The Death of Socrates. How the Polis Killed the Wisest Man Inside It

The city that will try Socrates has just come out of the longest war of its life. Twenty-seven years. It lost. Its empire is broken. Thousands of its best sons died at Syracuse. The plague that came with the war took a third of the population – and among the dead was Pericles, the greatest leader Athens had ever had.

Then came months of tyranny. The Thirty Tyrants, installed by the victorious Spartans, ran an eight-month terror: political murders, confiscations, purges. Their leader was Critias – a poet, an orator, a cousin of Plato's, and a former student of Socrates – and perhaps the most murderous of all the Thirty. Among those they killed was the uncle of the orator Lysias. The name Lysias will return in the next lecture – as the mouthpiece of one of Plato's arguments.

This was the third of three political earthquakes in barely a decade. In 411 an oligarchy of Four Hundred seized power; in 404, the Thirty; and in 401, only two years before the trial, the die-hards of the Thirty took the town of Eleusis and slaughtered nearly all its men before the democracy marched out and crushed them. In all three convulsions the leading roles were played by the same rich young men who had grown up around Socrates. The trauma the jurors carried into the courtroom was fresh: two years old.

In 403 the democrats took the city back. They were remarkably moderate – they declared an amnesty, took no personal revenge. Except for one man.

In 399 they put on trial the man everybody knew: the famously ugly, short, bug-eyed sculptor who had given up his craft to wander the agora asking impossible questions. The man whose students had become the most influential intellectuals of the city. The man whose former student Alcibiades had betrayed Athens to Sparta, then to Persia, then back to Athens. The man whose former student Critias had just run the terror.

Socrates was seventy. He lived in poverty and distrusted rule by the unqualified – and the latter he did not much hide.

The text of the indictment survives. Diogenes Laërtius quotes it: "Socrates is guilty: of not recognizing the gods the polis recognizes, and of introducing new divinities. Guilty also of corrupting the young. The penalty: death."

Look at the formula. Two parts. The first – asebeia, impiety – the charge tradition says had destroyed Anaxagoras and Protagoras, though those earlier persecutions are poorly attested and may be later legend. The second – corrupting the young. This is a new formula, and it is lethal. There is no statute in Athens against "corrupting the youth" in our sense. It is a political charge: you are spoiling my sons, turning them into citizens who do not believe in Athens.

From the inside it looked different. Alcibiades compared Socrates to a Silenus figurine – ugly on the outside, with little gods hidden within: a grotesque mask through which something showed that made the brightest young men of the city follow an old barefoot man. Hadot calls him atopos – "out of place," unclassifiable, fitting no category.

Who were the accusers? Meletus – a mediocre poet, an instrument. Anytus – a rich tanner and democrat, the man whose son had actually started following Socrates and quit the family business. And Lycon – an orator. Anytus mattered most, and he deserves an honest portrait: not a demagogue but a moderate, a lieutenant of Theramenes who lost his property under the Thirty, joined the armed resistance, and then kept the amnesty scrupulously, refusing even to sue for his confiscated goods. A man with clean hands and a real grievance.

Athens could not try Critias. He was already dead. They could not try Alcibiades – also dead, murdered in Asia Minor. What was left was the teacher.

But the real grievance – you trained the men who enslaved us – could not be the charge itself. Here lies a subtlety often flattened. The amnesty of 403 was not a general pardon in our sense; it was a narrower "no reprisals" clause covering the property settlement and the verdicts against the Thirty. Prosecutors could, and did, name Critias and Alcibiades openly and hint at them in the hall. What they could not do was prosecute the grievance as such. So it was recoded – into impiety, into "corrupting the young," formulas that reached only the four years since the democracy came back.

Socrates could have shown some reconciliation with the city – paid tribute, as Xenophon did, to the magnanimity of the majority in the peace. That alone, on the prosecution's own logic, might have meant no trial at all. He did nothing of the kind. He came to court, and his defense became one of the most ferocious attacks on the city itself the polis had ever heard from a defendant's lips.

Five hundred jurors – drawn from a yearly roll of six thousand, each paid three obols for the day. One day. A King Archon presided, an official allotted afresh each year, not a judge in the modern sense; no prosecutor's lawyer, no defense lawyer – the accused must speak for himself, his time measured out by the klepsydra, the "water-thief." Socrates spoke three times, and these three speeches were recorded by Plato, who sat among the spectators. The text we call the Apology.

In the first speech Socrates does something unheard of. Instead of pleading, he tells the jurors: I am carrying out the god's command. Long ago my friend Chaerephon went to Delphi and asked the Pythia: "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Pythia answered: "No one."

