists (detailed material and argument is relegated to the footnotes), occasional reference may be needed to the entries in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edn) and the glossary at the back of Stephen Todd's Shape of Athenian Law.

The photographs of the Agora are the painstaking work of Anita White. The plan of the Agora is reproduced by permission of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I am grateful to Stephen Todd and David Sedley for their usual perceptive comments; and also to the thousand or so of my pupils who, over the past twenty years, have begun their encounter with classical antiquity by answering the question: ‘Why did the Athenians Put Socrates to Death?’ If the question has not changed, that is not true of their answers.

Notes

[67] For the physical appearance of the courts, see Boegehold (The Lawcourts at Athens, 9–16, 91–113, 192–208).

[68] For the benches as a possible court: Boegehold, ‘Philocleon's Court’ (cf. Lawcourts at Athens, 95). But was there actually a fifth bench? Did the jury at the trial of Socrates number 500? Might this have been the meeting place of the Boule of 500? Nothing in ancient topography is ever straightforward: see Millett, ‘Encounters in the Agora’, 217–22.

[1] Translation with valuable introduction and commentary by Fisher, Against Timarchos; Greek text with facing translation in the Loeb edition by Adams, Aeschines. By convention, classical texts are cited according to agreed terms of reference: ‘Dem. XIX.284’ in the text refers to section (§) 284 of the nineteenth speech by Demosthenes, entitled On the False Embassy. Essential information about procedure in an Athenian court of law, including editing of speeches after delivery, is supplied in the succeeding paper by Todd (pp. 64–66). The logic of punishing homosexual prostitution by disenfranchisement is provided by Aeschines (§29): ‘a person who had sold his own body for others to treat as they pleased would have no hesitation in selling the interests of the community as a whole’. For the idea of transgressive behaviour across sex, politics and marketing: Davidson, ‘Fish, Sex and Revolution’; for Against Timarchos as a key text on Athenian gender and sexuality: Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 13–14, 19–109; Fisher, Against Timarchos, 25–67.

[2] The dangers of saying something to jurors which is beyond their experience are well demonstrated by what might be termed the ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover syndrome’ (‘Is it even a book you would want your wife or your servants to read?’): see Todd, ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Attic Orators’.

[3] Available in the Loeb edition, translated by Fowler, Plato; alternatively as a Penguin Classic, with helpful introduction and notes, by Tredennick & Tarrant, Last Days of Socrates; editions and commentaries: Burnet, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology and Crito; Stokes, Plato, Apology. In addition to a version of the Apology, Brickhouse & Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, usefully translate a range of Socratic texts and include a selection of relevant modern writings.

[4] According to Burnyeat (‘Impiety of Socrates’, 137), ‘the Apology is one long counter-indictment charging the Athenians with rampant injustice.’ To this effect he cites a telling passage from an ancient but anonymous and undated rhetorical treatise On Figured Speeches: ‘The Apology has as its primary purpose an apology… but it is also an accusation of the Athenians…. And the bitterness of the accusation is concealed by the moderation of the apology; for the things spoken in self-defence are an accusation of the Athenians….’.

[5] Half a talent (three thousand drachmas) was a substantial sum: enough to pay the wages of a skilled workman for ten years or so; for further equivalencies see Brickhouse & Smith, Socrates on Trial, 226–27; Trial and Execution of Socrates, 3. By comparison, Socrates' original, unassisted offer of a one-hundred-drachma fine was modest to say the least. Perhaps an implied contrast is intended with the five hundred drachmas Socrates reports Kallias as having paid for Evenos of Paros to teach his sons (20B); to say nothing of the inflated fees (10 000 drachmas and the like) allegedly charged by the leading Sophists: see Kerferd, Sophistic Movement, 27–28. For a different reading of the counter-penalty (even one hundred drachmas as a large sum for Socrates): Reeve, Socrates in the Apology, 169–76.

[6] Figures in the text for numbers of votes cast depend on three assumptions: (i) a jury of 500 (secure only for the later fourth century); (ii) Diogenes Laertius (II.41), from the third century ad, being wrong in stating that Socrates was found guilty by a majority of 281 votes; (iii) then (II.42) being correct in stating that there were eighty more votes for death than for guilt (see Todd nn.13, 26; Brickhouse & Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, 4).

[7] For the four dialogues, see Tredennick & Tarrant, Last Days of Socrates; Brickhouse & Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, 24–80. Euthyphro shows Socrates attending on an official to acknowledge the charge laid against him by Meletos (a discussion about piety ensues); Crito has Socrates refuse an offer by his friend to arrange his escape from prison (should one always obey the laws?); in the Phaedo (after contemplating the immortality of the soul) Socrates drinks the hemlock. The parody by Tony Hancock appears close to the beginning of ‘The Impressionist’ (broadcast December 1959). Life imitates art: Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, 38, tells of the ‘philosophical general’ Fellgiebel who, awaiting execution in the aftermath of the bomb plot of 1944 against Hitler, ‘spent his last hours discussing with his adjutant the immortality of the soul.’

