The Trial of Socrates, Retried

This case was decided long ago. You are asked to try it again on the record that survives.

Athens, 399 BC. The city had lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta five years earlier. Its walls had been pulled down. A junta of thirty men, installed under Spartan pressure, had ruled for months and killed a great many citizens before democracy was restored. An amnesty passed in 403 barred prosecution for most acts committed during those years. The wounds remained.

Into a court under that amnesty came three accusers. Meletus, a poet, brought the indictment. Anytus, a prosperous tanner and a leading democratic politician, stood behind it. Lycon, an orator, joined them. The charge had two limbs: that Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, about seventy years old, did not recognize the gods the city recognized and introduced new divinities of his own, and that he corrupted the young men of Athens.

Athenians in that room are unlikely to have needed telling what the indictment did not say. Critias, the most violent of the Thirty, had kept company with Socrates. So had Charmides, who held office under the Thirty in the Piraeus. So had Alcibiades, the brilliant and notorious general whose defection the city had not forgotten. The amnesty barred a prosecutor from naming those events as crimes. It did not bar a juror from remembering them.

The trial took one day before a jury traditionally given as five hundred and one citizens. Both sides spoke against a water clock. There were no appeals.

Here the record becomes difficult, and you should know why. The prosecution speeches are lost. Not summarized, not paraphrased by a neutral hand: gone. Nearly everything we have about what happened in that courtroom comes from men who admired Socrates and wrote afterward to defend his memory, chiefly Plato and Xenophon. Plato's account of the defense is the version most readers know. It may be reconstruction, argument, or something closer to a memorial than a transcript. Treat it as testimony from an interested witness, not as a stenographer's page.

On that account, Socrates declined the customary appeals to pity. He did not parade weeping children before the jury, and he said plainly that he would not. He cross-examined Meletus in open court and pressed him on whether a man could believe in divine activities while believing in no divinities at all. He described his questioning of prominent Athenians as a duty laid on him by the god at Delphi, a mission he was not free to abandon. He said he had never been anyone's teacher and took no fees. He also spoke of a divine sign, a voice or check that came to him privately and turned him away from certain actions.

You have the charge, the context the jurors carried into the room, and the gaps in the record. Weigh them.

Did Socrates commit the offenses charged?

We ask you to try the charge, not the legend. Athens permitted wide argument about the gods; what it did not permit was a man who denied the city's gods while claiming a private divine voice that answered to no shrine, no priest, no assembly. That is the indictment. He admitted the voice himself.

On corruption, we do not need the amnesty. We need only what every juror in that room could see. Critias and Charmides sat in the junta that emptied Athenian houses. Alcibiades taught Spartans how to bleed us. These were not strangers to the defendant. He spent years teaching young men of that class to examine every received obligation and to find the many unfit to judge anything. Some of them believed him.

Read the indictment and ask what act it names. It names none. No sacrifice refused, no altar defiled, no student produced who says he was taught to betray Athens. The prosecution's case is an atmosphere.

The impiety limb collapses on its own terms. Meletus was pressed in open court and could not hold a position: he charged both that the defendant introduced new divinities and that he believed in none. Both cannot be true. As for the sign that checked him, Athens was a city of oracles, omens and inherited dreams. A private conscience is not a foreign god.

The corruption limb is the amnesty in disguise. Critias and Alcibiades cannot be charged, so they are smuggled in through a man who never held office under them and took no fees from anyone. A teacher does not answer for what a student later becomes. On this record no one does.

Punish his manner if you must despise it. That is not the charge you swore to try.