Plato’s Crito

Week 1: Setting the Context

For today’s class, we’ll focus particularly on the immediate context of the Crito and the groundwork for the rest of the dialogue, focusing on 43a-46a. What follows is some background material; a somewhat different overview is available here from the Euthyphro course.

Athens’ rise to dominance in the fifth century B. C.

The tyrants and the birth of democracy

The date of Socrates’ birth is not directly documented anywhere reliable, but we know that he was about seventy years old when he died in 399 B.C.; accordingly we have provisionally assigned his birth to 470 BC. This means that he was born into the “golden age” of fifth-century Athens. A somewhat larger context may be useful.

Athens, like most Greek city-states, had been governed by a sequence of tyrants during the bulk of the sixth century B.C. The term “tyrant” translates the Greek tyrannos, and as such it was not at all times a term of opprobrium; it merely indicated a strong-man leader without a sanctioned hereditary pedigree. A traditional king, with a presumption of divine authority and the parentage to back it up, was more generally called a basileus. Nevertheless, the tyrannoi were the norm for the period, and even the title of Sophocles’ most famous play about Oedipus, usually rendered as Latin Oedipus Rex or as English Oedipus the King, was Oedipous Tyrannos.

The last of the great Athenian tyrants was named Peisistratus. Forceful, visionary, and occasionally ruthless, he oversaw a number of improvements in Athens and commissioned the project that fixed the textual canon of the Homeric poems — providing the basis of our Iliad and Odyssey to this day. Upon his death in 527 BC, his dynasty passed to his sons, but grew increasingly unstable; Hippias was overthrown in 510, and shortly thereafter a democracy — a more or less innovative form of government — was established by Cleisthenes. It remained anomalous among the Greek poleis: most were still governed by aristocracies (or, depending on how they are viewed, oligarchies.)

The Persian Wars

Shortly thereafter, in 499 BC, Athens sent troops to aid the Ionian city-states (i.e., those on the western coast of Asia Minor (i.e., modern Turkey) — in their revolt from the Persian empire. This expression of solidarity with their Greek-speaking brethren brought mainland Greece to the attention of the Persians, however, and the next half century was filled with a sequence of wars that lasted, at least nominally, till 449 BC. The first of these, however, were the most perilous. The first invasion of the Persians under Darius I was met and defeated by an alliance of Greek city-states at Marathon. (The name of the modern athletic event derives from this: legend has it that Pheidippides, a courier, ran the twenty-six miles back to Athens to report the Greek victory, whereupon he dropped dead. With a curious lack of historical awareness, athletes have been trying to reenact his achievement ever since, minus the end-of run fatality.) Persian forces had gained control of some of the Cycladic islands, but were kept out of the mainland of Greece for another decade.

In 480, however, the Persians launched a second expedition under Darius’ son Xerxes. This was briefly blocked by the famous stand of a small Greek force (including the famous 300 Spartans, but accompanied by others as well) who fought to the death, but with their defeat bought time for the remainder of mainland Greece to marshal its disorganized forces in response, and to block the Persian advance at the Isthmus of Corinth. Athens was seized and sacked within the year, and a majority of the northern Greek city-states capitulated to Xerxes or were defeated; control of the Peloponnesus, however, was assumed to require a naval victory. The Athenian naval forces encountered the fleet of Xerxes in the Strait of Salamis and roundly defeated them there in the Fall of 480; this was followed the next summer by land battles at Plataea and Mycale that spelled the end of the Persian adventure.

The Athens of Socrates’ youth

It was into this world that Socrates himself was born in approximately 470. The Greeks were exulting over their decisive rebuke of the Persians, and Athens had assumed a leading role among the Greek city-states. The extent of the Persian defeat — and, perhaps more importantly, Athenian triumphalism over it — was echoed by the dramatist Aeschylus in his play The Persians in 472. Athens cemented its prominence by establishing and directing the Delian League — a confederation of cities with shared military and commercial interests. For the next forty years or so, little could challenge Athens’ hegemony in the Greek world. For the most part it operated fairly harmoniously at first, but as time went on, Athens became more domineering and less susceptible to anything but full cooperation from other members of the League.

The dissolution of Athenian hegemony

The Peloponnesian War

When Socrates was about forty, tensions between the Delian League and the cities of the Peloponnese and a few of their allies broke out into open war when Thebes attacked the little city of Plataea. In what was perhaps a cascade of blunders, or perhaps the deliberate move of both sides toward an open showdown, the war escalated until virtually all of mainland Greece was drawn in on one side or the other — the Thebans and Spartans on one side, and Athens and the Delian League cities on the other. The Peloponnesian War was doubtless one of the formative pieces of the later part of Socrates’ life; certainly it produced a sequence of military and political disasters that broke both the pride of Athens and any hope for the unity of the Greek mainland. Socrates himself fought with the Athenian military, as he recounts briefly in the Apology.

