The greatest crime and the surest proof of the insanity of the democracy in Athens, an outrage that cast a black mark on that city’s glory for two-and-a-half thousand years, was the judicial murder of Socrates in 399 B.C. On trumped up charges of impiety and corruption of the youth, a completely blameless man, in truth more pious and devoted to the education and improvement of young men than anyone else in Athens, was put to death. Spite, spite was the motive of his accusers and judges; spite for his unwavering virtue and pursuit of truth: his inquiries showcased their own inadequacies and exposed as mere pretense their claims to knowledge and excellence. So depraved were the Athenians that they could not tolerate a truly virtuous man in their midst, and so they murdered Socrates.
This, at least, is the version of the story passed down to us by Plato and Xenophon, two of Socrates’ greatest students. They are not exactly unbiased sources. These men clearly loved their teacher and were deeply affected by his death. Not inclined favorably toward democracy to begin with, Plato, Xenophon, and others turned harshly against the Athenians’ preferred form of government. What better proof could there be that the mass of the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves?
In truth, the killing of Socrates was one of the democracy’s shrewdest acts and probably saved Athens from much horror and bloodshed. On a personal level Socrates may have been blameless, but his politics, his friends, and his students made him the most dangerous man in Athens at the opening of the 4th century. His murder was a calculated act of terror that ensured Athens’ security and stability for decades.
It is a common misconception that Thucydides chronicles the fall of Athens—this is not so. Thucydides’ history breaks off in mid-sentence, and it is Xenophon who picks up the tale. Nor does Thucydides describe the democracy’s descent into madness: although he does paint a graphic portrayal of the civil wars that broke out across the Greek world, Athens remained largely stable through the first twenty years of the war until the short-lived oligarchic coup of 411 B.C. Again, it is Xenophon who details what could truly be called the excesses of the democracy.
In 406 B.C., the Spartan admiral Lysander, who had a great future ahead of him, defeated the Athenian fleet at Notium. The Athenians were officially under the command of Alcibiades, an unscrupulous schemer but skilled military man—he was also the ἐρομένος of Socrates. Alcibiades was away and had instructed his subordinates to avoid battle; his orders were disregarded, but the Athenians, who didn’t trust Alcibiades to begin with, blamed him for the disaster and banished him.
Later that same year, a new Spartan leader, Callicratidas, pursued the Athenians still more harshly and threatened to annihilate their fleet at Arginusae. Almost in a panic, the Athenians raised a new fleet of reinforcements, for the first time putting slaves to the oars of their ships, and crushed the now outnumbered Spartans in battle. After a long string of humiliating defeats, Athens was grateful for a win. However, the admirals failed to collect the bodies of the dead sailors. Back home, recriminations flew wildly, and the Assembly moved to try the ten admirals for dereliction of duty as a group, knowing that if they had to try them individually, tempers would cool and a few might be acquitted. Of the presiding officials only Socrates refused to allow the motion, but he was shouted down. After many speeches and much legal wrangling, six of the ten admirals were forced to drink hemlock. In 405 B.C., Lysander returned to the field, and after defeating the Athenians at Aegospotami, he sailed into the Piraeus and dictated terms of surrender.
Lysander set up at Athens an oligarchical government to replace the democracy, and it was only at this point that the streets of Athens began to run red with blood. The Thirty Tyrants, as the leaders of the oligarchy were called, began an orgy of murder to enrich themselves and destroy their opponents. They were confident in their position because they believed they had the total support of Sparta behind them. In fact, only Lysander and the imperialists supported the Thirty, while the traditionalists led by King Pausianias did not, and it was Pausianias who led the Spartan reinforcements in 403 B.C. when the Thirty were near defeat. Pausianias, though victorious in battle, restored the democracy.
In addition to his association with Alcibiades, Socrates had in his circle the principle member of the Thirty Tyrants, a man named Critias. This has led many historians to assume that Socrates was targeted as part of recriminations following the fall of the Thirty. However, the Thirty were deposed in 403 B.C., while Socrates was put to death four years later in 399 B.C. If the Athenians wanted to punish Socrates for his association with the Thirty Tyrants, they took their jolly good time about it. In fact, two events, one past and one on the horizon, spurred the Athenians to action.