[8] Burnyeat, ‘Impiety of Socrates’, 1. Burnet (Plato's Euthyphro, Apology and Crito, 63–66; cf. Plato's Phaedo, ix–lvi) collects earlier expressions of the essential veracity of the Platonic Apology. Reeve (Socrates in the Apology, ix) in his acute analysis of the Apology, likens it to the Gospels and is suitably ‘agnostic’ (xiii) over its historicity. Recent debate has centred around the writings of Brickhouse and Smith who, in a sequence of connected works (Socrates on Trial, Plato's Socrates, Philosophy of Socrates, Trial and Execution of Socrates), explore the hypothesis that Plato's Apology best makes sense if understood as an attempt by the historical Socrates to present the strongest possible defence without compromising his principles (see esp. Socrates on Trial, viii, 1–10; contrasting reviews by McPherran and Schofield). Although the account that follows largely disagrees with their various hypotheses (see nn. 9, 11, 43, 56, 57, 74), Brickhouse and Smith have stimulated sceptics to re-examine their assumptions and refine their arguments.

[9] Vlastos (‘Paradox of Socrates’, 3–4) sees Plato's Apology as ‘recreation not reportage’, but still the ‘touchstone’ for identifying the historical Socrates in other early dialogues. Views differ over the key question of Plato's intended audience (see Tarrant in Tredennick & Tarrant, Last Days of Socrates, 33–34): fellow-citizens (Vlastos) or the jurors (Brickhouse and Smith) or fellow intellectuals (Millett) or even posterity (Burnyeat, ‘Impiety of Socrates’, 134). In his later writings (Socrates, 45–106), Vlastos argues persuasively for the Socrates of the earlier dialogues as philosophically distinctive, but is this necessarily the ‘real’ Socrates? (see Stokes, ‘Socrates' Mission’, 77 n. 1).

[10] In full: ‘Culturally licensed lies may be delightful, but do they also help to undermine knowledge, to take away the very ground of knowing?’ This is from the ‘Prologue’ by Wood (xiv) to a collection of essays on Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, edited by Gill & Wiseman. Particularly helpful here are the papers by Gill, Feeney and Moles. Gill (‘Plato on falsehood’, 69) explores the layers of fictionality in Plato's dialogues, in terms which (I think) come close to my formulation in the text: ‘verbal falsehood designed to propagate the process of acquiring “truth in the psyche”…’. Feeney brilliantly cites as the epigraph to his ‘Epilogue’ (230) Mr Boffin's dilemma in Dickens Our Mutual Friend: if he believed half of what he read, which half ought it to be? The reader looking for the historical Socrates in Plato faces a similar problem: he might be there, but how to recognise him? The analogy drawn in the text with the speeches in Thucydides may seem to raise more problems than it solves: ignotum per ignotius. Thucydides on the composition of his speeches (I.22) is actually cited by Vlastos in support of his reading of the Apology (Socrates, 49 n. 15, 253; cf. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 88–89). See the brief but innovative analysis by Moles (‘Truth and Untruth’, 103–07). For Bernard Williams, in his investigation of Truth and Truthfulness, Thucydides performs a key role in the development of historical truth (149–71). The book as a whole has mixed implications for the concept of ‘Greek truth’ given in my text (see esp. 271–77).

[11] Brickhouse & Smith (Socrates on Trial, 235–6) suggest that, as we do not know for certain what happened in court after the votes had been counted, a third speech was at least possible.

[12] One variety of hemlock (‘water hemlock’) acts as a powerful alkaloid poison causing in its victims convulsions, choking and vomiting. Gill, ‘Death of Socrates’, argues on this basis that the unrealistically serene transition from life to death presented by Plato reflects the ‘other-worldliness’ of the mortal Socrates. More recently, Bloch in ‘Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates’ has persuasively, though not quite decisively, identified the variety in question as ‘poison hemlock’, which apparently kills more calmly by paralysing the muscles used in respiration (cf. Sullivan, ‘Note on the Death of Socrates’). On the meaning of Socrates' last words: Most, ‘A cock for Asclepius’.

[13] Available in the Loeb edition: Marchant & Todd, Xenophon, or as a Penguin Classic: Tredennick & Waterfield, Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates; alternatively, in Brickhouse & Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, 81–107, and (with interpretive essay by Thomas Pangle) in Bartlett, Xenophon: the Shorter Writings.

[14] Plato and Xenophon on Socrates as complementary: Grote, History of Greece, VII 85–6; Adam, ‘Socrates’; Guthrie, Socrates, 8–10, who reckons that Xenophon's Apology ‘is of little or no independent value’ (11–20). Waterfield (Tredennick & Waterfield, Xenophon, 30–1) provides a checklist of points of coincidence between the two Apologies. So impressed is Hansen (Trial of Sokrates, 6) by these ‘striking similarities’ that he sees a common source in the trial itself. But Xenophon surely defends Socrates' reputation as a ‘good man’ in a way appropriate to an archetypal Athenian aristocrat, addressing a like-minded audience. Hence his attribution to Socrates in the Memorabilia (II.6.35) of the conventional view of justice as ‘helping friends and harming enemies’; not so in early Plato (never right to repay evil with evil): Vlastos (‘Paradox of Socrates’, 2; cf. McPherran, ‘Does Piety Pay?’, 165–66). The shifting fortunes of Plato and Xenophon as ‘history’ are traced by Guthrie (Socrates, 5–35). Early support for Platonic historicity from Grote (History of Greece, VII 89 n.2, 153–8); detailing recent support: Colaiaco (Socrates Against Athens, 19–21). The clearest, succinct summaries known to me of ‘Our Knowledge of Socrates’ are by Lacey, reprinted along with other relevant items in Patzer (Der historische Sokrates, 366–91), and by Rutherford, Art of Plato, 1–68.

