Apology

The key questions at the heart of Apology are why Socrates’s accusers put him on trial and, by extension, why the jury voted to condemn him to death. The official charges brought against Socrates were impiety and corrupting the youth. Given that these are both very subjective accusations, it is important to place them in the context of Socrates’s social and political reputation in early 4th century BCE. Athens. At the time, most educators were referred to as “sophists.” As paid tutors, they generally taught the children of wealthy clients. Moreover, because of this employee-employer relationship, sophists answered to their wealthy clients to a degree and thus had little reason to alienate them.

By contrast, Socrates never accepted payment for educating youths, and Plato characterizes him in direct opposition to the sophists. Socrates offered a far more informal education, as Athenian youths followed him in the streets to watch him expose the ignorance of their wealthy parents’ generation. In his defense, he says, “[T]he young men who follow me around of their own free will, those who have most leisure, the sons of the very rich, take pleasure in hearing people questioned” (28). Moreover, Socrates was free to adopt this strategy because, unlike the sophists, he was not beholden to an elite clientele, having accepted a life of poverty. This is the source of the charges of corrupting the youth, as prominent men of Athens—particularly his chief accuser Anytus—bristled at Socrates’s disrespect toward the city’s high society. Although Anytus is only mentioned briefly in Apology, he appears in another of Plato’s dialogues, Meno, where he takes grave offense at Socrates’s assertion that famed Athenians like the historian Thucydides failed to teach virtue in their children. (Plato, George Anastaplo, and Laurence Berns. Plato’s Meno. Focus Pub./R. Pullins Co, 2004.)

The charges of impiety are more complicated to parse. To begin with, it is nearly impossible to evaluate Socrates’s true piety with anything close to certainty. This is largely because Socrates left behind no written works of his own, and therefore all surviving observations on the philosopher’s actions and beliefs exist as secondary sources, most of which were written by his loyal disciple Plato. Yet within his defense—again, as reported by Plato—one sees that while Socrates’s religious beliefs may be unorthodox, he is not an atheist as Meletus is said to have claimed. Socrates repeatedly says he serves the god at Delphi, who through the oracle Pythia claimed that no man is wiser than Socrates. Socrates interprets this as an assignment to a holy mission to alert the souls of Athens to their own ignorance.

Moreover, Socrates repeatedly refers to his personal daimonion—which translates to “divine something”—which prohibits him from committing immoral or unethical deeds. In a display of his ability to expose the ignorance of others, Socrates manipulates Meletus into acknowledging these beliefs, which transparently contradict the earlier assertion that Socrates is an atheist. At the same time, this may be a hollow rhetorical victory—after all, in Socrates’s own words, the charge of impiety involves “not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things” (28). Thus, his belief in a daimonion, combined with his arguably blasphemous contention that his needling of elites is literally a mission from the gods, may support the charge of impiety.

That said, having unorthodox beliefs and annoying the elites hardly seem to justify Socrates’s arrest, trial, and execution. To better understand why his accusers and the jury were so ready to condemn him, one may look to the historical record. In 404 BCE, democratic Athens surrendered in the Peloponnesian War against its oligarchic opponent, Sparta. Sparta installed a ruthless puppet government, known later as the Thirty Tyrants, which murdered an estimated 5% of the Athenian population, exiled many more, and unlawfully confiscated property on a massive scale. By the time of Socrates’s trial, the Thirty Tyrants had been deposed and the Athenian democracy restored. Yet rightfully or not, jurors would have associated Socrates with the Thirty Tyrants for several reasons. First, multiple leaders of the Thirty Tyrants had been students of Socrates’s, including the particularly vicious statesman Critias. Moreover, many citizens loyal to Athenian democracy voluntarily exiled themselves if they had the means to do so—which, according to historian Robin Waterfield, Socrates absolutely had the means and wherewithal to find asylum elsewhere. (Waterfield, Robin. Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths. Faber & Faber, 2009.) Scholar Debra Nails adds that Lycon, one of the three chief accusers, partially blamed Socrates for the death of his son Autolycus at the hands of the Thirty Tyrants. (Nails, Debra. The People of Plato: The Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics. Hackett Publishing, 2002.)

Yet due to an agreement of reconciliation struck around 403 BCE, after the Thirty were deposed, Athenian citizens received amnesty for political actions taken before or during the Thirty’s reign of terror. Thus, the charges of impiety and youth corruption may have been merely symbolic offenses representing what the jury saw to be Socrates’s complicity in greater crimes against Athenian democracy. Waterfield suggests that Socrates embraced his role as a scapegoat for resolving old disputes that were still raw from the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. He writes that Socrates “saw himself as healing the City’s ills by his voluntary death.” (Waterfield, Robin. Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths. Faber & Faber, 2009.)

This sense of virtuous sacrifice is central to Plato’s depiction of Socrates in Apology, which many scholars consider one of his more reliable representations of his mentor. This is because the general content of Socrates’s defense speech would have been commonly known to Athens’s intellectual elite, and Plato would have had little to gain by misrepresenting him. Moreover, some scholars believe that over time, Plato began to attribute his own ideas to Socrates, whom he helped build up in the popular imagination as an unimpeachable authority on matters of philosophy. In what philosophers call “the Socrates problem,” this makes it difficult to establish precisely what Socrates believed.

Yet if Socrates’s exact belief system remains opaque, his personality and approach toward interrogation are on full display in Apology. He alternates between self-effacement and grandiosity, one moment admitting he knows nothing worthwhile and the next claiming he is anointed by the god of Delphi to expose the ignorance of Athenian elites. His Socratic method is also showcased, as Socrates interrogates Meletus and manipulates him into contradicting himself. Throughout his defense Socrates’s rhetoric is humorous and ironic, as when he suggests that as “punishment” for his crimes he be feted at the Prytaneum. He revels in his status as society’s “gadfly,” challenging the status quo. Socrates proclaims, “I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly” (35).

Perhaps most striking is Socrates’s emphasis on living a virtuous life at all costs, even and especially in the face of death. He references an act of civil disobedience he performed during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, which could have resulted in his execution had democrats not entered the city shortly thereafter, killing Critias and other leaders of the oligarchy in battle. Even after being sentenced to execution by the jury, Socrates is not afraid to die—though in true self-effacing manner, he does not attribute this sanguine attitude to courage. Rather, he believes death is either a dreamless sleep or a stay in the underworld, where he hopes to continue performing his duties as a gadfly.