Plato's Trial of Athens

Mark A. Ralkowski

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474227254
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

What can we learn about the trial of Socrates from Plato's dialogues? Most scholars say we can learn a lot from the Apology, but not from the rest. Plato's Trial of Athens rejects this assumption and argues that Plato used several of his dialogues to turn the tables on Socrates' accusers: they blamed Socrates for something the city had done to itself. Plato wanted to set the record straight and save his city from repeating her worst mistakes of the 5th century. Plato's Trial of Athens addresses challenging questions about the historicity of Plato's dialogues, and it traces Plato's critique of Athenian public life and polis culture from the trial in 399 up through the Laws and the Atlantis myth in the Critias and Timaeus. In the end, Ralkowski shows that what began as a bitter response to the unjust, politically-charged trial of Socrates, evolved into a pessimistic reflection on the role of philosophy in a democratic society, a theory about Athens' 5th century decline, and cautionary tale about the corrupting influences of naval imperialism.

1

The Politics of Impiety

In his Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche suggests that Socrates wanted to die. That is what his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius’ (Phd. 118a) – imply. Only a nihilist, only someone unhealthy, ‘tottery, decadent, late’, could equate death with healing and life with sickness. ‘Even Socrates was tired of [life]’ (Nietzsche 1977: 473).¹

Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him. ‘Socrates is no physician’, he said softly to himself; ‘here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has only been sick a long time.’ (Nietzsche 1977: 479)

Nietzsche probably got this idea from reading Xenophon, who tells us that Socrates was boastful during his defense speech because he preferred ‘death to extending [his] life for a life worse than death’ (Apol. 9). He was trying to entice the jury to convict him.² The alternative was old age, which just meant the general decline of his capacities and enjoyment of life (Apol. 6). Even his divinity wanted to protect him from that (Apol. 5).³

Waterfield (2009: 203–4) recently offered a new interpretation of Socrates’ dying words. ‘Playing on the close link between pharmakos and pharmakon, ‘scapegoat’ and ‘cure’, Socrates saw himself as healing the city’s ills by his voluntary death’. The city needed to make amends with the gods, whom the Athenians believed they had offended. How else could they make sense of their crushing loss to the Spartans, the loss of their proud empire and navy, the horrors of the Great Plague, and ongoing civil war and social crisis? There was something rotten in Athens, a sort of ‘pernicious vapor’ that could spread from one individual and infect the entire community.⁴ The execution of Socrates, who had come to embody everything that was wrong in Athenian culture – natural philosophy, sophistry, moral relativism, and questionable politics – gave the Athenians an opportunity to purify their community: all of the city’s evils could be loaded onto Socrates the scapegoat and sent away, curing Athens of all its ills. Socrates understood and accepted this role (Waterfield 2009: 203). He was a sort of pre-Christian saviour who lived according to his principles and voluntarily died for Athens’ sins. Asclepius deserved a sacrifice as thanks in advance for restoring the city to health.

These are fascinating and provocative ideas. But even if one of them were true, we would not have a complete answer to the question about why Socrates was tried and convicted, which asks about how Socrates was perceived, what he believed, and what could have motivated his jurors and accusers.⁵ These are historical questions about Athenian culture and religion, and philosophical questions about Socrates’ religious and political values. Even if Socrates wanted to die, either to cure Athens or to escape from this world to a more perfect one, we would still want to know how to account for his trial – why the accusers and jurors felt it important to execute an elderly man – which remains a mystery for many reasons.

In 399 BCE, Socrates was brought to trial for impiety. Meletus, the accuser who wrote the indictment, clarified this charge with three specifications: Socrates was guilty of failing to recognize the city’s gods; he invented new spiritual beings, and he corrupted the youth.⁶ All three of these claims were part of the impiety charge, which was the punishable offense under Athenian law.⁷ At the conclusion of the trial, during which Socrates may or may not have defended himself,⁸ the jury convicted Socrates and sentenced him to death. Today scholars continue to disagree about the motivations of the jury and the prosecution. Did they mean what they said when they charged Socrates with impiety, and did they have impiety in mind when they charged him with corrupting the youth? Or were there political reasons for the trial that aren’t reflected in the formal charges?

I.The standard positions and the difficulty

Scholars typically take one of two general approaches in answering this ‘motivation question’. Some argue that the formal charges are all we need to make sense of why Socrates was brought to trial and convicted. Political considerations may have been relevant – we have no way of knowing for sure, especially as we examine the evidence – but they are superfluous. We can account for the trial without speculating about political grievances. These scholars, those who favour ‘the religious interpretation’, divide into two groups: those who think Socrates was guilty of impiety (Burnyeat 2002; Connor 1991; McPherran 2002), and those who think he was innocent.⁹ The main point of contention between these rival positions is whether Socrates’ religious views and practices were unconventional enough to warrant a trial and conviction for impiety (Brickhouse and Smith 2002: 8). The alternative approach to answering the motivation question, that taken by those who favour ‘the political interpretation’, denies that the impiety charge was the real reason for Socrates’ trial, and argues that Socrates was prosecuted because he was, or was perceived to be, a threat to the democracy.¹⁰

The problem here is vexed, and not merely because it involves questions about the irrecoverable psychological states of Socrates’ prosecutors (about whom we know very little)¹¹ and jurors (about whom we know almost nothing).¹² In a sense, this question encapsulates the entirety of the Socratic Problem. We cannot know whether Socrates was on trial for subversion,¹³ or for some other political reason, if we do not know what his politics were or how they were perceived. And we cannot know whether the impiety charge was justified, or whether it is sufficient for making sense of Socrates’ trial, without knowing what his religious beliefs were. The motivation question, in other words, has both historical and philosophical aspects. On the one hand, there are perhaps unanswerable historical questions about what Socrates believed and how he was perceived by his countrymen. And on the other hand, there are philosophical questions about how we ought to understand Socrates’ philosophy as it is reported in the writings of Plato and Xenophon, assuming it is reported there at all.