[15] This is more or less the view of Waterfield, in his quirky but wide-ranging introduction to the Penguin Classic version: Tredennick & Waterfield, Xenophon, 18–26. Waterfield supplies additional conflicting views on luck and pleasure attributed to Socrates by other pupils (Aeschines of Sphettos and Antisthenes). In greater detail: Kahn (Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 1–35), who nonetheless follows Vlastos in regarding the Platonic Apology as ‘a quasi-historical document’ (88–9).

[16] For a straightforward placing of the trial in context, see Mossé, Le Proces de Socrate. I have consulted only a fraction of the available Socratic bibliography; for an impression of its scope and extent, see the Bibliography to Brickhouse & Smith, Socrates on Trial, 272–310. Recent overviews of Socrates as a thinker by Taylor, Socrates, Lane, Plato's Progeny and Penner, ‘Socrates’.

[17] The notion of Sokratikoi Logoi as a distinct genre derives from Aristotle, Poetics (1447b9–11), where they are classified, alongside poetry, as a type of mimesis or ‘imitation’: Guthrie, Socrates, 10–13. Possible practitioners include (apart from Xenophon and Plato): Antisthenes, Aeschines of Sphettos, Aristippus, Cebes, Crito, Euclides, Phaedo, Simmias (see Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 1–29); for the opposition: Polykrates, on whom see below (n. 58). For the pitiful range of fragments and hints that survives, see Ferguson, Socrates, 1.12, 8.23, 1.7, 1.9, 1.8, 5.2.

[18] Translation of Diogenes' Life of Socrates in Brickhouse & Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, 108–11. See Plutarch, Aristeides (1) for the specific claim that Socrates lent seventy minas (7000 drachmas) at interest to Crito (compare the sums in n. 5); for taking of interest as utterly inappropriate between friends: Millett, Lending and Borrowing, 36–52, with n. 29.

[19] For a fuller summary, see Guthrie, Socrates, 43–49. Greek text with facing translation by Sommerstein, Aristophanes and Henderson, Aristophanes. Translation in Penguin Classics by Sommerstein, Aristophanes. Acharnians, Clouds, Lysistrata; Greek text with commentary and a valuable introduction by Dover, Aristophanes, Clouds. The text we possess is an apparently incomplete revision by Aristophanes of the version performed in 423 (vv. 518–62, with Wasps 1037–47); see Dover, Aristophanes, Clouds, lxxx–xcix.

[20] Parker, Athenian Religion, 203. The precise philosophical character Aristophanes intended for Socrates remains elusive. Consensus accepts that Socrates of the Clouds is a composite figure: a blending of Sophists, natural scientists, assorted intellectuals, and possibly Socrates himself: Dover (Aristophanes, Clouds, xxxiii–lvii), reprinted with alterations as Dover, ‘Socrates in the Clouds’; Guthrie (Socrates, 49–57); Kerferd (The Sophistic Movement, 55–57). Zanker (The Mask of Socrates, 32–34) points out that, although the ‘portrait’ of Socrates in Clouds (thin, pale and staring) hardly squares with physical descriptions by his disciples (a fat-bellied Silenus), it does accord with depictions of ‘intellectuals’ in vase paintings.

[21] The dramatic fate of Socrates? According to Dodds (Greeks and the Irrational, 188), ‘The audience… was expected to enjoy the burning down of the Thinking Shop, and to care little if Socrates were burnt with it’ (cf. Kopff, ‘Was Socrates Murdered?’). Parker (Athenian Religion, 205): ‘[Strepsiades] leads a violent attack on the school, designed to eradicate it from the community and expel (though not destroy) its occupants’ (cf. Davies, ‘Popular Justice’, who supplies detailed bibliography). Stoning and the razing of houses were part and parcel of communal, if informal, vengeance (Bonner & Smith, Administration of Justice, II.277–8; see now Allen, World of Prometheus, 142–45). To the Lokrian and Spartan cases cited by Dover (Aristophanes, Clouds, 266), add the destruction by decree of the assembly of the house of the Athenian oligarch Antiphon (Plutarch, Moralia 834A).

[22] Parker (Athenian Religion, 205) aptly cites John Locke (A Letter Concerning Toleration) to the effect that atheism, in rendering empty all promises and oaths, destroys the bonds of civil society. We have already met in passing the notion of reciprocity in the help that Plato and others offer in raising for Socrates a half-talent fine; further hints of a little help from his friends in the testimony of Aristippos (Diog. Laert. II.74): food and wine being sent to Socrates.

[23] According to Fisher, Aeschines, Against Timarchos, 319, ‘the casual reference here to “Socrates the sophist” shows the enduring success of the affixing of labels by popular and comic repetition.’ By way of an analogy: the concept of ‘barbarian’, though vaguely pre-existing, may have been given sharper definition among Athenians through the production, early in the fifth century, of Aeschylus' drama Persians: see Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 56–100; also her Aeschylus, Persians.

