The Death of Socrates. How the Polis Killed the Wisest Man Inside It

Picture a city that has just emerged from the longest war of its life. Twenty-seven years. It lost. Its empire is broken. Thousands of its best sons died at Syracuse. A plague during the war took a third of the population — including Pericles, the greatest leader the city had ever had.

Then came months of tyranny. The Thirty Tyrants, installed by the victorious Spartans, ran an eight-month terror: political murders, confiscations, purges. Their leader was Critias — a poet, an orator, a cousin of Plato's, and a former student of Socrates. Among those they killed was the uncle of the orator Lysias. The name Lysias will return in the next lecture — as the mouthpiece of one of Plato's arguments.

In 403 the democrats took the city back. They were remarkably moderate — they declared an amnesty, took no personal revenge. Except for one man.

In 399 they put on trial the man everybody knew: the famously ugly, short, bug-eyed sculptor who had given up his craft to wander the agora asking impossible questions. The man whose students had become the most influential intellectuals of the city. The man whose former student Alcibiades had betrayed Athens to Sparta, then to Persia, then back to Athens. The man whose former student Critias had just run the terror.

Socrates was seventy. He lived in poverty and he hated democracy. The latter he did not much hide.

The text of the indictment survives. Diogenes Laërtius quotes it: "Socrates is guilty: of not recognizing the gods the polis recognizes, and of introducing new divinities. Guilty also of corrupting the young. The penalty: death."

Look at the formula. Two parts. The first — asebeia, impiety — the very charge that destroyed Anaxagoras and Protagoras. The second — corrupting the young. This is a new formula, and it is lethal. There is no statute in Athens against "corrupting the youth" in our sense. It is a political charge: you are spoiling my sons, turning them into citizens who do not believe in Athens.

Who were the accusers? Meletus — a mediocre poet, an instrument. Anytus — a rich tanner, a democrat, the man whose son had actually started following Socrates and quit the family business. And Lycon — an orator. The real architect was Anytus, a man whose family had suffered under the Thirty.

Athens could not try Critias. He was already dead. They could not try Alcibiades — also already dead, murdered in Asia Minor. What was left was the teacher.

And one more subtlety. Socrates could still have said I was wrong about how I taught them, I apologize. The Athenian amnesty would have covered it. He did not say it. He came to court — and his defense became one of the most ferocious attacks on the city itself the polis had ever heard from a defendant's lips.

Five hundred jurors. One day. No prosecutor's lawyer, no defense lawyer — the accused must speak for himself. Socrates spoke three times, and these three speeches were recorded by Plato, who sat among the spectators. The text we call the Apology.

In the first speech Socrates does something unheard of. Instead of pleading, he tells the jurors: I am carrying out the god's command. Long ago my friend Chaerephon went to Delphi and asked the Pythia: "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Pythia answered: "No one."

Socrates was bewildered. He knew he knew nothing. So how could he be the wisest? Was the god joking? But the god cannot lie. So Socrates began walking the city testing the renowned — the politicians, the poets, the craftsmen — about their wisdom. And every time he found the same thing: they did not know what they claimed to know, but they thought they did. Socrates at least knew that he did not.

"Through this search, Athenians, I have made many enemies — the worst and the most dangerous," he tells them. And then, conversationally: "I am the gadfly the god has placed on a horse. Athens is the noble horse, grown sluggish from its weight, in need of stinging. If you kill me, the horse will sleep."

This is not a defense. It is an accusation. He tells the court that the polis itself is sick, and that he is its doctor. That if it kills him, it will not heal — it will fall finally asleep.

Voegelin, reading this scene, names it precisely: "Three actions are taking place at once: the trial of Socrates, ending in his condemnation; the trial of Athens, ending in the rejection of its savior; and the separation of Socrates from the polis, ending in the solitude of his death."

Five hundred jurors voted. 281 guilty. 220 not guilty. If 31 had voted the other way, Socrates would have been acquitted. Which means the defense almost worked. Most of Athens still respected Socrates — or at least did not want his blood.

By Athenian rules, now came the penalty phase. The prosecutor proposes one punishment, the defendant proposes another. The jury chooses between the two. Meletus had proposed death.