In 401 B.C., Prince Cyrus of Persia gathered an army with the intention of usurping his brother Artaxerxes’ throne. Cyrus had been a strong supporter of Sparta during the Peloponnesian War on account of his close friendship with Lysander. With Sparta supreme in Greece and the imperialist party dominant in Sparta, Lysander decided to repay Cyrus’ generosity by allowing him to recruit mercenaries among the Greeks. The total number of these mercenaries came to just over ten thousand, and Cyrus intended to use them as his personal bodyguard to replace the Persian Immortals.
Along with the Ten Thousand went Xenophon, hoping for a position in Cyrus’ imperial government. When battle was joined at Cunaxa, the Greeks carried all before them, but Cyrus was killed, ending the rebellion. Shortly thereafter, the Persians invited the Greek leaders to a banquet to discuss terms of surrender where they murdered their guests. Xenophon rallied the Greek troops and led them on their long march to the Black Sea where they joined with a Spartan army under the general Thibron. The march of the Ten Thousand was proof of concept for a Greek invasion of Asia, which would be carried out some seventy-five years later. In the meantime, the failure of Cyrus’ rebellion had dashed the Spartans’ hopes of an alliance with Persia.
The Spartans held their own against the Persians for several more years, but they could only either project power abroad or enforce their rule at home, not both. Thus, the Athenian democrats could purge the city of opponents without the Spartans interfering.
And the democrats needed to act quickly. Xenophon had emerged from Asia in 400 B.C. at the head of the most powerful mercenary army in the world and could return home at any moment, and Plato would soon be old enough to hold public office. Xenophon was a proven leader, but Plato was a more immediate threat being at Athens already. In addition, he was already a prize-winning athlete and playwright and had family ties to some of the most illustrious noble families in Athens. Both were students of Socrates and favored the oligarchic faction. If Xenophon were to return home or Plato to enter politics, the democrats would have been hard put to retain power; civil war might even have resumed.
And these were not the only dangerous men: Socrates’ entire circle was well-educated, well-connected, well-funded, and thoroughly oligarchical.
Under the noses of everyone, while the older oligarchs and democrats discredited each other with internecine war, Socrates had groomed for leadership a coterie of young and anti-democratic future politicians. The democrats would not let the power they had so recently fought to obtain slip away, and they resolved to chop of the head of their rivals’ party.
With Socrates’ death, the threat of an oligarchic resurgence evaporated. Plato almost immediately left the city to travel the Mediterranean. Xenophon continued to fight alongside the Spartans, even bearing arms against Athens at the battle of Coronea in 394 B.C., after which he was formally banished. No other students of Socrates pursued a political career either. The oligarchic faction was all but dead: some moderates remained, but in 395 B.C., when considering whether to join a revolt against Sparta, the Athenian Assembly voted unanimously to go to war.
How would Socrates’ followers have ruled, given the chance? Unlike the moderate oligarchs, such as Sophocles and Aristophanes, who wanted to restore the constitution of the early democracy and exalted the Marathon Men (“Bring back the Constitution” they might have cried), Socrates’ students were outright reactionaries: they harked back to the Peisistratid tyranny of the 6th century, when Athens had no empire but was peaceful and prosperous and the tyrants kept a firm lid on factional conflict.
Accommodation with Sparta and abandonment of imperial ambitions would have been their platform in the early 4th century: Plato wrote bitterly of how Athens sent out its young men, such as the mathematician Theaetetus, to die on pointless and vainglorious expeditions to rebuild its empire. Phocion, a philosophically educated politician in the mid-4th century, supported peace and accommodation with Macedon. They also would have reduced the franchise and established an oligarchic constitution, as Demetrius of Phaleron eventually did, in order to limit factional conflict.
Unfortunately for Athens, the Athenians would have had none of this. The roots of the democracy ran old and deep: Solon included landless laborers into the citizen body through his reforms, Peisistratus led a faction of poor herders in his bid for the tyranny, and Cleisthenes overthrew the Peisistratids and established the democracy all in the 6th century, over a hundred years before Socrates died.
