Meletus accused Socrates, as historical sources agree, of impiety and corrupting the youth, and demanded the death penalty. The implication was that Socrates was using his influence with his following of young people to introduce false and damaging religious beliefs. The charge echoed the dramatic portrayal made by Aristophanes in his comedy The Clouds, performed in 423 BC and since published in book form, wherein Socrates mocked the Olympian gods as old-fashioned and introduced a new trinity of deities, Chaos, Clouds, and Tongue.[8] For more than twenty years rumors about Socrates’ unorthodox beliefs had been circulating in public and in private, and now Socrates would be held accountable for his alleged indiscretions.
As spokesmen (sunēgoroi) Meletus named Lycon and Anytus. Lycon was a distinguished supporter of democracy whose son Autolycus had been put to death by the Thirty, and hence would be a sympathetic speaker. Anytus was a political heavyweight. He was one of the leaders of the restored democracy, active in political reforms. Why had he signed on to speak for a political nobody? Or was he the real reason the trial was being held? Socrates had a reputation not only as a religious dissenter, but as a critic of democracy. He had stayed in Athens at the time of the Thirty and had not joined the rebels in the fort at Phyle. He was said to be a friend to Critias the head tyrant of the Thirty and Charmides of the Ten. Socrates was persona non grata to the democrats. A potential danger to the new regime. Was he a target for Anytus in his program of housecleaning? Was Meletus just a hired gun posing as a concerned citizen?
According to the rules of Athenian law, Meletus had to confront Socrates personally, in the company of two witnesses, to deliver the formal charge that he had lodged against Socrates. Socrates then was arraigned at the Royal Stoa, in an event depicted in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. Documents would be prepared and depositions collected in a ceramic box, the Athenian equivalent of a file folder. The charges were presented, and duly lodged in the state archives in the building known as the Metroön. They read, “This indictment was registered and sworn to by Meletus son of Meletus of Pitthus against Socrates son of Sophroniscus of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods the city believes in and of introducing other new deities; he is also guilty of corrupting the youth. The death penalty is demanded.”[9] A date was then set for a preliminary examination (anakrisis),[10] after which the date for trial was set.
[8].Aristophanes Clouds 423-424.
[9].Diogenes Laertius 2.40. Note the similarity to the informal statement of charges in Plato Apology 24b-c, and Xenophon Apology 11-12, 19. Diogenes cites Favorinus, a 2nd century AD historian and philosopher from Gaul, as having discovered the indictment document in the state archives.
[10].Harrison 1969-1971, 2: 85-94; MacDowell 1978: 238-240; Todd 1993: 125-126; Nails 2009.