“He was the first martyr of free speech and free thought.” So claims I.F. Stone in this 1988 bestseller about the trial and execution of Socrates, the great Athenian philosopher, in 399 BC. Thirty years after its initial publication, the relevance of the story has never been greater. In a world of campus safe spaces, micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, and controversies surrounding proper etiquette during the national anthem, there is much we can learn from the example of Socrates, his countrymen, and the unwritten ancient Athenian constitution.
Freedom of speech is far easier to proclaim than to define. In our own country and in our times, lawgivers have struggled with articulating a proper test against which to determine the limits of free speech. For most of our country’s history jurists employed the so-called “bad tendency test.” That is, the law could proscribe speech that had a tendency to harm public welfare, however broadly defined. Over the course of the twentieth century, new tests were employed that provided greater protections to free expression. First, the “clear and present danger” test of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was developed shortly after World War I. Later, in 1969, the Supreme Court established the even stronger “immanency test” in the landmark case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action.” Socrates, as we’ll see, would have been guilty under the “bad tendency” and “clear and present danger” tests, but not the “immanency test.”
Stone divides his book into two equal halves. Part I, Socrates and Athens, explores the philosopher’s long and contentious relationship with his home city and its political way-of-life. In particular, Stone reviews three basic philosophical questions where the opinions of Socrates differed greatly from those of his fellow countrymen and their unwritten constitution. First, Socrates rejected the foundational idea of the polis, the self-governing body of citizens with equal rights. To him, society was a herd that required a shepherd or king, “the one who knows,” as he was fond of saying, endowed with unlimited powers, who ruled and was obeyed; nobody was a citizen, all were subjects. Athenians, on the other hand, believed that man was an innately “political animal,” naturally possessing the abilities required to distinguish between good and evil, and fully capable of governing himself. Obviously, Stone writes, this was “no trivial difference” in perspective.
Second, Socrates and his countrymen differed in their definitions of virtue and knowledge. For Socrates, real understanding could only be obtained through absolute definition. If one could not define a thing absolutely, then one didn’t really know what it was. (He would have loved to question American judges on their various “tests” for assessing appropriate speech.) Socrates argued that virtue was knowledge, but real knowledge was inaccessible and thus ordinary men had neither the virtue nor the knowledge required for self-government. Or, as Stone summarizes it: “[Socrates] exhorts his fellow Athenians to virtue, but claims that it is not teachable. He identifies with knowledge, yet he insists that this knowledge is unattainable, and cannot be taught. To cap it all, after making his interlocutors feel inadequate and ignorant, Socrates confesses that he himself knows nothing.” Far from being an unapologetic supporter of Socrates, Stone notes that his logic leads “down a blind alley” and his ceaseless parsing of words in the vain pursuit of an airtight definition often comes across as “stratospheric nonsense.” (I couldn’t help but agree.) In contrast, the prevailing view among the Athenians and the broader Greek world was that most men possessed a broadly defined “political virtue,” which made a civilized community viable. “The dominant Greek view gave dignity to the common man,” Stone writes. “The Socratic view demeaned him. This was [yet another] irreconcilable divergence.”
Finally, Socrates preached and practiced complete withdrawal from the political life of the city. For his fellow citizens, active participation in the civic life of the polis was, according to Stone, “a right, a duty, and an education,” it was the very foundation upon which Solon, the great Athenian lawgiver, had built the democracy. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles calls men who mind their own business and take no part in public affairs as “idiotes” – ancient Greek for “good-for-nothings” and the root for our common epithet of “idiot.” Socrates have liked to think of his role in Athenian society as that of a gadfly to a horse, stinging every so often for the good of the sluggish beast of burden. If so, Stone wonders where he was in 411 and 404 BC when the democracy was overthrown (by his former students, no less: Alcibiades and Critias, respectively)? Or, better yet, where was Socrates during the momentous debates on the fates of Mytilene and Melos in 428 and 416 BC during the Peloponnesian War? “The most talkative man in Athens fell silent when his voice most needed,” laments the author. In Xenophon’s Memorablia, he has Socrates referring to the Athenian assembly as “an audience of mere dunces and weaklings.” It is difficult to argue with Stone’s observation that “sometimes the worst snobs are in the middle class.” Moreover, the Mytilenian Debate, which Socrates conveniently opted out of, showed just how wrong he could be about his fellow citizens. Stone crows, “The example set by Diodotus [the common citizen who successfully argued for the reverse of Cleon’s decision to liquidate the Mytilenians] makes one blush for Socrates.”
For those with little background in Greek history and/or Socratic philosophy, Part I will be highly informative and, I suspect, not a little bit surprising to learn that he was “a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed.” Part II, The Ordeal, chronicles the trial and sentencing of Socrates, most of which comes down to us from the writings of his students, Plato and Xenophon, both of whom deliberatly cast their master in the most flattering light.
Socrates and his controversial opinions had been well known around Athens for decades; the comic poets had famously lampooned him for years. Why then did the city wait until he was seventy-years-old to prosecute him? Stone claims it was because of “three political earthquakes” that occurred in Athens in the late fifth century BC, all of which bore Socrates’ philosophical fingerprints.
In relatively short succession – 411, 404, and 401 BC – disaffected elements in aristocratic Athenian society sought to overthrow the democracy in favor of an autocratic dictatorship. They succeeded in 411 and 404. “Each [conspiracy] crowded many horrors into a short and memorable span,” Stone writes, and were conspicuously led by the rich young men prominent in the entourage of Socrates. The peripatetic and indigent philosopher was no longer viewed as a harmless old crank, but rather a full-blown national security threat. He was turning some of Athens’ most talented and privileged youth into violent revolutionaries. Something had to be done.
His principal accuser was a man named Anytus. In many ways, Anytus represented the best of Athenian democracy. A hard-working and successful tanner, he had served his city with honor and distinction in many roles over many years. None too surprisingly, Socrates had little use for Anytus. He had mocked his profession as degrading and his intelligence as limited. Moreover, he had openly encouraged his son not to go into the noisome family business. Anytus – undoubtedly like countless other industrious and law-abiding Athenian fathers – had had enough of the good-for-nothing sophist who did nothing but ridicule his fellow citizens and fill their sons’ heads with disgust for Athens and admiration for the hated Sparta.
According to Plato, Socrates was accused of “corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things.” One senses that his fellow citizens would have been willing to let his unorthodox religious opinions slide if he weren’t so influential with the crème of Athenian youth.
Socrates was convicted by a vote of 280 to 220. Stone argues that he could have easily secured his acquittal if he had only appealed to the city’s great tradition of free speech and intellectual tolerance. But to do so would have meant publicly praising the very city and institutions that he had spent his entire life excoriating. He couldn’t do it. Socrates literally would rather die than affirm the value of the privileges he enjoyed in his hometown. When it came time for sentencing, he mocked the jury by suggesting that his “punishment” should be a substantial cash reward along with a lifetime of free room and board at the expense of the state. Stone claims “Socrates simply wanted to die.” The jury was happy to oblige. They responded to his insults by sentencing him to death by a vote of 360 to 140. Evidently, his contemptuous proposal and tone had swayed a sizeable bloc of jurors who had voted for his acquittal to vote for his death.
In Stone’s concluding assessment, “The paradox and the shame in the trial of Socrates is that a city famous for free speech prosecuted a philosopher guilty of no other crime than exercising it.” In light of the evidence presented in his book, I found it remarkable that his fellow citizens practiced such forbearance for so long, especially during the generation-long, existential battle against Sparta and her allies.
In closing, the author refutes claims that Socrates was caught up in a broader witch-hunt against philosophers. The death of Socrates was unique, he says, and necessary to secure his legacy. It was Plato, writing decades after the fact, who created the indelible image of “the superior man confronting the ignorant mob with serenity and humor.” It was “Plato’s genius and love [that] turned Socrates into a secular saint of our Western civilization,” he says. Indeed, “Socrates needed the hemlock as Jesus needed the Crucifixion, to fulfill his mission.”
“The Trial of Socrates” is a wonderful introduction to Socratic philosophy, Greek history in the fifth century BC, and a parable for our own contentious times.
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