II.The Amnesty

Many scholars have dismissed the political interpretation out of hand because they have considered it incompatible with the Amnesty that was passed in 403,¹⁴ just after the fall of the Thirty and the end of the brutal civil war in Athens.¹⁵ Even some proponents of the political interpretation have thought the provisions of the Amnesty made it illegal just to mention political grievances during post-war trials – for example, this is how one might explain why Socrates does not discuss politics in either Plato’s or Xenophon’s account of the trial.

However, if Brickhouse and Smith are correct, under Athenian law at the time there was a recognized difference between (1) what you could charge a person with, and (2) what you could say during his trial (1989: 73–4). The Amnesty was not a complete forgiveness of crimes, and (so far as we know) it did not explicitly restrict what people said during the prosecution of defendants like Socrates. It only restricted the grounds on which people could be charged and convicted. If this is right, Socrates’ accusers were not allowed to charge him with political crimes alleged to have occurred prior to the Amnesty, but they were free to bring up their allegations as often as they wished once the trial was underway (Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 174).¹⁶ There are two kinds of evidence for this position: (1) the details of the Amnesty, which are inconclusive, and (2) the speeches associated with other trials from the same time period, which strongly suggest that prosecutors could speak freely about political grievances once a trial began.

The reconciliation agreement of 403 BCE made it illegal to charge people with political crimes (other than murder by one’s own hands, which remained prosecutable under the Amnesty agreement) committed before¹⁷ or during the reign of the Thirty, or for violating any of the laws that the Amnesty nullified.¹⁸ It had two important provisions. The first was a matter of distributive justice, which guaranteed that everyone who lost his property under the Thirty got it back or received something of comparable value. The second was a rule against reprisals, which governed the trials the oligarchs had to submit to as a precondition for staying in Athens: the verdicts of those trials were final – there could be no reprisals.

The ‘no reprisals’ provision is the part of the reconciliation agreement that many scholars have interpreted as a blanket Amnesty, and some of the ancient evidence appears to support their interpretation. As Aristotle says in his Athenian Constitution, there was ‘a universal Amnesty for past events, covering everybody except the Thirty, the Ten, the Eleven, and those that have been governors of Peiraeus, and that these also be covered by the Amnesty if they render account’ (Arist. Ath. Pol. 39.6). Likewise, Andocides speaks very generally of the Amnesty’s application: the returning democrats, he says, ‘decided to let go of the past, and counted the safety of the city as more important than personal grievances, and so decreed not to recall past misdeeds committed by either side’ (Andoc. 1.81). These comments give us some reason to think the Amnesty established a very general rule against stirring up political controversies of any kind, not just a legal restriction on the drafting of formal charges.

However, if Carawan (2002) and Waterfield (2009) are correct, it is a mistake to consider these statements as evidence of a blanket Amnesty, because the ‘no reprisals’ rule applied only to the two provisions in the reconciliation agreement: ‘the term used [mē mnēsikakein] is common in ancient Athenian contract law and it always refers to the specific terms of a specific agreement’ (Waterfield 2009: 134). As Carawan (2002: 5) develops this point, ‘in treaties of reconciliation the pledge mē mnēsikakein is not in itself a bar against prosecuting partisan crimes in the first instance, but a rule against further retribution in matters that have been settled once and for all’. The Amnesty guarded against reprisals on post-war property agreements and the verdicts handed down during the post-war trials of the Thirty and their henchmen (Ostwald 1986: 501–2). But that was the extent of the Amnesty’s forgiveness. It did not protect Socrates or anyone else against having his relationships with members of the Thirty discussed during his trial. His accusers were free to use this information however they wished in their efforts to persuade the jury.

We should note that Waterfield and Carawan could be mistaken about the application of the ‘no reprisals’ provision in the reconciliation agreement without other scholars being mistaken about the legal restrictions that Socrates’ accusers faced as they constructed and presented their case. These are logically independent points. As Brickhouse and Smith (1989: 74) have argued, ‘there was no provision in the Amnesty that would prevent Meletus et al. from making unmistakable references to Socrates’ associations with Alcibiades or Critias, through obvious insinuation, or even quite explicitly, by way of character assassination’. Juries were supposed to make their judgements on legal grounds alone, but it appears that there were no rules governing what people did or did not say during post-war trials – only a rule that restricted how one framed the legal matters in an indictment.

There is some reason to think the Amnesty was more restrictive than Brickhouse and Smith suggest, and that it would have prevented Socrates’ accusers from mentioning his relationships with the Thirty at all. According to Aristotle, Archinus – who diligently supported the Amnesty and even created the procedure of paragraphē to protect against unfair trials – persuaded the Council of five hundred citizens to execute someone for violating the Amnesty: ‘When somebody began to stir up grudges against the returned citizens, he arraigned him before the Council and persuaded it to execute him without trial, saying that this was the moment for them to show if they wished to save the democracy and keep their oaths’ (Arist. Ath. Pol. 40.2). This sounds like evidence against the Brickhouse and Smith position, but in fact it does not settle the matter. Archinus and the Council may have been punishing someone for crafting a political indictment, or they may have been responding to someone who act...