The initial course of the war favored Athens more than might have been expected; the military dominance of the Spartans proved less compelling than their reputation. Due to overreach and mismanagement, however, Athens squandered its early advantage and began to lose. Following a particularly grim sequence of reversals, in June of 411, a coup overthrew the democratic order in Athens, installing an oligarchic government that would be more responsive to exigencies. This oligarchy of “The Four Hundred”, as they were known, lasted only a relatively short time; later that same year, one of the leaders (Phrynichus) was assassinated, and a few days afterward, the Four Hundred fell. The war against Sparta was resumed, but miscalculations, compounded by political instability, riddled the enterprise.

The end of the Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War finally ended when Athens capitulated to Sparta, and the pro-Spartan faction at Athens established the rule of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Their rule endured for only eight months, but in that time they managed to execute or murder about five percent of the Athenian population, confiscate property, and establish an oligarchic rule that radically diminished the rights of citizens. When Athens fell, Sparta briefly took over its government; the next year the democracy was restored by Thrasybulus (who had been a leader in the Samian resistance to the Four Hundred in 411), and amnesty was proclaimed for all parties. Socrates’ refusal to follow an illegal order during the period of the tyrants’ rule was no longer punishable. Animus remained in the atmosphere, however.

Socrates relates the story of his resistance to the Thirty in the course of his Apology. Rather than conveying the order for the execution of a handful of Athenian soldiers, he had simply gone home and ignored the order. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation:

Let me tell you a passage of my own life, which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from any fear of death, and that if I had not yielded I should have died at once. I will tell you a story — tasteless, perhaps, and commonplace, but nevertheless true. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator; the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them all together, which was illegal, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and have me taken away, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because I feared imprisonment and death. This happened in the days of the democracy. But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to execute him. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes; and then I showed, not in words only, but in deed, that, if I may be allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my only fear was the fear of doing an unrighteous or unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. And to this many will witness.

Something like a normal form of pre-war governance was eventually re-established, but the cultural atmosphere of Athens was permanently fractured, and the loss of confidence infused much of its public discourse. Even if outright reprisals had settled down, recriminations were rampant and ongoing; people sought explanations in various breaches of cultural unity. Socrates was accused and convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens. Among the youth that Socrates himself was accused of having corrupted was Alcibiades, who was almost the diametrical opposite of Socrates in personality. He was flashy and ostentatious; he had also led a number of brilliant campaigns. He had, however, been responsible for a number of unsuccessful ones as well. He vacillated in his loyalties, and defected eventually to the enemy. He was assassinated in 404 BC while setting out for the Persian court. People remembered, and — rightly or wrongly — discerned Socrates’ hand behind what had gone wrong.

The trial of Socrates

Accordingly, Socrates was brought to trial in the Athenian court on charges of corrupting the youth, of attempting to make the right appear wrong (and vice versa), and other similar vague charges. It’s worth noting that there is no restriction in Athenian law at the time on what one could be tried for — there were, to be sure, laws on the books, but the construction of an infraction as a kind of ad hoc do-it-yourself matter was also entirely possible. One would, of course, have to persuade the jury (a large number, about 500) that the charge was worth dealing with, as well as that the defendant was actually guilty of doing it, but if one could fulfill those criteria, the case could move forward.

The question of whether Socrates really intended to defend himself rigorously against these charges, or whether he was just going along on the assumption that he would be convicted one way or the other anyway, is still open. Socrates argues in his Apology that he is really attempting to rebut long-standing prejudice more than any of the specific charges that have come up in the current case. There seems to be some truth to this, to be sure. At the same time, at least one modern journalist-scholar (I. F. Stone) has argued that Socrates was basically guilty as charged, and that he got what was coming to him.

Taken on its own terms — if what Plato records for us in Socrates’ Apology is in fact much like what he delivered — it is hard to find any serious charge on which to convict Socrates. Whatever he intended to accomplish, Socrates conducted his defense from a rather high and abstract level, and seemed supremely unconcerned about whether he would be convicted or not. He fairly clearly refutes most of the factual claims of the prosecution and, in what was perhaps a tactical blunder, makes them (especially Meletus) look rather foolish into the bargain. In the end, Socrates was convicted as charged, but by a surprisingly small margin. The trial moved then to the sentencing phase.

Socrates does not seem to have taken this part of the trial very seriously either: he suggests for a start that an appropriate penalty for what he had done would be to be maintained and fed at the public expense. Almost as an afterthought, he proposes the payment of a slight fine, but with the proviso that he has no intention of stopping doing what they have charged him with in the first place. The humor seems to have eluded the jury; a larger number voted for the death penalty than had originally found him guilty. Socrates accepted the decision with equanimity, though he warned the jury that in putting him to death, they would incur the blame of future generations for a very small gain, since he assumed (reasonably enough) that he would die soon enough anyway. It’s not clear whether they even expected to enforce the sentence — there is clearly (as is discussed in the Crito a practical plan for Socrates to escape. For good or ill, however, Socrates decides to submit willingly to their penalty.

If you’re reading along in Greek, cover 43a1-44c5.