The Charge

In 399 BCE, three Athenian citizens — Meletus, a poet; Anytus, a tanner and politician; and Lycon, an orator — brought a formal indictment against Socrates of Athens, aged 70. The charges were two: impiety toward the gods of Athens, including the introduction of new divine beings; and corruption of the youth of Athens.

These charges require historical context. Athens had recently been through a catastrophe: the disastrous Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BCE), the Spartan occupation, the oligarchic coup of the Thirty Tyrants (404–403 BCE), and a civil war before the restoration of democracy. The city was scarred, anxious, and in no mood for provocation. A general amnesty had been declared for offenses committed under the Thirty, which meant that many political grievances could not be settled directly. The trial of Socrates has the character of a displaced political grievance: Critias, the bloodiest of the Thirty Tyrants, had been a student of Socrates; so had Alcibiades, the charismatic general whose betrayal of Athens during the Sicilian expedition was widely blamed for the disaster. When Anytus, who had fought the Thirty and helped restore democracy, helped bring the charges, he was probably settling a political score that the amnesty had formally closed.

The Proceedings

Socrates was tried before a jury of 500 citizens, as Athenian practice required for serious cases. He chose to speak in his own defense rather than hire a professional rhetorician — a choice that was either principled or provocative, depending on your view of Socrates. Plato’s “Apology” gives his account of what Socrates said, and even discounting Plato’s idealization of his teacher, the picture that emerges is of a man who understood perfectly well that the jury expected a certain kind of performance — humility, appeals to pity, perhaps tears — and who refused to provide it.

Socrates claimed that his life of philosophical questioning was a divine mission, assigned to him by Apollo (through the Delphic oracle’s puzzling declaration that no one was wiser than Socrates). He had interpreted this as a commission to interrogate those reputed to be wise and demonstrate that their wisdom was unfounded. This activity — systematic public questioning of Athenian statesmen, poets, and craftsmen — had made him famous and had made him enemies. The young men of Athens, he acknowledged, followed him and enjoyed watching him expose the pretensions of their elders. Whether this was corruption or education depended on what one thought education was.

The jury voted 280 to 220 for conviction. Athenian procedure then required both sides to propose a penalty, with the jury choosing between them. The prosecution proposed death. Socrates, after initially suggesting that his penalty should be free meals at the Prytaneum — the honor given to Olympic victors — eventually proposed a small fine. The jury, reportedly more angered by this than by the original verdict, voted by a larger margin for death.

The Outcome

Socrates was imprisoned while awaiting execution. His friends, including Crito, arranged his escape; the plan was feasible, and he refused. He spent his last days in philosophical conversation. Plato’s “Phaedo” records — or imagines — his final discussion, on the immortality of the soul, before he drank the hemlock. He died calmly, which impressed even those who thought he deserved his sentence.

The verdict was regretted by a significant portion of Athenian opinion almost immediately. The story Diogenes Laertius tells — that within a year, the Athenians had put up a bronze statue of Socrates, prosecuted Meletus and executed him, and exiled Anytus — may be exaggerated, but it reflects a real shift in how the city remembered the trial.

What it Teaches

The trial of Socrates has been interpreted, in the tradition that descends from Plato, as the martyrdom of philosophy — the free mind destroyed by the envy and fear of democratic ignorance. This interpretation is powerful and partially correct, but it is incomplete in ways that matter.

Athens was not simply wrong about what Socrates was doing. He really was questioning the basis of the city’s religious and moral traditions. He really did associate with men who had done great damage to the democracy. His claim that he was performing a divine service by exposing his fellow citizens’ false beliefs was, from the perspective of those citizens, not obviously distinguishable from arrogance. A city that understood itself as a community with shared beliefs and shared gods had some grounds for regarding a man who systematically undermined those beliefs as a genuine threat. The trial reveals the ancient and irresolvable tension between the needs of political community — which requires some shared commitments — and the demands of honest intellectual inquiry — which cannot promise to preserve any particular commitment.

What makes the verdict troubling is not that Athens failed to appreciate genius, but that it could find no way to accommodate honest questioning within its political life. Socrates offered a relationship between philosophy and democracy that the city could not sustain. That failure has recurred in different forms in every polity that has since tried to manage the same tension: how much questioning of foundations can a community tolerate while remaining a community? The Athenians answered: less than Socrates was prepared to do. Most democratic societies have managed somewhat better. None has solved the problem.