No attempt to establish an oligarchy in Athens lasted long without strong outside support. In addition to the vote, the Athenians craved empire with an intensity that can only be described as madness. In his day, Phocion had to move heaven and earth to keep Athens from revolting against Macedon, which had crushed Athens in battle, wiped the city of Thebes from the map, and conquered both Sparta and Persia at the same time. The Athenians refused to accept reality even when it was literally beating them over the head: if Plato had risen to speak for peace in 395 B.C., he would have been dragged from the speakers’ platform and torn limb from limb.
In a way, then, the execution of their beloved teacher was a godsend for the students of Socrates. It showed them clearly that their cause was hopeless, that politics would ultimately profit them nothing, and so they chose to make the best of a bad situation. And we should be glad that they did. Instead of writing the history of his times with his spear, Xenophon did so with his pen; instead of swaying citizens in the Assembly, Plato’s words have inspired countless generations to philosophy. It is because of these men that we know how Socrates died; it is because of these men that we care how Socrates died and condemn the Athenians for his murder even to this day.
The reactionaries of Socrates’ circle managed to turn tragedy into triumph by recognizing that in the long run they could not win through politics and by finding other ways to thrive, something their democratic colleagues never understood. It is a lesson that many today could do well to learn, but, well, we also live in a democracy, now don’t we?
Wonderful article. Going to link for it for the History, I didn’t know Socrates was planning a coup of aristocrats. Strange our New Deal schools seem to leave that part out…I wonder why. [I don’t].
We don’t live in any sort of Athenian democracy and never did, as for Oligarchical tyranny we have that now in America, our Democracy was overthrown by the New Deal, which is Administrative Government. No election decides this governments fate, nor even impacts on it. We elect 537 of a government of 4.3 million – and you blame democracy? Our vote is irrelevant except to politicians and their cronies.
We don’t have Democracy and none of us have ever seen one. We did have a Republic that broadly extended the Franchise but few living ever saw that either.
You are denouncing a Tomb.
What is the impact of an election on any Department of Government or the Federal Reserve? Nothing. The figurehead boss changes.
As for Politics: There are in Leaders or Rulers both The Will to Power and The Call of Duty. In our current Rulers there is only The Will to Power, they consider Duty a four letter word – the only one not in their vocabulary or ken.
In neoreactionaries I discern also the same Will to Power, and frustration that they’d have to strive and suffer for it…I discern little or no call to duty. Too bad, it would keep you warm on the cold nights and keep you going when it’s hard.
There is no mind in History to compete with Napoleon’s, but he didn’t just succeed because of Supreme self-confidence and the Will to Power. He understood also his Duties – look at the Code Napoleon, his restoration and reform of marriage, the Church, education and the exiles. That’s Duty, not pure lust for power.
Until you have some sense of Duty you should indeed forgo Politics and striving after Power. Duty to something higher than yourselves. Reactionaries of course understood that and sadly only that…and not The Will to Power.
Perhaps if you find Duty you could marry it with ambition, and advance matters.
[I want isn’t Duty…I want..I want].
Politics is a dead end. Metapolitics? Maybe not.
I really enjoyed this article. Can you provide a recommended reading list of books and such on these topics?
You are now on my daily reading list.
Thanks, Jeff!
Plato’s three dialogues Apology, Crito, and Phaedo are the main sources for the historical Socrates, but Plato seems to take some liberties with his subject matter. Xenophon’s Apology largely agrees with Plato’s account but differs on a number of details; his Symposium and Memorabilia are also about Socrates, but they were written many decades after the fact and deal primarily with events where Xenophon was not present. Aristophanes’ play Clouds presents a very different, more slippery version of Socrates from the portrait painted by his students.
For history, Xenophon’s Hellenica is the authoritative source for 410 B.C. to 362 B.C. and his Anabasis covers the march of the Ten Thousand. Things get fuzzy thereafter, except for Alexander’s rein, but Plutarch’s Lives of Agesilaus, Phocion, Demosthenes, and Alexander give decent coverage; Diodorus Siculus’ Library of History books 16-18 cover most of the 4th century, but he is a notoriously unreliable source.
I have a question for all the readers and Authors of this site. If democracy failed so badly at Athens why is it so functional in the pure democracy of Switzerland?
Or is that a mistaken assumption on my part?
