IV.

The Trial

Socrates’s self-described role as the public “gadfly” of Athens made him unpopular with many citizens. He may have been seen as being in some way responsible for the aristocratic revolt against the democracy in 404 bc, which led to a brief reign of terror in which some of his students and friends participated. He was certainly ridiculed as one of the sophists by the comic poet Aristophanes in his play The Clouds, although Socrates himself saw the sophists as dangerous opponents, willing to teach anything for a fee and argue without sincerity.

Perhaps for these reasons, he was charged in 399 bc with neglecting the established gods and introducing new divinities, a reference to the daemonion, or mystical inner voice, which he often claimed guided his actions; and with corrupting the morals of the young. Plato’s Apology depicts Socrates’s own defence at his trial, which sought to vindicate his role in the city and his commitment to philosophy. He was found guilty by only a small majority, and in accordance with Athenian legal practice, was given the chance to propose his own counter-penalty to the death sentence demanded by his prosecutors. However, his proposal that he simply be fined, in view of his value to the city as a philosopher, so incensed the jury that it voted by an increased majority for the death penalty.

Socrates’s friends wanted to help him escape from prison, but in Plato’s Crito he argues with one of them that his commitment to philosophy and his own principles make it better for him to suffer the wrong of execution than to wrong the city. Plato’s Phaedo describes his last day and the calm way in which he drank the hemlock, which was the customary procedure of execution. The manner of Socrates’s life and his death both contributed to making him a model of the rational, enquiring, and fearless philosopher for future generations.