[24] Standard treatments of the Sophists: Guthrie, Sophists, esp. 27–45; de Romilly, The Great Sophists; Winton, ‘Herodotus, Thucydides and the Sophists’, 89–101; Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, whose broad conception of rhetoric is quoted in the text (82; cf. Todd p.68).

[25] Protagoras as paradigmatic: Kerferd (The Sophistic Movement, 104); not so, says Bett (1989), who argues persuasively that the ‘strong’ sense of relativism, associated with Protagoras, cannot necessarily be attributed to Sophists in general. Remaining testimony on Protagoras in Diogenes Laertius (IX.50–56). The idea of making ‘the weaker argument seem the stronger’ has already been encountered in Clouds; for a further hostile expression (explicitly attached to Protagoras): Aristotle, Rhetoric 1402a. Parker (Athenian Religion, 213) finds hints that the ‘Overthrowing Arguments’ (as he translates Kataballontes, an alternative title for Truth) may have challenged ancestral, religious traditions, including divination.

[26] For attempts to argue that black is white, see the opening sections of the anonymous Dissoi Logoi or ‘Contrasting Arguments’, thought to date from the early fourth century: translation and commentary by Robinson, ‘Contrasting Arguments’; cf. Guthrie, Sophists, 316–19. Aristotle (Politics 1253b20) notes the existence of individuals who argue that only by convention is one person a slave and another free, and also object to how slavery, being based on force, is unjust. On the likely identity of those objecting, see Cambiano, ‘Aristotle and the Anonymous Opponents of Slavery’. For what seemed new and threatening about the later fifth-century questioning of religion: Parker, Athenian Religion, 210–12; for the dangers inherent in apparently selling off practical skills to the highest bidder: Gower, ‘Introduction’, 12.

[27] Rhetoric (and the Sophists) are ably defended against the strictures of Plato by Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. On equality as a preoccupation for some Sophists: Guthrie, Sophists, 148–63. For translations of surviving fragments by the Sophists: Sprague, The Older Sophists.

[28] Vol. VIII of Grote's History was originally published in 1850. In the ‘new edition’ of 1888 (39 n. 2), Grote further defends his vision of the Sophists in that the political debate they encouraged resembled that of the House of Commons. On Grote as an historian, see the introduction by Cartledge to the 2001 reprint of the one-volume abridgement of the History, which unfortunately omits the chapter on the Sophists.

[29] Turner (The Greek Heritage, 187–263) sets Grote in context and gives details of his three discussions of Socrates (286–98). He explains Grote's later, more pessimistic view of the oppressive quality of public opinion, evident in his Plato, and the Other Companions of Socrates, as a response to Mill's On Liberty.

[30] Turner, The Greek Heritage, 264–321 and Lane, Plato's Progeny, 11–51. Along the way, Lane takes in (amongst others) Voltaire, Kant, Herder, Robespierre, Mill, Arnold, Crossman, Popper, Hume, Vlastos, Stone, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sorel, Arendt, Foucault, Patoçka, Kierkegaard and Derrida. Her analysis is helpfully complemented by Fitzpatrick, ‘The Legacy of Socrates’.

[31] For bibliographic details on Hegel on Socrates, see Turner, The Greek Heritage, 276–78, and Lane, Plato's Progeny, 33–35. Something of the passions aroused among contemporaries by Hegel's reading of Socrates is apparent from the long digression by Thirlwall, History of Greece, IV 526–62. For others viewing the fate of Socrates in terms of Hegelian tragedy: Colaiaco, Socrates Against Athens, 4–5; most recently, Tarrant (Tredennick & Tarrant, The Last Days of Socrates, 38): ‘We have the classic situation of a Greek tragedy, where a person of high moral principles is confronted step by step with a situation from which there is no escape….’

[32] Extended reviews by Burnyeat, ‘Cracking the Socrates Case’, Griffin, ‘Stone's Philosopher’, Todd, ‘The Journalist, the Academic and the Trial of Socrates’; for the North American literary reviews: Connor, ‘The Other 399’, 49, n. 1.

[33] In fact, these are not quite the final words of the book. There follows an extended appendix (231–48) in which Stone examines critically the idea of an ongoing ‘witch hunt’ against intellectuals in later fifth-century Athens. Its possible existence was highlighted by Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, 179–206, framed against the background of another witch-hunt. At the time of writing, Stone was unaware of the similar conclusion, also based on the fragility of the evidence, already reached by Dover, ‘Freedom of the Intellectual’. The most recent assessment by Parker (Athenian Religion, 207–10) stresses the impossibility of certainty, but tentatively concludes that the Athenians in the fifth century tended to fall short of ‘intolerant principles’ rather than living up to ‘principled tolerance’.

[34] Of course, the professional classicist can find plenty to fault in the detail of Stone's analysis: his view that the Athenians provided elementary education for all citizens, resulting in widespread literacy (42); his anachronistic and inconsistent application to Athens of the idea of a ‘middle class’ (42, 118, 145, 175); the notion that comic theatre was the equivalent of a ‘crusading newspaper’ (265). Yet minor awkwardnesses are outweighed by the gains in terms of a direct, uncluttered response (saying the unsayable): how Socrates in the Euthyphro seemingly condones manslaughter (147); the raw deal apparently meted out to Xanthippe in the Phaedo (192). Xanthippe is, incidentally, allowed to have her say by Roger Scruton, Xanthippic Dialogues.