Socrates was bewildered. He knew he knew nothing. So how could he be the wisest? Was the god joking? But the god cannot lie. So Socrates began walking the city testing the renowned – the politicians, the poets, the craftsmen – about their wisdom. And every time he found the same thing: they did not know what they claimed to know, but they thought they did. Socrates at least knew that he did not.

"Through this search, Athenians, I have made many enemies – the worst and the most dangerous," he tells them. And then, conversationally: "God has fastened me to this city as a stinging fly to a large thoroughbred horse, which because of its size has grown lazy and needs the sting to rouse it. If you kill me, the horse will sleep."

This is not a defense. It is an accusation. He tells the court that the polis itself is sick, and that he is its doctor. That if it kills him, it will not heal – it will fall finally asleep.

There was something deliberate in it. I. F. Stone, honestly reconstructing what the careful Apology never says aloud, puts these words in Socrates' mouth: "I do not believe in your so-called freedom of speech, but you do. I do not believe in democracy. But you do. This is your test, not mine." This is the antidemocratic Socrates in plain form – the one Plato's text is at pains to leave unspoken.

Voegelin, reading this scene, names it precisely: "Three actions are taking place at once: the trial of Socrates, ending in his condemnation; the trial of Athens, ending in the rejection of its savior; and the separation of Socrates from the polis, ending in the solitude of his death."

There is a bitter detail in the words of this trial. The Greek word behind our "hypocrite" – hypokritēs – meant simply an actor, one who speaks from behind a mask. Socrates was tried by the city that invented the theater, and the verdict was passed by jurors who themselves wore the mask of civic virtue.

Five hundred jurors voted. Socrates himself gives only the margin: had thirty votes fallen the other way, he would have been acquitted (Apology 36a). The absolute counts handed down by tradition – some 280 for guilt against 220 – are reconstructed from Diogenes Laërtius's problematic figure – he transmits a majority of "281 votes," impossible for a jury of this size – rather than any recorded tally. Either way the margin was narrow. The defense almost worked: most of Athens still respected Socrates – or at least did not want his blood.

By Athenian rules, now came the penalty phase. The prosecutor proposes one punishment, the defendant proposes another. The jury chooses between the two. Meletus had proposed death.

What did Socrates propose? He stands before the court that has just convicted him of reshaping the young, and he says:

"What fine, then, do I deserve? I have been the benefactor of the polis, who has spent his whole life making Athenians better citizens. The most just penalty would be free meals at the Prytaneum for life – the honor the city grants to Olympic victors."

This is what we will call the most insolent thing anyone has ever said at his own death trial. He is asking, in effect, that the city pay him to have lunch. The hall erupts. No defendant has ever behaved this way.

Xenophon three times calls this tone megalegoria – "big talking," a lofty boastfulness – insisting it was not senseless but calculated to provoke rather than to conciliate. Stone's reading is blunt: the near-acquittal astonished Socrates because he had been trying to lose. Death was his choice, and he could obtain it only from an exasperated jury.

His friends – Plato, Crito, Apollodorus – rise in panic and say: we will pay a fine. Thirty minae. A large sum. Socrates agrees to propose it – without enthusiasm, as a chore.

The vote on the penalty. Tradition records 361 for death against 139 for the fine – again reconstructed from Diogenes, who records only that death carried by "eighty more votes," and again contested: Waterfield notes that afterward Socrates addresses the 220 who voted to acquit him as true jurors, as if their bloc had held – which would mean far fewer switched to killing him than the tradition claims. If the later count is right, more jurors voted for his death than had voted him guilty – enraged by what he did in the middle. He mocked the court. He mocked Athens itself.

And Athens killed him.

About a month passed between the conviction and the execution. They did not kill at once – the fleet had been sent to Delos for the annual festival, and as long as that ship was away the city was "pure." Socrates sat in prison.

His friends prepared his escape. Crito – one of his wealthier friends – had bribed the guard. A ship was waiting in the harbor for Thessaly. Socrates could have walked out. The Athenian authorities, frankly, would have been relieved: nobody wanted an actual execution; everyone assumed he would flee, as tradition says Anaxagoras and Protagoras had fled before him.

The dialogue Crito is a conversation in the cell. Crito argues: you will betray your children, you will betray your friends, your name will be stained with cowardice. Socrates listens – and instead of answering in his own voice makes the Laws of Athens themselves speak:

"Did we not give you life? Was it not through us that your father took your mother? You must either persuade your country or do whatever it commands. You above all Athenians have left this city least – never, except once to the Isthmus, and on military service. So well did we suit you that you fathered your children here. And now you would run off like the lowest slave, against the contracts by which you agreed to live as our citizen."

