rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] The Céline of Athens (Reply)

Traditionally, Socrates' suicide has led historians and philosophers to see that man as a martyr to the causes of free speech and inquiry.

[Socrates] came to believe that it was his mission to act as a kind of "gadfly" to the Athenian people, provoking them into recognizing their moral ignorance. Needless to say, his constant interrogation did not endear him to all of the citizens of Athens. While Socrates developed a following among many of the more idealistic young men of Athens--Plato, for example, was a devoted disciple of his--he soon incurred the wrath of some of the most powerful men in the city.

In 399 B.C. Socrates was put on trail for atheism (not believing in the gods of Athens) and corrupting the youth of the City (by teaching them to question everything). In the end, the jury found Socrates guilty as charged and condemned him to death by the drinking of hemlock. Although his execution was delayed for a month and he had ample time to escape, Socrates refused to do so because he felt it would be contrary to his principles (see Plato's Crito). As Plato describes it, Socrates' last day on earth was spent discussing the the question of the immortality of his soul with his friends Cebes and Simmias (see Plato's Phaedo).

But as I.F. Stone noted in 1979 in an interview for his book The Trial of Socrates, things with Socrates aren't nearly as cheery or wholesale as all that.

[The reason for his execution is i]n a speech by the famous orator Aeschines, the great rival of Demosthenes, in the year 345 B.C., just 54 years after the trial of Socrates. This bit is well known to scholars but its significance has never been fully appreciated. With the clue Aeschines provides, we may begin to reconstruct the Athenian political realities. Aeschines cited the case of Socrates as a praiseworthy precedent. "Men of Athens," he said to the jury court, "you executed Socrates, the sophist, because he was clearly responsible for the education of Critias, one of the thirty anti-democratic leaders."

[. . . Critias] was the bloodiest dictator Athens had ever known, a pupil of Socrates at one time, and a cousin of Plato’s. Aeschines was saying in effect that the antidemocratic teachings of Socrates helped to make a dictator of Critias, who terrorized Athens in 404 B.C. during the regime of the Thirty Tyrants and just five years before the trial of Socrates. Critias seemed to have been the most powerful member of the Thirty.

[. . .]

Aeschines could not have swayed the jury by that reference unless he was saying something about the relations between Socrates and Critias which was generally accepted as true by the Athenian public opinion of the time. Thought 50 years had passed, the dictatorship of Critias and the Thirty Tyrants must still have been a hateful memory. Justly or unjustly, Socrates’s reputation still suffered from his association with Critias. The reference to Critias and Socrates proved effective demagogy. Aeschines won his case.

[. . .]

To understand this, one must touch on a damaging fact few historians have explained, or even mentioned, so great is the reverence for Socrates: Socrates remained in the city all through the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants.

[. . . That single fact must have accounted more than any other for the prejudice against Socrates when the democracy was restored. The thirty Tyrants ruled only about eight months, but it was a time of terror. In that period they executed 1,500 Athenians and banished 5,000, one-tenth or more of the total population of men, women, children and slaves.

Is it entirely a coincidence that Plato proposes, as the ideal government, a dictatorship of the philosophers?

A thesis, for debate: Plato is as reliable a guide to Athenian politics and, indeed, to the Athenian polity, as Céline would have been in his Danish exile of the politics of Vichy France and the proper organization of French society.