[35] On the impact of the Peloponnesian War: Strauss, Athens after the Peloponnesian War, 11–86; Hornblower, Greek World, 184–209. Democracy was restored to Athens through the authority of the Spartan King Pausanias, jealous as he was of the power wielded by Lysander, the darling of the oligarchs; or so we are told by Xenophon (Hellenica II.4.28–43).

[36] Of the four categories, only ‘poets’ is relatively unproblematic. Demiourgos seems to have the sense of ‘making things for people in general’; that is, for sale, not subsistence. But how do politikoi differ from rhetores, which, joined with strategoi, is the usual term for ‘politicians’ (Hansen, ‘The Athenian “Politicians”’)? Perhaps the rough equivalent of ‘statesmen’ as opposed to ‘politicians’? Some editors have deleted politikoi as an interpolation, giving each prosecutor a single constituency. But Anytos' doubling-up is defended by Burnet (Plato's Euthyphro, Apology and Crito, ad loc.) as a subtle Socratic gibe against those attempting to combine material with intellectual pursuits. For a more overt sneer from Xenophon's Socrates at Anytos' contrasting (pre)occupations, see Apol. 29–31, discussed in the text below. For anger as entirely appropriate for an aggrieved Athenian litigant: Allen, World of Prometheus, 50–59.

[37] Xenophon (Hellenica II.3.42–44) also brackets Anytos in exile with Thrasyboulos, hero of the democratic restoration. What is known about Anytos (including his wealth) is conveniently summarised by Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, No. 1324. Attempts have been made, none of them persuasive, to identify Meletos with an indeterminate number of individuals bearing the name; see MacDowell, Andokides, 208–10. Given the private nature of the prosecution (a crucial feature of the Athenian legal system), it is misleading to characterize the trial as ‘The People versus Socrates’ (Kendall) or ‘The State versus Socrates’ (Montgomery).

[38] ‘Extant evidence reveals that the Athenians typically prosecuted only in cases where they were in fact victims or personally involved in the matter at trial’: Allen, World of Prometheus, 39; cf. 62–65, whose important work on punishment in Athens is further discussed in the text (VI). See Todd (p. 66) with Rhodes, ‘Enmity in Fourth-Century Athens’.

[39] For brief intellectual biographies of Finley, see Hornblower, ‘Introduction’, Whittaker, ‘M.I. Finley’, and the ‘Editors' Introduction’ to Finley, Economy and Society, ix–xxvi. It is odd that Stone was apparently unaware of Finley's essay, which seems first to have appeared in Horizon, the New York literary journal.

[40] The balance of opinion seems currently in favour of Letter VII as the work of Plato himself: Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 48–59; Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements, 119, n. 16.

[41] The key texts are speeches written by Lysias, conveniently translated by Todd, Lysias: 6. Against Andocides (c. 400); 12. Against Eratosthenes (?403/402); 13. Against Agoratus (?399); 25. On a Charge of Overthrowing the Democracy (?400); 30. Against Nicomachus (399); 31. Against Philon (?c. 400); frag. 9. For Eryximachus, Who Had Remained in the City (i.e. he had not joined the democratic exiles).

[42] It is a matter for regret that Todd's important work on the Amnesty is available in extenso only in his unpublished PhD thesis, Athenian Internal Politics 403–395 BC; for selective summaries, see Todd, ‘The Journalist, the Academic and the Trial of Socrates’; Shape of Athenian Law, 232–36. Even this is sufficient to call into question Havelock's search (‘Why was Socrates Tried?’; cf. ‘Evidence for the Teaching of Socrates’) for a non-political motive for the prosecution, based on his conviction that ‘the mood of the times when Socrates was tried was politically speaking “live and let live”’ (96).

[43] Finley supposed that Athenian juries contained (61): ‘a disproportionate number of the very poor… the very old... and of the richer men’; a view in part echoed by Brickhouse & Smith (Socrates on Trial, 26) and Gower (‘Introduction’, 16). Recent research (notably Markle, ‘Jury Pay and Assembly Pay’; Todd, ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Attic Orators’) suggests that juries may have been more representative of the citizen body as a whole.

[44] Preserved by Diogenes Laertius (II.40), quoting Favorinus, an intellectual from the second century ad. The translation in the text is by Garland, Introducing New Gods, 137. The customary rendering of ‘polis’ in the indictment as ‘city’, rather than ‘state’ or ‘community’, is misleadingly narrow. ‘Subverting the young’ as opposed to ‘corrupting’ them was suggested as a more appropriate translation of diaphtherein by Stone, Trial of Socrates, 28–29; the same word is used by Aeschines regarding Critias' ‘subversion’ of Athens' democracy. The demes to which Socrates and Meletos belonged were the local-government units of Attica and part of each citizen's formal identification.

