Death in Athens
The Trial of Socrates.
by I.F. Stone.
Little, Brown. 282 pp. $18.95.
There is something charming in seeing someone begin the study of ancient languages and literature late in life after a very different career devoted to practical and current worldly business. So it is said to have been with the elder Cato, Censor of the Roman republic, who, we are told, began the study of Greek as an old man. In the same way I.F. Stone, socialist and journalist, turned to the study of Greek and the Greeks when ill health forced him to stop publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly after almost two decades of leftist criticism of American society. He was led to the ancient Greeks by his plan to write a history of the freedom of thought; he hoped that such a work would help to preserve free speech where it exists and also “to help embattled dissidents in the Communist world find their way to a liberating synthesis of Marx and Jefferson.”
Anyone who hopes to find a basis for liberty in Marx is just the man to seek the answers to problems that have eluded solution for more than two thousand years, and one of these emerges from the condemnation of Socrates in the year 399 B.C.E. on the charge of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens. “How,” asks Stone, “could the trial of Socrates have happened in so free a society? How could Athens have been so untrue to itself?” This book is his attempt to answer those questions and “to mitigate the city’s crime and thereby remove some of the stigma the trial left on democracy and Athens.” Stone’s strategy has two parts: first, to show that Athens was totally committed to free speech and did not normally place any check on it, and, therefore, that the trial of Socrates was a singular aberration which might be explicable, if finally not justifiable; secondly, to demonstrate that Socrates was primarily responsible for his own condemnation.
The Athenian democracy has had the deserved reputation ever since antiquity of placing the greatest importance on and giving the broadest latitude to freedom of speech for its citizens. In spite of that, ancient traditions report various punishments meted out to famous intellectuals such as Anaxagoras, Protagoras, and Euripides. Stone devotes an entire chapter to denying the accuracy of these reports, pointing out that they came from doubtful sources written long after the events they purport to describe. Nothing in his arguments is new; he chiefly rehearses one side of a scholarly quarrel that has gone on for more than a century. Having digested the evidence, most classical scholars still believe in the condemnation of at least some of the artists and thinkers mentioned by the ancient writers.
Quite apart from these cases, however, there is good evidence that the Athenian democracy found it necessary to limit the freedoms of its intellectuals from time to time. There seems little doubt that Phidias, the master sculptor, planner of the temples of the Acropolis, and personal friend of Pericles, was banished on a combined charge of peculation and impiety. We are told, moreover, that on one occasion a law was passed that barred Athenian comedy, which normally throve on satirical treatment of contemporary Athenians, especially politicians, from portraying live people. The ban was soon withdrawn.
These are merely examples of brief lapses in moments of fear, danger, or political conflict from a generally high standard of tolerance, but they show that the treatment of Socrates was not so singular as Stone supposes. He labors so hard to make his case because of a belief in a mythical Athens that could not resist an appeal to the right of free speech. Had Socrates made such an appeal instead of the defense he offered, says Stone, “he would have struck a deep and responsive chord.”
Let us leave until later a discussion of Socrates’s defense. The point to be made here is that the real Athens put significant limits on the exercise of freedom of speech, especially in the political arena. Checks on intellectuals were sporadic and temporary; limits on political speech were built into the constitution and of long duration. For almost a century from the invention of the democracy, the Athenians employed the institution called ostracism, whereby each year one citizen could be exiled for ten years, without trial, without, indeed, any charge brought against him. Almost all the victims of ostracism were leading politicians; their removal from Athens amounted to a rather effective deprivation of their right to speak freely there on political or any other questions.
Still another check was on the freedom to speak in the Athenian assembly. In the second half of the 5th century a law was enacted to the effect that a speaker in the assembly could be brought to trial on the charge of making an illegal proposal. This charge, the graphe paranomon, could be brought at once, but it could also be delayed for an indefinite time into the future. This law could not have failed to have a chilling effect on at least some speakers.
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Thus the real Athens was a more complex place than is understood by I.F. Stone. Still, there have been few people in history, if any, who have held as high an opinion of freedom of speech as the Athenians. Why, then, did they prosecute occasional intellectuals for using it and arm themselves with such powerful weapons against it? The answer is that the real Athenian democracy was faced at various times by real enemies, external and internal.
The fledgling democracy founded shortly before 500 B.C.E. was threatened immediately by the armies of Sparta and its allies from the outside and by potential traitors within. The Persian invasion that was defeated at Marathon was led by an Athenian traitor, and the campaign’s strategy was based on the expectation of treason within the city. Again, during the Peloponnesian War the enemies of democracy plotted treason, this time successfully. The leaders of the coup, and especially the young aristocrats who did the dirtiest work, had listened for years to radical intellectuals who questioned the fundamental principles and assumptions of the Athenian democratic society, its religion, its civic beliefs, its patriotism, its insistence that its citizens exercise their individualism in accordance with the needs of the polity and not to its detriment. Such men could speak of the traditional democracy as “acknowledged foolishness,” especially when compared with theoretical and utopian regimes they had been taught to admire.