And at the end, in Socrates' own mouth: "Then let it be, Crito, and let us follow this course, since God leads the way."

This is a philosophical position of extraordinary power, and it is subtler than plain obedience. The Laws grant a real exit: every Athenian, on coming of age, is free to take his property and go wherever he likes if he is not satisfied with them. Whoever stays renews his consent daily. The choice is always the same – to persuade your country or to obey it. Socrates does not say the verdict is just; he says that a standing contract he could have left at any time, and did not, binds him more than the injustice of a single verdict. Flee, and he is one more sophist on the run. Stay, and he becomes something else.

He became something else.

The dialogue Phaedo describes the last day. The friends came in the morning. Socrates spoke with them all day – about the soul, about immortality, about philosophy as a "practice of death." Not grim. Calm. Clear. Even funny.

When the sun began to set the jailer brought in the cup of hemlock. He was weeping. Socrates was steady. He drank the whole draught without hesitation. Then he walked, as he had been advised, until his legs began to numb. Then he lay down.

It was long assumed that death by hemlock was ugly, all spasms and choking; but the toxicologist Enid Bloch has shown that this hemlock, Conium maculatum, kills by a gradual ascending paralysis, close to what Plato describes. The calm of the scene is no literary sanitizing.

He could already barely speak. Just before he died, lifting for a moment the last cloth from his face, he said:

"Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don't forget."

And he died.

Asclepius is the god of healing. The cock is what the healed brought to him as offering. What did Socrates mean? Interpretations have been multiplying for two and a half thousand years. The most direct: death is the soul's cure from the body. I am healed. Pay the god.

Waterfield reads the words through an older frame still: pharmakon, the drug, is kin to pharmakos, the scapegoat driven from the city to carry off its pollution and heal it. Socrates, dying willingly, healed the polis that expelled him – and owed the god of healing his thanks. We will meet that same mechanism again, named for what it is, in lecture 09.

Voegelin's reading: "The philosophical life toward death and the judgment in eternity separates from the life of the dead souls. And then the pathos of the moment is relieved by the last irony of Socratic ignorance: 'Who of us takes the better way is hidden to all, except to the God.'"

In the room – where Plato was not (he was sick at home, he says) – but in the room of his imagination, this is how it happened.

In the ordinary version of this story, here it ends. Another inconvenient philosopher killed. Athens settles. He's forgotten within a generation.

But Socrates had foretold otherwise – in the courtroom itself, turning to those who had condemned him to death: "I tell you, my executioners, that as soon as I am dead a vengeance will fall upon you far heavier than the death you have dealt me. More accusers will rise, whom until now I have held back; and being younger they will be harsher to you." Plato, thirty years old among the spectators that day, became the fulfillment of the prophecy he would later write down.

He was from the most influential aristocratic family in Athens – descended on his mother's side from Solon, on his father's from Codrus. His uncle Critias had just run the terror. His brothers were the flower of Athenian youth. The whole arc ahead – politics, power, name – was his.

He chose otherwise. He chose to leave the city, to travel, to learn. And when he returned – almost forty – he founded a school outside Athens. He named it after the hero Academus: the Academy. The first university in Western history.

And for the rest of his life – and he lived another fifty years – he wrote. He wrote dialogues in which the main character was Socrates. He almost never gave the word to himself. He spoke only through Socrates.

What Athens had killed in one man, this man returned to the world as thirty-six dialogues. In the middle of these, in the Republic, he had his teacher imaginatively found a perfect city – a city where philosophers rule, and demagogues are cut off at the throat.

And yet the prosecution deserves a hearing. I. F. Stone, a journalist who defended free speech all his life, built the hardest version of it: a democracy twice overthrown by Socrates' own pupils, marched against again only two years before the trial, putting on trial its most conspicuous unreconciled critic – a man who used his platform to reaffirm, again and again, the very contempt that had already cost the city two reigns of terror. The city of four words for free speech was being un-Athenian, and it knew it. Gregory Vlastos put it bitterly: Jesus wept for Jerusalem; Socrates never shed a tear for Athens. And yet, Stone concludes, "these events explain the prosecution of Socrates, but they do not justify it." An acquittal would only have vindicated the very democracy he scorned; and the man killed for speaking freely would have granted no such freedom in the city of his dreams.

It was revenge. It was theory. It was a civilizational change. The next lecture is about that.