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Home , Apology (Plato), Definitions (Plato), Meletus

Lecture 2.2: and

1. Don’t think of this as an ‘apology’ in our sense of the word: this is ’ defense, at his trial. 2. Setting: let me tell you a little bit about the civic life of Athens at this period. Athens is structured around 10 tribes, to one of which any citizen belonged. Representatives of those civic units constituted the government. Leadership rotated among the tribes; people holding civic offices were often chosen by lot from among the members of those tribes. [the ‘council,’ the boule, to which Socrates refers at one point, was the governing body.]

The juridical function was equally democratic, and distributed: The judges, in Socrates’ trial, were the jury. There were 500 of them, I believe—probably something like 50 from each of the 10 tribes, and they too were chosen by lot. Each jury member has one black stone and one white; At the end of the trial you throw one into a pot; The stones are counted. At the end of Socrates’ trial, 30 votes separated condemnation from acquittal—less than 10%. The accusers present their case (we don’t have that here); The defendant presents his. The winner sets the punishment; if the defendant loses, he is allowed to argue for an alternative punishment that he considers appropriate. (Ya gotta LOVE what Socrates considers a fair alternative to his death sentence.) Oh—and if the accusers lose, they have to pay the court costs.

3. Our opens after his accusers have presented what was apparently a rhetorically stunning and probably rather ritualized accusation; any careful observer of Law and Order knows our equivalent: “Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” 4. Socrates rises and dissociates himself from any such ritualized approach. --Not gonna sway you by rhetoric. --Not gonna bring in my weeping wife with babe in arms and ragged dirty- faced children to evoke your sentiments of pity— I expect all and only the best of both of us—I , to speak the truth; you, to administer justice. 5. [and—this is THE court of law. The verdict of the court is the law of the land. If it is procedurally correct, there is no grounds of appeal because the verdict seems to have been the wrong one.] --I know I said that the was the very model of a —inconclusive, no positive statements, primarily carried out in Socrates’ conversational/inquisitorial exchanages… --In that respect, the Apology is atypical. We do get some positive indications of what is important to Socrates, the principles, priorities and convictions by which he is determined to live, and willing to die. No ; but a nice little elenchus with , one of his accusers… 6. He divides his defense between the details of the present accusation—and a response to the broader situation—his rep; what people say about him; their semi- conscious associations with ‘people like him.’ --After all, maybe among the 500 there are some he has not accosted on the streets. This is a serious matter; in respect to them, and their job, he has to give them a chance to see him as he is. --Or—maybe someone who he DID meet on the streets, one of their neighbors, may have told them that he was a slippery character: that he left his boat companions behind in the MeiKong delta; that he associated with terrorists in his youth, or really believed in Zoroaster… --they may have heard that he was one of those “Come to ME! Hear MY truth!” cosmologists, like some of the presocratics you all read last week. --they may have been told that he was a —itinerant tutors to the young, the equivalent in antiquity of SAT crammers, who for sufficient drachmas will teach your son what he needs to get a cushy political appointment. Before we even think about the present accusations, let me tell you who I am, what I do care about, and why. 6. The story he tells then is of the report a friend of his brought back from the highest religious authority of the day—the oracle at Delphi, the living voice of Apollo. Chaerophon asked the oracle if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The oracle said no. So: What’s with THAT? I have no pretensions to particular . Everything I know I learned in kindergarten, the moral platitudes of my culture: tell the truth, don’t lie Do your duty Don’t hit the other kids or steal their toys Don’t covet your neighbor’s ox Meet your obligations and do your duty Be a good citizen Honor the gods… But you can’t just ignore the living voice of the god. So: just maybe the god is wrong, this time. So—I began a search for men wiser than myself. --that didn’t work out so well. It didn’t make me a lot of friends— But I did figure out one thing. [‘a kind of human wisdom’?] IF I didn’t know something, at least I knew that I didn’t know it. So if I couldn’t falsify the words of the oracle, maybe there was nonetheless a message in them for me. Maybe knowing what I didn’t know kept me from inadvertently doing wrong out of ignorance, making moral mistakes, acting badly, instead of well. Maybe that ‘human wisdom’ I have in knowing the limits of my knowledge is more rare, and more useful, to me and to my fellow citizens, than I had thought. Maybe spreading that through my city is a contribution I can make to myself and my fellow citizens that the gods value. Maybe I have been set by the gods on my city as a horsefly on a horse—to sting them into thoughtfulness and a concern for virtue. 7. After telling them who he is, and why, Socrates shows them what he does. His exchange with Meletus is Socratic elenchus at its best, although he does step out of character a bit: none of this “Oh, Euthyphro, you are so wise, please help poor little me out of my predicament” of the paradigm ; he accuses Meletus of playing games with the court, of pretending to care about things to which he has never given one thought. (24c) 8. His charge to the jury: Beware. Some people don’t like me. If I am condemned, that will be the reason—not the justice of these false and incoherent charges. [and that’s not a good reason] And by the way: don’t think that I am ashamed of my choices about how I lead my life—or that I am afraid enough of death to be willing to change. In this part of the dialogue we actually get some positive statements that suggest that Socrates does have some specific principles, some moral convictions that he is willing to live by, to die for: Death before dishonor Death before injustice It is evil and shameful to do wrong and disobey superiors Support justice and set it as the highest value… 9. I am not defending myself against these stupid charges. You cannot harm me, for a good man can never be injured by a worse man; On the contrary, I am defending you—trying to save you from the harm it will do to you as individuals and to your city, to put a man to death unjustly.

