The trial and death of Socrates

In 399 BCE, in a democratic Athens bruised by defeat in the Peloponnesian War and a brief, bloody oligarchic coup, three citizens brought a public prosecution against Socrates. A jury of 500 ordinary Athenians would decide his fate by majority vote. The event became the founding drama of Western philosophy — the philosopher on trial before the city.

The charges were two: impiety (asebeia) — “not believing in the gods the city believes in, and introducing new divinities” — and corrupting the youth. Our central account of Socrates’ defense is Plato’s Apology (from apologia = a legal defense speech; nothing to do with saying sorry). It presents not a groveling plea but a proud, even provocative, vindication of his whole life.

Socrates explains his mission as a religious duty. The Delphic oracle had declared no one wiser than he; puzzled, he cross-examined Athens’ reputed experts and found their wisdom empty — earning their hatred. His questioning, he insists, is the god’s command, a service to Athens. He casts himself in a famous image: he is the gadfly (myōps) sent by the god to sting a great but sluggish horse — the city of Athens — keeping it awake and alive (Apology 30e).

He also speaks of his daimonion — a private “divine sign,” an inner voice that since childhood has warned him away from wrong actions (but never commands him toward any) (Apology 31d). To the jury this was double-edged: it explained his sincerity, but it also sounded exactly like the “new divinity” the impiety charge alleged. Socrates uses it to show his piety is real, just not conventional.

The heart of the Apology is Socrates’ refusal to save himself by abandoning philosophy. Even if acquitted on condition that he stop questioning people, he says, he would refuse — “I will obey the god rather than you.” And he delivers the line that has defined philosophy ever since: “the unexamined life is not worth living” (ho anexetastos bios ou biōtos, Apology 38a). A human life without self-scrutiny is not, for him, a fully human life at all.

The jury found him guilty by a fairly narrow margin. Athenian trials then had a second phase: prosecution and defendant each proposed a penalty, and the jury chose between them. The prosecution proposed death. Socrates, instead of pleading for exile, half-seriously proposed that the city reward him with free meals in the Prytaneum, as it did Olympic victors — then offered a token fine. The jury, affronted, voted for death by an even larger margin. He would not beg (Apology 36b–38b).

In prison, awaiting execution, Socrates’ friend Crito offers to bribe the guards and smuggle him to safety. Socrates refuses — and the dialogue Crito gives his reasons. He personifies the Laws of Athens, who confront him: You were born, raised, and educated under us; you lived here 70 years, freely, when you could have left; that is a kind of tacit agreement to abide by our judgments. To flee now would be to destroy the laws and do wrong in return for wrong.

Two principles drive the Crito. First, one must never do injustice — not even in return for injustice (Crito 49b–c): returning wrong for wrong is still wrong, however unfair the original treatment. Second, a citizen who has enjoyed a city’s benefits and never emigrated has, in effect, agreed to obey its laws, even when a particular verdict goes against him. Escaping would betray both. So the man wronged by Athens’ verdict will not wrong Athens’ laws.

The end is told in the Phaedo, which frames Socrates’ last day as a discussion of the soul’s immortality. Strikingly, he is calm — even cheerful — because he holds that philosophy is a “practice for death” (meletē thanatou, Phaedo 64a, 67e): the philosopher spends life freeing the reasoning soul from the distractions of the body, so death, the final separation of soul from body, holds no terror for one who has lived rightly.

Socrates thus became philosophy’s first martyr — a man who died rather than betray the examined life — and its enduring model. The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo together dramatize the questions he made central: What is piety, really? What do we owe the state? Is death an evil? And above all: how should a human being live, and die? The city silenced the gadfly, but the sting has never worn off.