The biography of SOCRATES,
son of the statuary Sophroniscus and of the midwife Phaenarete,
starts when he was
born at Athens, not earlier than 471 B.C. nor later than May or June 469 B.C. As a
youth he received the customary instruction in gymnastics and music; and
in after years he made himself acquainted with geometry and astronomy and
studied the methods and the doctrines of the leaders of Greek thought and
culture. He began life as a sculptor; and in the 2nd century A.D. a group of
the Graces, supposed to be his work, was still to be seen on the road to the
Acropolis. But he soon abandoned art and gave himself to what may best be
called education, conceiving that he had a divine commission, witnessed by
oracles, dreams and signs, not indeed to teach any positive doctrine, but to
convict men of ignorance mistaking itself for knowledge, and by so doing to
promote their intellectual and moral improvement.
He was on terms of intimacy
with some of the most distinguished of his Athenian contemporaries, and, at
any rate in later life, was personally known to very many of his fellow
citizens. His domestic relations were, it is said unhappy. The shrewishness
of his wife Xanthippe became proverbial with the ancients, as it still is with
ourselves. Aristotle, in his remarks upon genius and its degeneracy speaks of Socrates'
sons as dull and fatuous; and in Xenophon’s
Memorabilia, one of them, Lamprocles, receives a formal rebuke for undutiful behavior
towards his mother.
Socrates served as a hoplite at Potidaea (432 - 429 B.C.), where on one occasion
he saved the life of Alcibiades, at Delium (424), and at Amphipolis (422). In
these campaigns his bravery and endurance were conspicuous. But while he thus
performed the ordinary duties of a Greek citizen with credit, he neither
attained nor sought political position. His “divine voice,” he said, had
warned him to refrain from politics, presumably because office would have
entailed the sacrifice of his principles and the abandonment of his proper
vocation. Yet in 406 he was a member of the senate; and on the first day
of the trial of the victors of Arginusae, being president of the prytanis, he
resisted: first, in conjunction with his colleagues, afterwards, when they yielded,
alone, the illegal and unconstitutional proposal of Callixenus, that the fate
of the eight generals should be decided by a single vote of the assembly.
Not
less courageous than this opposition to the civium ardor prava jubentium
was his disregard of the vultus instantis tyranni two years later.
During the reign of terror of 404 the Thirty, anxious to implicate in their
crimes men of repute who might otherwise have opposed their plans, ordered
five citizens, one of whom was Socrates, to go to Salamis and bring thence
their destined victim Leon. Socrates alone disobeyed. But though he was
exceptionally obnoxious to the Thirty as appears not only in this
incident, but also in their threat of punishment under a special ordinance
forbidding “the teaching of the art of argument,” it was reserved for
the reconstituted democracy to bring him to trial and to put him to death.
In 399, four years after the restoration and the amnesty, he was indicted
as an offender against public morality. His accusers were Meletus the
poet, Anytus the tanner and Lycon the orator, all of them members of the
democratic or patriot party who had returned from Phyle with Thrasybulus. The
accusation ran thus: “Socrates is guilty, firstly, of denying the gods
recognized by the state and introducing new divinities, and, secondly, of
corrupting the young.”
In his unpremeditated defense, so far from seeking
to conciliate his judges, Socrates defied them. He was found guilty by 280 votes, it is supposed, against 220.
Meletus having called for capital punishment, it now rested with the accused
to make a counter-proposition; and there can be little doubt that had
Socrates without further remark suggested some smaller but yet substantial
penalty, the proposal would have been accepted. But to the amazement of the
judges and the distress of his friends, Socrates proudly declared that for the
services which he had rendered to the city he deserved, not punishment, but
the reward of a public benefactor - maintenance in the Prytaneum at the cost
of the state; and although at the close of his speech he professed himself
willing to pay a fine of one mina, and upon the urgent entreaties of his
friends raised the amount of his offer to thirty minas, he made no attempt to
disguise his indifference to the result. His attitude exasperated the judges,
and the penalty of death was decreed by an increased majority.
Then in a short
address Socrates declared his contentment with his own conduct and with the
sentence. Whether death was a dreamless sleep, or a new life in Hades, where
he would have opportunities of testing the wisdom of the heroes and the sages
of antiquity, in either case he esteemed it a gain to die. In the same spirit
he refused to take advantage of a scheme arranged by his friend Crito for an
escape from prison.
Under ordinary circumstances the condemned criminal drank
the cup of hemlock on the day after the trial; but in the case of Socrates the
rule that during the absence of the sacred ship sent annually to Delos no one
should be put to death caused an exceptional delay. For thirty days he
remained in imprisonment, receiving his intimates and conversing with them in
his accustomed manner. How in his last conversation be argued that the wise
man will regard approaching death with a cheerful confidence Plato relates in
the Phaedo; and, while the central argument which rests the doctrine of the
soul’s immortality upon the theory of ideas must be accounted Platonic,
in all other respects the narrative, though not that of an eye witness, has
the air of accuracy and truth.
Jacques-Louis David, 'The
Death of Socrates