Trial of Socrates (399 BC): Athens Condemns Its Philosopher

The trial of Socrates took place in Athens in the spring of 399 BC, when the seventy-year-old philosopher was charged with impiety and corrupting the young. A jury of about 500 citizens found him guilty and condemned him to death, and about a month later he drank hemlock in prison. Through the accounts of his followers Plato and Xenophon, the trial became one of the most famous in history and a lasting symbol of the conflict between free inquiry and the community.

Who was Socrates?

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 BC, the son of a stonemason named Sophroniscus and a midwife named Phaenarete. He served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, fighting at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, and was admired for his courage and endurance.

He wrote nothing. Instead he spent his days in the streets and gymnasia of Athens, questioning anyone willing to talk about justice, courage, piety or the good life. His method was to ask for a definition, then expose contradictions in the answers, often leaving the other person embarrassed. He claimed that his only wisdom was knowing that he did not know.

His friend Chaerephon once asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the priestess answered that no one was. Socrates said he took this as a divine mission to test people who were thought wise. He also spoke of a daimonion, an inner divine sign or voice that warned him against certain actions.

Background: a city in crisis

By 399 BC Athens had been shaken by defeat. It had lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC and lived through the terror of the Thirty Tyrants before democracy was restored in 403 BC.

Socrates was linked in many minds with men who had harmed the city. Alcibiades, his most famous admirer, had defected to Sparta. Critias, leader of the Thirty, and Charmides, another oligarch, had been part of his circle. Socrates himself had resisted both regimes: in 406 BC he refused to support the illegal collective trial of the generals after the Battle of Arginusae, and under the Thirty he refused to help arrest Leon of Salamis.

He was also an easy target for satire. In 423 BC Aristophanes had mocked him in the comedy The Clouds as a sophist who studied the heavens, denied the gods and taught young men to win arguments dishonestly. Plato has Socrates name this comic picture as one of the old prejudices he had to fight.

The charges

Under the amnesty of 403 BC, no one could be prosecuted for actions committed during the oligarchy, so a political case was impossible. Instead three men brought a public charge of impiety (asebeia). The formal prosecutor was Meletus, supported by Anytus, a leading democratic politician, and Lycon, an orator.

According to the text preserved by Diogenes Laertius, the charge accused Socrates of failing to recognise the gods the city recognised, of introducing other new divinities and of corrupting the young. The penalty proposed was death.

What “corrupting the young” meant is debated. It may have referred to teaching young men to question their parents and traditions, or to the political careers of pupils such as Critias and Alcibiades. A pamphlet by the writer Polycrates, published a few years after the trial, stressed these political links, which suggests that many Athenians saw them as part of the case.

The trial

The case was heard in a single day before a jury of about 500 citizens chosen by lot. Each side spoke for a fixed time, measured by a water clock. The prosecutors’ speeches are lost. Socrates’ defence survives in two versions: Plato’s Apology (from the Greek apologia, “defence speech”) and a shorter work by Xenophon. Plato says he was present; Xenophon was not.

In Plato’s version Socrates did not plead or weep, and he refused to bring his children into court to stir pity, as defendants often did. He questioned Meletus and tried to show that the charges were confused. He explained his Delphic mission and compared himself to a gadfly sent by the god to sting a large, sluggish horse, Athens, into wakefulness.

Xenophon’s account differs in tone. He says Socrates spoke boldly, even arrogantly, because he had decided that death at seventy was preferable to the troubles of old age, and that his inner divine sign had not stopped him from making his defence. Both writers agree that Socrates made no real effort to win the jury’s sympathy, which may have cost him votes.

The jury found him guilty. Plato has Socrates remark that if just 30 votes had gone the other way he would have been acquitted, which implies a vote of roughly 280 to 220.

The penalty

Athenian procedure required the defendant to propose an alternative penalty. Socrates first suggested, half ironically, that he deserved free meals in the Prytaneum, an honour given to Olympic victors and public benefactors. He then offered a fine of 30 minae, a large sum guaranteed by friends including Plato and Crito.

In this second speech Plato gives him the most famous line of the trial: that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. The jury chose death. Diogenes Laertius reports that the majority for the death penalty was larger than the majority for conviction, and that some jurors who had voted to acquit then voted for death.

Prison and death

Executions were normally carried out quickly, but the trial had taken place the day after a sacred ship sailed for the island of Delos. Until it returned, Athens had to remain ritually pure and no one could be executed. Socrates spent about a month in prison, talking with his friends.

Plato’s Crito describes how his old friend Crito arranged an escape and begged him to leave. Socrates refused. He argued that he had accepted the city’s laws all his life and could not break them now simply because the verdict was unjust.

The Phaedo, set on his final day, records a long conversation about the immortality of the soul. Late in the afternoon the jailer brought a cup of hemlock. Socrates drank it calmly, walked about until his legs grew heavy and lay down. As the numbness reached his body, he reminded Crito that they owed a cockerel to Asclepius, the god of healing. Plato notes that he himself was absent that day through illness.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Socrates was tried for atheism alone. The charge combined impiety with corrupting the young, and the political background mattered, even if it could not be named in court.
• Myth: Socrates said “I know that I know nothing.” This exact phrase does not appear in Plato. Socrates says he does not think he knows what he does not know, which is close in spirit but more careful.
• Myth: his death was agonising. Plato’s calm account has been questioned, since hemlock poisoning can cause convulsions. Some scholars think the species used, or Plato’s literary aims, explain the peaceful description; the question is still debated.
• Fact: the vote was close. A shift of a few dozen jurors would have saved him.

Consequences and legacy

The death of Socrates profoundly shaped his followers. Plato turned away from a political career and, about a decade later, founded the Academy, where Socratic questioning became the basis of a philosophical school. Plato, Xenophon and others wrote dialogues in which Socrates was the main speaker, creating the portrait that survives today.

Several philosophical movements, including the Cynics and the Stoics, claimed Socrates as a model. For later writers he became the example of a person who preferred death to abandoning the search for truth. He was often compared to other martyrs for conscience.

The trial also became a central text in debates about democracy. Critics, from Plato onwards, saw it as proof that popular juries could be ignorant and swayed by prejudice. Defenders of Athens have argued that Socrates provoked the jury and that the city’s anxiety after war and civil strife was understandable. The journalist I. F. Stone’s book The Trial of Socrates (1988) revived the political interpretation for a modern audience.

Artists also took up the story. Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Socrates (1787), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, presents him as a heroic teacher, pointing upwards while reaching for the cup.

Timeline

• c. 470 BC: Socrates is born in Athens.
• 423 BC: Aristophanes satirises him in The Clouds.
• 406 BC: As a council member, he opposes the illegal trial of the Arginusae generals.
• 404-403 BC: The Thirty Tyrants rule Athens; Socrates refuses to arrest Leon of Salamis.
• 403 BC: Democracy is restored with a general amnesty.
• 399 BC, spring: Socrates is tried, convicted and sentenced to death.
• 399 BC, about a month later: After the sacred ship returns from Delos, Socrates drinks hemlock.

Why it matters

The trial of Socrates raises questions that remain urgent: how far a community should tolerate those who challenge its beliefs, and what an individual owes to the laws of a state that wrongs him. Through Plato’s account, a single day in an Athenian court became one of the founding moments of Western philosophy.