Transcript The Trial and Death of Socrates

Trial and Execution of Socrates
Democracy on Trial
Events in Athens
 411 BCE: Aristocratic Reaction; Council of 400
(Oligarchy)
 410 BCE: Restoration of Democracy (Alcibiades)
 404 BCE: Athens defeated by Sparta; Tyranny of
30 (Critias)
 403 BCE (September): Fall of 30; Restoration of
Democracy
 399 BCE: Socrates charged with corrupting the
young and not believing in the gods; convicted
by a narrow margin
Bust of Socrates
Daniel Nicholas Chodowiecki
“The Death of Socrates (?)”
18th-19th century
Johann Friedrich Greuter
“Socrates (?) and His Students”
17th century
Pietro Testa
“The Symposium” (1648)
Jean-Louis David
“The Death of Socrates” (1748)
Impiety Trials
Reactionary Athenian Mainstream Culture?
Plutarch, Pericles, 32
“About this time also Aspasia was put on trial for impiety,
Hermippus the comic poet being her prosecutor, who alleged
further against her that she received free-born women into a place
of assignation for Pericles. And Diopeithes brought in a bill
providing for the public impeachment of such as did not believe in
gods, or who taught doctrines regarding the heavens, directing
suspicion against Pericles by means of Anaxagoras. The people
accepted with delight these slanders, and so, while they were in this
mood, a bill was passed, on motion of Dracontides, that Pericles
should deposit his accounts of public moneys with the prytanes,
and that the jurors should decide upon his case with ballots which
had lain upon the altar of the goddess on the acropolis. But
Hagnon amended this clause of the bill with the motion that the
case be tried before fifteen hundred jurors in the ordinary way,
whether one wanted to call it a prosecution for embezzlement and
bribery, or malversation.”
Bad Press on the Sophists
 Plato’s Republic, Protagoras, and Gorgias
 Aristophanes’ Clouds (first production in 423 BCE)
Aristophanes, Birds
Great Dionysia 414 BCE
“And yet, only yesterday, before your dispensation in
the skies became a fact, the Spartan craze had swept
the faddish world. Why, men went mad with mimicry
of Socrates, affected long hair, indifferent food, rustic
walking sticks, total bathlessness, and led, in short,
what I can only call a Spartan existence.”
Lines 1280-1285, trans. W. Arrowsmith
Aristophanes, Clouds
Great Dionysia 423 BCE
SOCRATES: “You see, only by being suspended aloft, by
dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare
thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict
scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean.
Had I pursued my inquiries from down there on the
ground, my data would be worthless. The earth, you see,
pulls down the delicate essence of thought to its own
gross level.”
W. Arrowsmith,[pg. 25]
Was Socrates A Sophist?
Oracle at Delphi
Socrates proclaimed the wisest man. Socrates’
questions are in the service of Apollo; he is testing
this statement, because he cannot believe it to be
true. He finds it to be true insofar as the rest know
nothing but think they know something, whereas
Socrates knows nothing but also knows that he
knows nothing.
Anti-Democratic Socratic Ideas?
Socrates in Plato’s Republic
Horse Analogy: Horses are benefited by one or by
a few (horse trainers), not by everyone
Compare Socrates in Plato’s Crito
Body: Athlete Analogy: the trainer-expert
benefits the body; the common man corrupts the
body
Soul: Philosophers benefit the soul; common men
corrupt the soul
Plato on Democracy
(Dion of Syracuse)
“[Dion intended] to put a curb upon unrestrained
democracy, which he did not regard as a constitution at
all, but rather as a kind of supermarket of constitutions—
to use Plato’s phrase—and to introduce a blend of
democracy and monarchy on the Spartan and Cretan
model.” Plutarch, Dion, 53
Selected Passages from Plato’s Republic
“Then it follows, Polemarchus, that it is just for the
many, who are mistaken in their judgment, to harm
their friends, who are bad, and benefit their enemies,
who are good.”
(334d-e)
“That certainly wouldn’t be surprising, for, even as you were
speaking it occurred to me that, in the first place, we aren’t all
born alike, but each of us differs somewhat in nature from the
others, one being suited to one task, another to another.”
(370b)
“Then, a whole city established according to nature would be
wise because of the smallest class and part in it, namely, the
governing or ruling one. And to this class, which seems to be by
nature the smallest, belongs a share of knowledge that alone
among all the other kinds of knowledge is to be called wisdom.”
(428e-429a)
“Now the members of this small group [the philosophers] have
tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at
the same time they’ve also seen the madness of the majority and
realized, in a word, that hardly anyone acts sanely in public
affairs and that there is no ally with whom they might go to the
aid of justice and survive, that instead they’d perish before they
could profit either their city or their friends and be useless both
to themselves and to others, just like a man who has fallen among
wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice
nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone.”
(496c-d)
Socrates’ Disciples
 Alcibiades
 Critias