“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

- Socrates, moments before death

Athens in 399 BCE is a city that has survived everything but itself. The Persian Wars glorified it, while the subsequent Peloponnesian Wars broke it apart. The Thirty Tyrants, an oligarchal council installed by Sparta after Athens’ defeat, exerted both control and brutality for eight months before democracy clawed its way back to the agora. The very city that came up with the notion of free inquiry and civic accountability had just seen it being used to tear itself down. The democracy that came out of that experience and called itself a ‘democracy’ was very different from the confident, expansionist Athens of Pericles. It was a city that had been so thoroughly humiliated by defeat that it had imposed unforgiving, prescriptive ideas that dictated what loyalty to Athens must, and will, look like.

Into this politically charged atmosphere enters Socrates: seventy years old, famously ugly, constitutionally provocative, and most importantly, the one man unafraid to ask the question which would go on to fracture Athenian certainties as we know it, i.e. ‘Why?’. For forty years he has made a habit of one pursuit specifically: finding the most respected, most powerful, most self-assured men in Athens and proving, unequivocally, through patient and systematic questioning, that they do not, in fact, know what they are talking about. For example, generals could not define courage asked to, while noble politicians collapsed under the weight of defining justice. Most notably, poets like Ion of Ephesus, capable of reducing an audience to tears reciting Homer, are left unable to answer even the simplest questions about the very poetry they perform when pressed by our philosopher in question. He did this publicly and repeatedly, leaving an indelible impression on the Athenian society at large. 

The formal charges brought against him are two: impiety toward the gods of the city, and corruption of the youth. The men bringing these charges are Meletus, a poet of modest reputation; Lycon, a rhetorician; and Anytus, a democratic loyalist and connected tanner, carrying large political weight in the prosecution. This is where the legal proceedings were initiated. However, it must be noted that the burden/privilege (however you may interpret it) of trying Socrates is shared by the prosecuting council as a whole, not any individual. The charges are legally coherent in this committee. They could also, in the way that most consequential legal proceedings tend to, reveal something else entirely. Bear this in mind before entering the Court of Athens. 

The charge of corruption implicates two names, now almost profane to utter aloud in Athens: Alcibiades, perhaps the most gifted Athenian of his generation, who defected to Sparta and handed them what they needed to prolong the war before dying in exile, and Critias, becoming the most violent architect of the Thirty Tyrants, both spending formative years around Socrates. The prosecution’s initial objective shall most likely be to convince the jury of this potential precedent of treachery. 

The impiety charge is the more philosophically loaded of the two. Socrates spoke openly of a daimonion, a personal divine voice, spending decades questioning whether the gods behaved as Athenian tradition insisted they did or not. In a city still reconstructing its institutions after a decade of catastrophe, this is understandably considered as incitement of chaos.

However, the defence’s arguments are not without merit. Socrates fought with recorded bravery at Potidaea and at Delium. The Oracle at Delphi called him the wisest man in Greece, ironically a title which he spent his life interrogating rather than seeking. And the charges, when pressed for specificity, require a standard of proof much harder for prosecution to meet, once the defence compels them to be specific what exactly was corrupted, and in who, and when.

On the 8th of August, the dikasteria, Athens’ jury court, will officially be in session. You will present arguments to five hundred and one citizens, they will weigh the evidence and most importantly decide whether the man who forced Athens to examine itself deserves to die for it.

“Will Athens sentence Socrates to death in 399 BC?” 

Precisely the kind of question Socrates himself would pose. The answer, as ever, rests with you.