Gadfly's Guilt THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES

By John Elson

In its impact on the minds and emotions of Western man, it is an event that can be compared only to the Passion and death of Jesus. After a lifetime devoted to the pursuit of truth and virtue, Socrates, at age 70, is put on trial, charged with dishonoring the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. The sage makes an eloquent plea in self-defense but is nonetheless found guilty and condemned to die. His disciples urge him to escape into exile, but Socrates refuses and carries out the court's decree by drinking a cup of poison hemlock.

This powerful and moving story has always been surrounded by mystery: Why would Athens, the cradle of democracy and free speech, prosecute its most famous philosopher? Accounts of the trial by Plato and Xenophon, both disciples of Socrates', suggest that the Athenians were simply tired of being prodded toward virtue by a self-styled gadfly. Retired Journalist I.F. Stone, something of a gadfly himself, has a different, iconoclastic answer. In this engaging ramble through Hellenic history and philology, Stone argues persuasively that the beloved Socrates was in reality a coldhearted, elitist, pro-Spartan snob who was openly contemptuous of Athens' vaunted democracy and favored totalitarian rule by a philosopher-king. Bloody political coups led by two of his best-known students, Alcibiades and Critias, overthrew democratic governments in Athens in 411 and 404 B.C. The threat of a third coup in 401, Stone argues, triggered Socrates' trial, which took place two years later.

In Athenian criminal proceedings, ordinary citizens presented the charges, and the 500-man juries voted twice: first on guilt or innocence, and then (if the verdict was guilty) on the penalty. Socrates' speeches at his trial, as recorded in Plato's Apology, still have the magic to move readers, but they clearly failed to persuade his contemporaries. Stone calculates that the votes were 280 to 220 for the guilty verdict, 360 to 140 for the death penalty.

According to the Apology, Socrates admitted that a guilty verdict "was not a surprise." Why so? Stone concludes that the sage, tired of life, did not wish vindication and went out of his way to antagonize the jury. Among other things, Socrates boasted that the oracle at Delphi had said of him, "No man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent." As Stone comments, "Socrates looks more like a picador enraging a bull than a defendant trying to mollify a jury."

To Stone, the shame of the trial is that a "city famous for free speech prosecuted a philosopher guilty of no other crime than exercising it." But Socrates could easily have won acquittal, the author asserts and, in a charming exercise of historical imagination, composes the kind of speech the philosopher should have made. In essence, Stone contends, Socrates could have argued that Athens was on trial, not he. As his jurors knew well, he did not believe in free speech or democracy -- but they did. How then could they boast of those beliefs if they suppressed his right to express a contrary opinion?

The Trial of Socrates is, in the best sense of the term, a work of amateur scholarship. Heart trouble, compounded by failing eyesight, forced the author to close down his leftist muckraking journal, I.F. Stone's Weekly, in 1971. He planned to write a history of freedom of thought, a project that inexorably led him back to ancient Athens. Classicists may quibble with some of Stone's jaunty conclusions. But lay readers, for whom the book is intended, should find it instructive that the quizzical skills Stone honed while poking holes in Pentagon propaganda apply equally well to the protective prose of Socrates' adoring disciples.