What did Socrates propose? He stands before the court that has just convicted him of reshaping the young, and he says:

"What fine, then, do I deserve? I have been the benefactor of the polis, who has spent his whole life making Athenians better citizens. The most just penalty would be free meals at the Prytaneum for life — the honor the city grants to Olympic victors."

This is what we will call the most insolent thing anyone has ever said at his own death trial. He is asking, in effect, that the city pay him to have lunch. The hall erupts. No defendant has ever behaved this way.

His friends — Plato, Crito, Apollodorus — rise in panic and say: we will pay a fine. Thirty minae. A large sum. Socrates agrees to propose it — without enthusiasm, as a chore.

The vote on the penalty. 361 for death. 139 for the fine. Which means many more jurors voted to kill him than to convict him in the first place. Why? Because what he did in the middle outraged them. He mocked the court. He mocked Athens itself.

And Athens killed him.

About a month passed between the conviction and the execution. They did not kill at once — the fleet had been sent to Delos for the annual festival, and as long as that ship was away the city was "pure." Socrates sat in prison.

His friends prepared his escape. Crito — one of his wealthier friends — had bribed the guard. A ship was waiting in the harbor for Thessaly. Socrates could have walked out. The Athenian authorities, frankly, would have been relieved: nobody wanted an actual execution; everyone assumed he would flee, the way Anaxagoras had fled, the way Protagoras had fled. That was how it was done.

The dialogue Crito is a conversation in the cell. Crito argues: you will betray your children, you will betray your friends, your name will be stained with cowardice. Socrates listens and replies:

"All my life I have lived under these laws. I had a contract with them: I live in Athens, I use its streets, its markets, its education, its marriage. I have never once left the city except for war. Now the laws have condemned me. If I flee, I destroy the law. Better that the law destroy me than that I destroy the law."

This is a philosophical position of extraordinary power. He does not say the verdict is just. He says the system that produced the verdict is more whole than he is, and his death will reinforce it more than his flight would. If he flees, he becomes one more sophist on the run, like Protagoras. If he stays, he becomes something else.

He became something else.

The dialogue Phaedo describes the last day. The friends came in the morning. Socrates spoke with them all day — about the soul, about immortality, about philosophy as a "practice of death." Not grim. Calm. Clear. Even funny.

When the sun began to set the jailer brought in the cup of hemlock. He was weeping. Socrates was steady. He drank the whole draught without hesitation. Then he walked, as he had been advised, until his legs began to numb. Then he lay down.

He could already barely speak. Just before he died, lifting for a moment the last cloth from his face, he said:

"Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay this debt. Do not forget."

And he died.

Asclepius is the god of healing. The cock is what the healed brought to him as offering. What did Socrates mean? Interpretations have been multiplying for two and a half thousand years. The most direct: death is the soul's cure from the body. I am healed. Pay the god.

Voegelin's reading: "The philosophical life toward death and the judgment in eternity separates from the life of the dead souls. And then the pathos of the moment is relieved by the last irony of Socratic ignorance: 'Who of us takes the better way is hidden to all, except to the God.'"

In the room — where Plato was not (he was sick at home, he says) — but in the room of his imagination, this is how it happened.

In the ordinary version of this story, here it ends. Another inconvenient philosopher killed. Athens settles. He's forgotten within a generation.

But among those who stood watching this execution was a man who would not allow that. He was about thirty. He was from the most influential aristocratic family in Athens — descended on his mother's side from Solon, on his father's from Codrus. His uncle Critias had just run the terror. His brothers were the flower of Athenian youth. The whole arc ahead — politics, power, name — was his.

He chose otherwise. He chose to leave the city, to travel, to learn. And when he returned — almost forty — he founded a school outside Athens. He named it after the hero Academus: the Academy. The first university in Western history.

And for the rest of his life — and he lived another fifty years — he wrote. He wrote dialogues in which the main character was Socrates. He almost never gave the word to himself. He spoke only through Socrates.

What Athens had killed in one man, this man returned to the world as thirty-six dialogues. In the middle of these, in the Republic, he had his teacher imaginatively found a perfect city — a city where philosophers rule, and demagogues are cut off at the throat.

It was revenge. It was theory. It was a civilizational change. The next lecture is about that.