And with that as his defense, Socrates was judged guilty by a jury of his peers.

*** *** *** Why did the Athenians condemn Socrates to death? It seems to me that we, sitting here in 2008, are in a very good position to understand why. Let’s think for a minute about what the histories tell us about what was going on in geographic Greece. I’m not a historian; so don’t expect a list of names and dates of battles, but… Greece was just another provincial area in , say, the 7 th century, ’s time. The real power in the region was the Persians. But by the end of the 6 th century, things started looking up. The last Persian war was dated by one of my sources at 499 BC—the cusp between the 6 th and the 5 th century; and the greeks won. With the removal of the threat from the east, the region entered a period of peace after victory—called “The Golden Age” of Greece (480-338 BC). All of geographic Greece was prospering with the end of the wars with Persia. It was a period of incredible cultural expansion—not only economically, with trade, but military strength, prosperity, and culturally as well. And Athens was its cultural center. They had 50 really SUPER years. But remember—greece was not a nation-state, as we understand such things today. It was a collection of city-states, the poloi, of about 10K people apiece, politically autonomous, culturally diverse, different in style—and sharing one common ambition: POWER. More power. So around 461 began the Peleponnesian wars—battles of the greek city states among themselves. The two main powers in geographic Greece were Athens, the prosperous culture- commercial center, and Sparta, the military powerhouse. From 431-404, Sparta and Athens were pretty much head to head. For the second half of the 5 th century, then, there were constant calls to military service; and not all the battles were going well. Persia, the evil empire in the east, had been recovering from their earlier defeat, and were beginning to flex their muscles again, re-energizing as a political threat, especially to the greek cities on asia minor. [possible insert: Let me tell you about a typical guy, born in 450.…] Not everything was going smoothly back in superpower Athens, either. There was political turmoil; in 404 there was even a brief period when democratic Athens was taken over by a group of oligarchic tyrants, the “30”. They only lasted a year before democracy was restored; but that year represented a real shock to the Athenian sense of cultural identity, cultural values. So there was a growing sense of mistrust of local power, of the sense of political responsibility on the part of the people running things. When Athenians looked around, they got the feeling that their period of dominance in their world might be coming to an end. Things were going down hill—militarily, economically and even politically. In short, they were scared. They were mistrustful. They were pissed off. They wondered if the gods, who had been, clearly, on their side, might be abandoning them. Were they being punished by the gods, those Homeric myths who they secretly rather scorned, for their cosmological monisms, their materialism (both philosophical and economic), their sophisticated high culture attacks on the solid values of the greek common man? They wanted a scapegoat. It was a bad time to be tried for, of all things, impiety—even unjustly!-- in Athens in 399. Enter Socrates.

The Crito There are not any surprises in this short little dialogue. The question treated is adumbrated in the Apology; Socrates’ friends, the ones that wanted him to accept exile, are still trying to save his life; but we could tell by reading the Apology how Socrates was going to react to that. There are some nice things to be found about duty, and obligation, and justice; but we will maybe look more at those when two weeks from today we are reading the first books of the . I particularly enjoy in that dialogue the exchange between Socrates and “the , if they could talk.”

I find it hard to read these particular dialogues in this moment of our history. They are much too much about what it is to be a good citizen; about what it is to be a just polis; about what it is not only what citizens owe their country, but what their city or country owes those citizens—in terms of what the laws are, and how they are enforced; what the values are, and how they are enacted; how well the City, or in the Crito, the voice of the Laws, looks after its citizens, and the obligations to it that we thereby incur.