I have a question about the premise that Socrates and his students (Plato in particular) can be understood as advocating for any kind of practical political solution to Athenian democracy. In Book 7 of the Republic, just as Socrates has finished constructing the City in Speech, Socrates adds two last prerequisites to the City. First, the Philosopher-King must choose to rule and live the vita activa. However, the Philosopher knows the vita activa is inferior to the vita contemplativa. By choosing the vita activa, the Philosopher-King is deliberately choosing the inferior to the superior, and thereby surrenders the title of Philosopher, becoming a mere King. Secondly, Socrates argues that the first set of citizens must be children no older than ten without parents, because parents would have taught culture and values incompatible with the city in speech and the citizens must not have any influences from outside the City. One is led to believe that either the Philosopher is snatching infants from their cradles at night, or else these first citizens sprout out of the very soil itself (perhaps a reference to the Theban foundation myth).
In short, the foundation of the City in Speech requires two impossible acts: a Philosopher-King who is not a Philosopher and a crop of citizens born out of thin air. Socrates himself makes these demands, so it is absurd to claim (as some have tried) that he didn’t catch these two flaws in his reasoning. The flaws are intentional, meaning that Socrates knows full well that the City in Speech is an impossibility, and therefore the entire act of City-Building must have a meaning other than practical politics.
My question is this: If you wish to support your claim that Socrates was a reactionary politician interested in practical ends, why does he argue in Book 7 of the Republic that city-building is futile? One answer would be that The Republic represents mature Plato’s thought rather than Socrates, but The Republic, unlike The Laws, predates Plato’s travels in Sicily, and so he had yet to fully replace Socrates’s teachings with his own. The “middle period” of Plato is generally considered to be a mixture of Socratic and Platonic teachings. If we accept that The Republic represents Socratic thinking in any significant way, rejection of the vita activa for the vita contemplativa is a central tenet of Socratic thought from the beginning.
I would attribute the ideas in the Republic to Plato rather than to Socrates, especially the radical rejection of politics. In practice, however, both Plato and his students at least kept a finger on the pulse of politics. I suspect that Plato himself was of two minds: raised and educated with the expectation of political involvement but deeply affected by his teacher’s death.
That being said, there is precisely zero evidence to suggest that Socrates had anything like a practical program or even an active interest in politics. All indications are that Socrates’ focus was entirely on education. Aside from Aristophanes, however, the relevant authors were Socrates’ students, who would have been at pains to avoid any such implications. My reading of the sources and history is that Socrates himself didn’t need to have any practical plans in order to have an impact: his students, when they came of age, would naturally enter politics. That being the case, I have difficulty imagining that Socrates was unaware of the political significance of his activities.
Then I must not have understood the point of the article. Socrates’s threat to democracy Athens was not in his teachings but the misapplication of his teachings by aristocratic students, especially the kind of dim-witted literalist interpretations we see in Karl Popper?
I can certainly understand that taking any of the political dialogues literally (with the possible exception of The Laws, which seems to be more straightforward) would be a recipe for endless bloodshed, as attempting to literally interpret The Republic, for example, follows from the same mindset of any number of lunatic utopian ideologues, namely imposing self-will on reality in a vain attempt to change Being to fit doxa. The relationship between Ontos and doxa, of course, forms the center of all Socratic teachings, and makes the anti-political interpretation the only reasonable understanding of any of the dialogues of Plato or Xenophon. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people like Strauss and Arendt from attempting to re-politicize Greek philosophy, but that’s another topic.
I think the key is that Socrates wasn’t teaching his students so much as training them. From their teacher Socrates’ students mainly learned rhetoric, including Socrates’ unique style of deconstructive dialectic, and he also provided moral instruction. But if Socrates was training young men, what was he training them for? Well, like any good Sophist, he was training them to be effective politicians. These students’ politics were determined by their class, family, and friends more than by their or their teacher’s philosophy, though Socrates may have encouraged his students to become more systematic in their thinking.
The threat that Socrates’ circle posed arose more from their background than their philosophy. Until the fall of the Thirty, the democracy was effectively divided between oligarchic and democratic factions. With the fall of the Thirty, the democrats held supreme and undisputed power. Socrates’ students would have breathed new life into the oligarchic faction, and that was something the democrats would not tolerate.
Also during this period there was big presence of foreigners in Athens, especially Phoenicians (a Levantine Semitic people) who exercised great influence in international trading and banking.