[45] Stone echoes the verdict reached by Richard Crossman in his influential Plato Today, 46: ‘he was arrested and put on his trial ostensibly for worshipping strange gods and corrupting the youth, actually for aiding and abetting the counter-revolution.’ Dover, on the basis of his sceptical reading of the evidence for a fifth-century ‘witch-hunt’ against intellectuals in Athens (see above, n. 33), also concluded that political associations told heavily against Socrates (‘Freedom of the Intellectual’, 151–57). The significance of religious factors is reasserted by Connor, ‘The Other 399’. On the practical impossibility of separating out religious from political motives (no accusation of impiety without a political dimension), see Parker (Athenian Religion, 201–02). Despite his insistence on religious implications, Garland (Introducing New Gods, 136) still regards the prosecution as politically motivated (‘no doubt whatsoever’), identifying Meletos as front-man for Anytos (‘prime instigator of the proceedings’).

[46] Honour for the gods as finite conforms to the general idea of the ‘limited good’ in Greek economy and society: see Millett, ‘Hesiod and his World’. According to Greek belief, allowing an impious person to remain unpunished was likely to bring down divine punishment on the entire community; see the opening of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, where the whole of Thebes suffers from plague through Oedipus' wrongdoing in the eyes of the gods.

[47] ‘Oblique support only’, as Burnyeat is emphatically concerned with the Socrates of Plato's Apology and not the ‘flesh-and-blood snubnosed personality who died in 399 bc’ (135). Against Burnyeat (and Vlastos, Socrates), McPherran, ‘Does Piety Pay?’, offers a reading of the Apology which allows for radicalising of traditional religious attitudes, while preserving a role for the central practices of Athenian religion.

[48] Only exceptionally (Xen. Apol. 13) is Socrates made to claim that his daimonion benefits the whole community. Although Parker (Athenian Religion, 203, n. 5) is unpersuaded by Garland's suggestion that Socrates failed adequately to acknowledge existing gods, that does not affect the substance of his argument. Elsewhere (137, 139, 141 n. 3), Garland scrupulously notes where his conclusions are based on an appeal to internal consistency or the balance of probabilities.

[49] Hansen argues that Stone's approach to the trial (though broadly along the lines of his own analysis) is vitiated by misrepresentations, omissions and a hostile view of Socrates (3).

[50] For details of groups which were out to shock: Parker, Athenian Religion, 335–36; something of the ‘respectable’ reaction to their behaviour (from later in the fourth-century bc) may be gained from Demosthenes (LIV), Against Konon.

[51] Entitled On the Mysteries; see esp. §§11–53, with introduction and commentary by MacDowell, Andokides. The trials of Andokides and Socrates date from the same year; the same Meletos may appear as prosecutor in both of them (but see above, n. 37). Specifically on the Mutilation of the Herms: Osborne, ‘Erection and Mutilation of the Hermai’.

[52] According to Murray, ‘The Affair of the Mysteries’, 149, the events of 415 ‘opened up a fatal breach of mistrust in Athenian political life, between the demos and its traditional aristocratic leaders’. Murray further suggests that the blasphemous acts had the function of creating an illegitimate bond of trust between members of an inner group within the polis: ‘an act of hybris, a challenge to the wider community’ (157–58). On the polarised structure of politics in the polis: Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, 1–23, 50–69; Cartledge, ‘Greek Political Thought’; de Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 69–80, 278–300.

[53] Popper's presentation of a democratic Socrates (Open Society, 189–94) is strongly challenged by Kraut (Socrates and the State, 203–07), whose conclusion that Socrates saw democracy as a form of government unlikely to be bettered is in turn disputed by Brickhouse & Smith (Socrates on Trial, 170–4; Plato's Socrates, 141–55). Kraut's plea for a Socrates with a more ambivalent view of Athens' democracy is echoed by Monoson's recent study of Plato's Democratic Entanglements. Emphasis is here on Plato's manipulation of broader concepts associated with democracy in Athens, showing how (3): ‘in his work, a searching consideration of the possibilities raised by some democratic ideals and institutions coexists alongside severe criticisms of democratic life and politics’. Among the elements under consideration are (16): ‘social unity, an intellectually capable citizenry, relations of reciprocity amongst citizens and between city and individual, and the defeat of tyranny’. The extent to which these are characteristic features of democracy as opposed to oligarchy seems unclear. Compare overlapping attitudes to the ‘rule of law’: Harris and Rubinstein, ‘Introduction’, 2.

[54] A register of passages in which the Platonic Socrates might seem to show hostility towards democratic ideology is presented by Brickhouse & Smith, Plato's Socrates, 158–60. Elsewhere (Socrates on Trial, 79–80), they argue that advocating the abolition of selection by lot need not imply hostility towards democracy in general. Whatever the force of their arguments (certain key offices in Athens were elective; oligarchies might employ sortition), they accept that Socrates' opposition to the lot might have been construed by contemporaries as broadly anti-democratic.

[55] Fragments conveniently translated in Ferguson, Socrates, 163–73; summary in Guthrie, Socrates, 39–43. Not all comic allusions to Socrates are entirely hostile: according to a character in Ameipsias, ‘he'd rather starve than flatter’. Compare the comment by the unnamed litigant in Lysias' speech Against Aeschines the Socratic: how Aeschines (not the accuser of Timarchos) as a former pupil of Socrates – ‘speaker of many fine words about justice and excellence’ – might be expected to avoid wickedness and dishonesty. But he didn't (fr.1, 342–46 in Todd, Lysias).

