Comp Civ Test #2 Essay d:-)

                   When 21^st century people think of the great philosophers of ancient times the name Socrates will undoubtedly spring into their mind. In his time he was equally revered. Over the years of his life, his fame spread to all throughout Greece and young and old alike were said to come to meet with him to enjoy his intellect and friendly personality. So why, in the Athenian society that is birthing more democracy and freedom than any before them, would a celebrated seventy year old philosopher be put to death? The truth lies in the unstable political life of Athens at the time. The charges of impiety and corruption of youth that led Socrates to his death were false and unfair; