Plato’s Euthyphro

Week 1: Setting the Context

Greece in the fifth century B. C.

The fifth century B.C. — running from 500 to 401 B.C. — was arguably the period of greatest political, social, and artistic development for ancient Greece, and certainly the period in which Athens was most prominent. Led by Athens, a coalition of Greek city-states defeated several attacks from Persia, which was at the time the greatest power around the Mediterranean, between the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) and the land and sea victories at Thermopylae and Salamis (480 B.C.). Freedom from the Persian threat allowed a fragile balance of power to develop covering most of the Greek mainland, the islands of the Aegean, and some of the coastal cities of Asia Minor. Athens became the leading power among them for a period, with the power of the so-called Delian League, which included at its peak more than three hundred separate Greek city-states, but not Sparta or many of the other cities to the south and west. The Delian League continued to prosecute occasional war against the Persians until the middle of the century, when it was concluded officially in 449 B.C. in the Peace of Callias.

The fifth century saw the development of much that we now consider characteristic of ancient Greece, though a good deal of it was in reality confined to Athens itself. The democracy that had taken root at around the turn of the century now came into full flower there, though many other cities had very different forms of government. The growth of what we often call Greek tragedy — in fact Athenian tragedy — took place at the same time. While it had its origins in the late sixth century, it came into prominence with the three great playwrights Aeschylus (ca. 525 – 455 B.C.), Sophocles (ca. 497 – 405 B.C.), and Euripides (ca. 480 – 406 B.C.). Comedy — what we now call Old Comedy — became popular as well. It tended to be edgy and highly political, and the only surviving examples we have are a number of plays of Aristophanes (ca. 446 – 386 B.C.). His satires on Socrates are, Socrates claims, a source of prejudice against him.

Athens: democracy and other problems

While its image has been highly idealized in 2400 years of hindsight, the Athenian democracy was hardly a paragon of what would be considered modern democratic virtues. It had a tumultuous birth, life, and death. There were few restrictions on what it could do, and in the absence of anything like a governing constitution, the will of the majority could be turned to almost any end without formal restriction. It produced wild swings in policy and programs, and an arbitrary structure of justice. A number of people at the time and since have viewed it with considerable skepticism — among the contemporaries Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Plato and Aristotle themselves.

The Peloponnesian War and its aftermath

In 431 B.C., tensions between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) broke out into open war. It was waged intermittently over the ensuing thirty years. Despite early advantages and something like a clear victory, Athens continued to wage war until it lost in 404 B.C. It left the Athenian democracy in disarray, and the state was taken over for a period by a group of oligarchic rulers (the Thirty Tyrants), though the democracy was restored in 403 B.C. While Athens would eventually reacquire some measure of prominence in the Corinthian War (395-387 B.C.), it never again became the dominant power in mainland Greece. By the end of the fourth century B.C. Athens, and most of the rest of mainland Greece had fallen to the power of the Macedonians to the north.

Socrates in the political scene

It was in this defeated and socially chaotic culture that Socrates was brought to trial and convicted. The people of Athens were somewhat dazed by their defeat and were looking to find someone to blame. Socrates was one option. In his Apology, he recounts his part in the wars and his more or less cavalier disobedience to the Thirty Tyrants afterward. For the most part, however, Socrates did not involve himself in political matters, and this is one of the points of contention that arise in the course of his prosecution and defense.

The charges against Socrates

Socrates was brought to trial in 399 B.C., on charges of corrupting the youth, making the weaker argument appear the stronger, and a range of religious infractions that included (at the same time) believing in no gods at all, and believing in gods different from those officially sanctioned by the state. It’s worth noting that these charges were not framed up with respect to any laws that had been written or promulgated before: the charges were for the most part made up for the occasion. As long as the jury was willing to try him for so doing, they could do so and find him innocent or guilty, and, if they found him guilty, could impose whatever sentence upon him they deemed relevant.

The charge of corrupting the youth was a complicated one, and it is in an odd way an image of the kind of culture war rhetoric we saw here in the 1960s and intermittently since. Among those who had once been in Socrates’ circle of young admirers was one Alcibiades, who had gone on to commit treason against Athens in the Peloponnesian conflict and finally defected to Persia. Other citizens similarly seem to have found Socrates to be an unpleasant irritant, and, having no more subtle way of ridding themselves of his influence, brought him to trial on these made-for-the-occasion charges.

From our point of view, and in the context of our juridical culture, that would have been illegal, but it’s worth noting that there were no constraints in particular on what one could or could not be tried for. The trial was indeed irregular, but it was not illegal on those terms. I was arguably illegal, however, inasmuch as it in bringing these charges, Anytus violated the terms ofof an amnesty that had been granted in 403 or 402 B.C. for any religious actions undertaken during or prior to the rule of the Thirty Tyrants.

The Apology, trial, decision, death (Apology, Crito, Phaedo)

The trial of Socrates is recounted in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, and the aftermath, leading to his death, in the Crito and the Phaedo. The Apology is scarcely a dialogue, having only one speaker for almost all its length (there are a few intrusions by Mellitus and Anytus). It’s a speech for the defense, but it is generally counted among the dialogues. These three recount the very end of Socrates’ life — the events of 399 B.C. in particular — but they are apparently the earliest of Plato’s dialogues to be written. Later in Plato’s career he wrote more dialogues in almost all of which Socrates himself figures prominently, but they may well be less true to the historical record. We will talk more about the Platonic corpus and the socalled “Socratic problem” next time.

Plato’s account is the only full-length record that purports to be a transcript of Socrates’ defense speech, but it’s not the only record. The soldier and scholar Xenophon also wrote in his Memorabilia an account of Socrates’ speech (linked in the “Extras” page). It diverges substantially from what Plato preserves — and hence it at least calls into question the fidelity of Plato’s version. Whether or not the Platonic account is fully accurate, however, it constitutes a bold defense of intellectual integrity against the claims of an unrestrained state and the suspicions of the masses, even when the penalty for not bowing down might be death.

Socrates was convicted of the charges brought against him by a fairly small margin. The normal jury in Athens was 501 — this is not much like the jury of the English Common Law system. He was convicted by only about thirty votes, suggesting that less than three fifths — not much more than half — of that jury voted to convict. That being done, however, a sentence of death was passed by a majority larger than the number that voted to convict him.

This trial is prefigured somewhat in the Euthyphro, which takes place just before Socrates’ own trial. The thematic links are something we’ll have occasion to look at later on.

If you’re reading along in Greek, cover 2a1-4b6.