[56] Hansen, Trial of Sokrates, 28.

[57] For the Critias memorial: Diels-Kranz, II.374, no. 13. Brickhouse & Smith (Plato's Socrates, 166–73), while conceding that Plato does indeed show Socrates associating with a high proportion of ‘bad men’, argue against ‘guilt by association’ along the lines that it is the sick who have greatest need of the physician (and test most keenly the physician's skill). But, whatever the persuasive power of this argument (and it is hard to equate Alcibiades' manifest opportunism with support for democracy; see 169, n. 177) popular perceptions of Socrates' oligarchic connexions may well have been different.

[58] The opposing view, interpreting Xenophon's response as directed against Polykrates, is explored at length by Chroust, Xenophon, Polykrates; Socrates, Man and Myth. In a key piece of their argument against a political dimension to the trial, Brickhouse & Smith (Plato's Socrates, 173–75; Trial and Execution of Socrates, 5–8) distinguish between Xenophon's references in the Memorabilia to ‘the accuser’ (=Polykrates) and to ‘the one(s) who wrote the indictment’ (=Meletos and co.). They then argue for Polykrates' pamphlet as the source of subsequent support for a political motive for the trial. Here, as elsewhere, individual readers must make their own decision regarding the balance of probabilities.

[59] Xenophon (Mem. I.2.47–48) provides a list of followers not corrupted by Socrates. But, from a democratic perspective, the career of Xenophon himself will not bear too close scrutiny. From the content of his Hellenika, it seems certain that he took the oligarchic side in the Civil War; and his eventual banishment from Athens may have been because of his enthusiastic support for Sparta: see Anderson, Xenophon, 46–70.

[60] Tredennick & Waterfield, Xenophon, 37; Garland, Introducing New Gods, 151; Reeve, Socrates in the Apology, 175.

[61] Weber is quoted from Finley (1985, 100); Harrison (Law of Athens, 53) and King (Against Meidias, xiii) from Powell, Athens and Sparta, 263–64. Bonner and Smith (Administration of Justice, II.289) reproduce from the early twentieth century the opinion of B.B. Rogers, practising lawyer and translator of Aristophanes, that: ‘it would be difficult to devise a judicial system less adapted to the due administration of justice. A large assembly can rarely if ever form a fit tribunal for ascertaining facts or deciding questions of law … it is apt to degenerate into a mere mob, open to all the influences and liable to be swayed by all the passions which stir and agitate popular meetings.’

[62] For the notion of legal systems as resolving conflicts inevitable in society, see Todd & Millett, ‘Law, Society and Athens’, 17; with respect to Athens: Johnstone, Disputes and Democracy, 4–8. More generally on the comparative approach, with reference to litigation as feud, within the agonistic society that was Athens: Cohen, Law, Violence and Community. The process of arbitration, both private and public, which was such a feature of the Athenian legal system (though not applicable in the case of the trial of Socrates), is consistent with the idea of dispute settlement: Todd, Shape of Athenian Law, 123–30; Allen, World of Prometheus, 317–22; Hunter, Policing Athens, 43–69; Scafuro, Forensic Stage, esp. 383–99. For a different explanation of the origins and development of law in Athens, see Sealey, Justice of the Greeks esp. 19–24.

[63] ‘It is hard to draw firm lines between the settlement of cases in court and the spillover of legal actions into the agora, the streets, the fields, and the houses of Attica. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising if justice gives way to justification.’ Foxhall & Lewis, Greek Law in its Political Setting, 8. ‘In addition, the jurors are often asked to consider the effect of the verdict on themselves, their families, and the city before casting their vote. The trial is thus placed firmly in the lives of the jurors and the community at large’: Carey. ‘Legal Space’, 176, in a paper which emphasises ‘the seamless joint between the courtroom and the life of the citizen and city’ (178). For a range of types of such ‘prudential appeals’ see Carey and Reid (Demosthenes, 10–11). Rhodes (‘Keeping to the Point’) argues that the content of forensic speeches was more relevant to the legal matter in hand than hitherto thought; but his reading depends in part on assuming a broader conception of ‘relevance’ (see Harris & Rubinstein, ‘Introduction’, 13).

[64] There is, of course, much more to Allen's study; not least, the revolutionary view of punishment (reformative rather than retributive) put forward in Plato's Apology (26A) and developed in his later works: ‘Plato's Paradigm Shifts’ (245–81).

[65] For what is known of the possible location of courts within the area of the Agora: Boegehold, The Lawcourts at Athens. Even the remoter court called Delphinion (hearing cases of allegedly justifiable homicide) was located only just outside the city walls: Wycherley, Stones of Athens, 166–67.

[66] For detail of Socrates in the Agora, see the engaging booklet by Lang. On the mixing of activities in the Agora: Millett, ‘Encounters in the Agora’, 211–18.

[69] Bronze-founders around the Hephaesteion: Wycherley, Stones of Athens, 68–69. An entry in an ancient wordbook (Anecdota Graeca) reads: ‘Chalko: the name of a place where bronze is sold; it is sold where the Hephaisteion is’; also as the place to hire casual labour: Fuks, ‘Kolonos Misthos’.

