Social Matter

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 4^th 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 6^th 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 4^th 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-4^th 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 6^th 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?