The oligarchy established in 411 lasted only four months. An even nastier and tighter oligarchic regime, the “Thirty Tyrants,” set up with Spartan support after the war, was also short-lived. An amnesty was passed to prevent civil strife, but many Athenians looked back bitterly on these attacks on their democracy and on the men responsible for them. They could not fail to notice that Alcibiades, once very close to Socrates, was the originator of the first oligarchic coup. At least once a traitor and twice an exile to escape prosecution, he it was who had told the Spartans that democracy was “acknowledged foolishness.” Nor did they forget that it was Socrates who urged Charmides, one of the Thirty, to enter political life. Finally, they knew that Critias, the bloodthirsty leader of the Thirty, had also associated with Socrates.
Socrates himself was certainly no friend of democracy. He regularly questioned and ridiculed a system of government by mass meeting, most of whose officials were chosen by lot. He appears to have preferred the far less democratic mixed constitution of Sparta, but there can be no question that he would have treated that constitution as roughly had he been a Spartan, and so would he have dealt with any other constitution wherever he lived.
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The crucial fact is that he was a philosopher, not a politician. He appears to have believed in some kind of transcendental knowledge that could be arrived at through unaided human reason. The route to that knowledge was through an unending process of questioning, and inevitably undermining, received opinion, which in Athens was predominantly democratic. Religion and customary practice were much older than the democracy, but by 399 that regime was more than a century old, in most people’s view “the ancestral constitution” which was seen to rest on the older traditions. Philosophers, scientists, rhetoricians, inquirers, and teachers of all sorts, raising difficult questions about everything, excited and influenced rich young men who could pay their fees. These young men could easily be persuaded that the beliefs of the uneducated masses were nonsense and that a government that rested on such beliefs and ignored their special claims to influence and power was absurd and wrong. Socrates’s erstwhile pupil, the monstrous Critias, wrote that religion and the gods were merely the inventions of clever men to make the masses well-behaved and law-abiding through fear of divine punishment.
Socrates did not teach for pay and did not engage in scientific speculation, deny the existence of the gods, or deny the validity of law, even in a democratic state. To the ordinary Athenian, however, these differences were trivial. They knew that he questioned everything, provided no answers, and left his interlocutors looking and feeling silly, unable to justify their traditions, beliefs, and actions. To them Socrates, even more than the others, was undermining the elements that underlay their constitution and state. Such was the tolerance of the Athenians that they took no action against him until he was seventy, and even then the amnesty prevented them from making the complaints that were most on their minds.
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Stone knows all this but focuses on the ways in which Socrates offended the democracy as opposed to the society in general. He denied the assumptions of democracy by regarding human beings in society as a herd in need of a shepherd; by insisting that good government required leaders who have true knowledge and could not arise from the ignorant opinions of the masses; and by withdrawing from political life and urging others to do the same, while democratic theory required the participation of all citizens. Stone further emphasizes that Socrates, though himself of humble origins, was a snob who held the common Athenian in contempt. All of this is meant to palliate and explain, though not excuse, the behavior of the Athenians in condemning Socrates. Plato, we are told, “carried on the same intellectual assault against Athenian freedom and democracy that his master [Socrates] launched. . . .” “It was the political, not the philosophical or theological, views of Socrates that finally got him into trouble.”
This is a vulgarly reductionist explanation of the behavior of the Athenians that badly mistakes the more complex reality. Socrates was surely right when he told his judges that more than the men who brought him to trial in 399 he feared his earlier accusers, those who said that “there is a man called Socrates, a wise man, a student of all things in the sky and below the earth, who makes the worse argument the stronger. Those who spread that rumor, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers, for their hearers believe that those who study these things do not even believe in the gods.” Stone’s prejudice is that hostility to democracy is the worst of crimes, one that extenuates the violation of an individual’s freedom, while the undermining of the religious and other traditions does not. The Athenians held an opposite view.
Stone’s main defense of the Athenians, however, is that Socrates need not have died at all had he chosen to defend himself properly. Instead, he deliberately provoked his judges by refusing to make an effective defense and by refusing to propose an acceptable alternative punishment when he was convicted. He chose to die when the Athenians merely wanted him to be quiet or to go into exile. Stone suggests that he chose to lose, when he might have won acquittal, out of a vindictive hatred for the Athenian democracy. Had he pleaded his case as a 20th-century civil libertarian he would have succeeded, but “his victory would also have been a victory for the democratic principles he scorned. An acquittal would have vindicated Athens.” So, we are to believe, he preferred to die.