[70] For the howled-down litigant: Dem.45.6 (with Millett, ‘Sale, Credit and Exchange’, 210–11) hardly supportive of the primacy of the ‘rule of law’ in Athens; on which see Harris, ‘Law and Oratory’, Sealey, Justice of the Greeks. Significance of jurors ignoring the law is emphasised by Allen (World of Prometheus, 179): ‘The Athenians treated law as a wise advisor but as an advisor whose uniform was ultimately of second rank to that of the judge’ (cf. 5–9, 174–9). As a consequence, success in court depended on the ability to deploy the correct, common language (35): ‘to use the institutional tools in ways that coincided with Athenian cultural conceptions of desert, a set of publicly crafted, used, and contested terms that rested on ideologies of anger, honor, status, and reciprocity.’ Johnstone (Disputes and Democracy, 21–45) presents the ‘autonomy’ of the courts as helping to construct a privileged in-group of adult male citizens.

[71] On thorubos as a regular feature of Athenian courts: Bers, ‘Dikastic Thorubos’; taken by Brickhouse & Smith (Socrates on Trial, 210–11) as indicating that Plato's Socrates did not antagonise the jury to any unusual extent. Compare the participatory use of thorubos in the Athenian assembly: Tacon (‘Ecclesiastic Thorubos’). On the accepted presence of bystanders: Lanni, ‘Spectator Sport or Serious Politics?’. In her account of forensic thorubos, Allen (World of Prometheus, 224; cf. 170) strikingly interprets an allusion to ‘stoning’ a litigant after a trial (Aesch. I.163) as a metaphorical reference to jurors' hostility. But the trial in question is surely an imagined – and exaggerated – event. On the brevity of trials in Athens: Todd, Shape of Athenian Law, 130–32; MacDowell, Law in Classical Athens, 247–54, ‘Length of Trials’. The ritual of Athenian courts is presented by Bers (‘Just Rituals?’) as intended to enhance the sense of solemnity. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy is introduced by Goldhill in his ‘Programme Notes’ to Goldhill and Osborne, and explored with reference to forensic oratory in the accompanying essays by Easterling, Hesk and Ford. Hall (‘Lawcourt Dramas’) sets out the many points of comparison between Athenian courts and drama (cf. Todd pp. 71–72).

[72] Fr. B 14.1 in Burtt, Minor Attic Orators fr. 11.57 in Worthington, cuopas, and Hatrris, Dinarchus, Hyporides, and Lyurgus: the intended antithesis may be between ‘words’ as opposed to ‘deeds’. The use of precedent in Athenian law-court speeches (regular but loose and not binding) is explored by Lanni, ‘Arguing from “Precedent”’.

[73] On the creation and manipulation of this ‘social memory’ see Allen (World of Prometheus, 65–68), who points out that even arbitrations might attract a crowd (66). She also argues (190–96) for the memorializing effect of a graphe or ‘public prosecution’: ‘used for cases that the community needed to be written into the public memory’ (192). The charge against Socrates was a graphe for impiety. For the legal implications of the distinction between graphe and dike, see Todd, pp. 65–66.

[74] Demosthenes as Timarchos' sunegoros: Fisher, Aeschines, Timarchos, 23–24. The frequent use of supporting speakers in Athenian courts has recently been highlighted by Rubinstein (Litigation and Co-operation). Of course, had Chaerephon been alive, he might have been summoned by Socrates not as a sunegoros but as a witness (in Plato's account, he has to make do with Chaerephon's brother). Tarrant (Tredennick & Tarrant, Last days of Socrates, 216, n. 18) notes that, democrat or not, Chaerephon was a regular butt of comic playwrights. With regard to witnesses, Humphries (‘Social Relations on stage’) and Todd (‘The Purpose of Evidence’) have demonstrated the importance of parading individuals who are both closely connected with the litigant and also enjoy wider prestige and status.

[75] On the ‘public service theme’ as a characteristic of Athenian forensic oratory, see Millett (‘Rhetoric of Reciprocity’) with Johnstone (Disputes and Democracy, 93–108). Although Plato has Socrates disclaim all knowledge of conventional courtroom rhetoric (17D; contrast 35A), the points of contact between the Apology and extant law-court speeches have often been noted (e.g. by Burnet, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology and Crito, 66–67).

[76] Brickhouse & Smith (Trial and Execution of Socrates, 4, n. 3) dispute the tradition that a substantial number of jurors switched their vote from innocence to death. Their argument depends on an assumption of strict logic in Socrates' third speech to the jurors, where he addresses the jurors as ‘those who voted for death’ and ‘those who voted for acquittal’ (implying that all those voting for acquittal also went on to vote for his alternative penalty. According to Xenophon (Apol. 23), Socrates explicitly refused to propose a counter-penalty (tantamount to an admission of guilt). Brickhouse & Smith (Socrates on Trial, 219–20) struggle to reconcile the suggestion about free meals at the Prutaneion with their thesis that Socrates did nothing deliberately to provoke the jury.

[77] Socrates and Christ: Gooch, Reflections on Jesus and Socrates.

[78] At the time of his leaving Britain for Germany in 1939, Joyce was an American citizen. His conviction for treason was based on his earlier, illegal acquisition of a British passport.