On that fateful day, one group of partisans demanded justice that was long overdue for a malefactor. Another group declared the proceedings a travesty of justice, the latest example of political irresponsibility and judicial folly. The five hundred jurors who were deputized to represent the will of the Athenian people would judge the loquacious intellectual who had, by his own admission, become the gadfly of the city. Though the trial featured one of Athens’ most controversial figures, it was not in principle so different from many proceedings that pitted private rights against public needs and masked political agendas behind criminal prosecutions. No one present that day could predict that the trial would become a cause célèbre, a defining moment in history, politics, and culture, whose arguments would echo down the halls of time.
The trial focused public attention on the life of an eccentric genius, Socrates of Athens. In a society that treasured beauty he was a man of almost legendary ugliness; in a society that worshiped expertise, a man who disavowed knowledge or skill; in a society famous for belles lettres, a man who spoke in everyday words and wrote down none of his philosophical insights; in a society that expected decorum, a man who went barefoot in a threadbare cloak without a tunic. In a state whose navy had ruled the waves, he rarely traveled outside the city walls; in a government in which every citizen was a politician, he shunned public office and political activity; in a city of strong opinions, he raised questions but offered no answers. Inspiring deep indignation in some, bemused curiosity in others, and passionate devotion in still others, he combined the skeptical stance of a perpetual seeker after truth with the single-minded dedication of a religious zealot. To his enemies his public activities seemed to contradict truth, subvert justice, and undermine morality; to his followers they seemed to instill virtue in replacing incoherent prejudices with consistent ethical imperatives.
The circumstances of his life and death would make Socrates not a mere victim of injustice but a martyr to a new cause, transforming his followers into apostles of a new faith. His followers vowed that they would not let Athens forget the barefoot philosopher or the wrong the city had done to him. They made his trial the most notorious judicial proceeding ever, and made his peripatetic life the stuff of legend. They recreated his conversations in written dialogues that became the gospels of the movement, making it possible for readers ever after to look over the shoulder of the master and experience the magic of his words and the frustration of his questions. In some fateful way, the circumstances that put Socrates on trial for his life immortalized him.
This is the story of Socrates, the so-called philosopher — fraud or wise man, political subversive or moral reformer, mocker or educator, heretic or saint, misanthrope or humanist, scoundrel or moralist, blasphemer or prophet, and finally, charlatan or revolutionary thinker. If he is very much a child of his time, he may also be a World-Historical Individual, a person who grasps new truths and opens a door to intellectual progress. His great gift was not that of preaching some new doctrine, but of getting people to look into their own hearts — their souls, as he said. He acted as a mirror for his interlocutors to see willy-nilly what they really were. Itinerant psychotherapist or self-appointed faultfinder, he confronted individuals where they were most vulnerable, in their own consciences. At the trial he called on the jurors too to search their souls and see what was really at stake in the conflict between himself and the city.
The unspoken question was: Dare we set a person like Socrates loose in the city? The trial of Socrates has become in many ways the trial of Athens and the city’s vaunted freedoms and egalitarian ideals. Socrates is either the most shameless and irresponsible of miscreants or the conscience that makes the government and its representatives answer for their transgressions. By a strange transposition Socrates’ trial becomes the test of everyone who meets Socrates in the literature that resurrected him. In speaking from the dust, Socrates challenges us to bring forth our best reasons, to make an accounting of our own lives before the tribunal of time. You should know, says one character in a dialogue, that “anyone who gets close enough to Socrates to converse with him … must eventually go around the ring with him in argument and not stop until that person ends up giving a complete account of how he lives now and how he has spent his past life.”[14]
In his trial, as we shall see, Socrates did not play for sympathy from the jury. Instead, he spoke about principles and challenged the jury to recognize some good beyond money, reputation, and power, something he called the care of the soul. In the representations of the philosopher his followers wrote for us, the character of Socrates has an uncanny power to draw in bystanders and ultimately the literary audience to his interrogations; his unanswered questions hang in the air.
As we search his life and character, he still compels us to search our own, and to ask ourselves, What really matters? Is there something more than money, reputation, power? Is there a right and wrong beyond my own personal welfare? Do I know what that is? Can I give good reasons for my beliefs and convictions — and then exhibit them in my actions? Can I trust myself in all situations to do what I know is right?
How is my soul?
[14].Plato Laches 187e-188a; see ch. 15* below.