Stone is not the first, only the least persuasive, to try to excuse the Athenians by considering Socrates’s death a form of judicial suicide. It is necessary to repeat that Socrates was not a politician but a philosopher. The notion that he wanted to die in order to spite the democracy and make himself a martyr to the anti-democratic cause is ludicrous. If there was any martyrdom intended it was in behalf of philosophy and the freedom to seek the truth by inquiry.
In fact, a Socrates true to himself had no choice but to act as he did. He could not argue for entirely unrestrained free speech as a general principle because he agreed with his judges that it could be a threat to the existing order, a risk he was glad to run. He could only assert for himself that his own character and destiny required him to continue his inquiries, whatever the cost. The Athenian democracy was right to see the danger he presented to it but wrong to prosecute and execute him, not only because the toleration even of speech dangerous to its own existence is part of the nature of democracy, but also because suppression of ideas is impossible in a democratic state. Democracies must defend themselves against subversion not by trying to suppress the expression of hostile and dangerous opinions but by providing effective answers to the attacks and by defending the traditions that underlie their polities.
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I.F. Stone’s defense of the Athenian democracy will not work, but it is easy to perceive his agony in making the attempt. He detests Socrates’s hostility to democracy, yet he identifies with his position as the lonely critic of a flawed society, a bold and independent gadfly pointing the way to a truer and better understanding than his fellow citizens’. His own glory days were in the 1940’s and 1950’s when, more than now, the American democracy rested on the traditions of patriotism and free enterprise. Quite consistently his writings tended to undermine those values. Though he sometimes criticized the Soviet Union, he attacked every American attempt to resist Soviet expansion and the spread of Communist tyranny, regularly questioning the decency of American motives and accusing the U.S. of imperialism and warmongering.
Thus in December 1946, when the enslavement of Eastern Europe was a fait accompli and Stalin’s evil intentions blatant, a committee of the House of Representatives recommended an increase in the industrial production of West Germany and restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union. Stone wrote that “the old familiar Nazi line of the need to strengthen the Reich as a bulwark against Bolshevism reappears . . . and it reappears in a context suggesting that America’s principal postwar concern is preparation for a third world war, this time against the USSR.” He denounced the doctrine of containment and asserted that the only danger was from the inherent expansionist tendencies of capitalism and from the militarism and repression to which it turned as a device to resist depression or socialism.
“But the trend toward socialism,” he wrote in 1947, “is irresistible, though atom bombs level everything from Moscow to Vladivostok, though the palest pinks of Washington are immured in Alaskan hoosegows. This is the handwriting on the 20th-century skies. This is the future. The American capitalist would be wise to recognize it and contain himself. This is the ‘containment’ we need for world peace.”
Four decades later, when predicted great depressions have failed to come to pass, when the peoples of the Western democracies have achieved a level of prosperity, freedom, and democracy unexampled, when the tyranny of Communism has produced no compensating prosperity but only economic decay, when the Chinese Communists have turned to free enterprise to solve their problems and their Soviet counterparts are trying to find a way to do the same, when socialism is “acknowledged foolishness” to all but the faithful true believers who do not have to experience it, all this may seem merely dated nonsense. But I.F. Stone was an admired godfather of the New Left. America’s gilded youth of the 1960’s took their picture of America from him and others who shared his views. Safe in the shelter of their universities, they behaved much like the Nazi mobs that destroyed the Weimar Republic.
Stone regretted their excesses: “I do not like much of what they are saying and doing. I do not like to hear opponents shouted down, much less beaten up. I do not like to hear any one group or class, including policemen, called pigs. I do not think four-letter words are arguments. I hate, hate, intolerance and violence.” He hated it, but he excused it, for he felt “that the New Left and the black revolutionists . . . are doing God’s work.” So Stone, too, like Socrates, finds justification for his behavior in the will of God, but he lacks Socrates’s consistency. To him freedom of speech is sacred, but its suppression by the New Left is justifiable. Socrates, moreover, never defended the Alcibiadeses and Charmideses and Critiases who attacked the democracy he scorned, but Stone defends the bullies who trample the principle he professes to revere.
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Socrates resisted the mob on several difficult occasions and throughout his life. Stone’s finest hours were in the years he resisted the mob stirred to misbehavior by the deranged bully Joseph McCarthy. For this he suffered no harm whatsoever, in considerable part because he made his living from a capitalist enterprise of which he was the proprietor. Within a very few years the despicable McCarthy was gone. The Athenians in a moment of inexplicable fear, fury, or vengeance, killed their critic, Socrates. America, on the other hand, has rewarded I.F. Stone with prosperity and admiration verging on reverence. Let us hope he has many more healthy years to study the ancients and moderns and to contemplate the paradox.
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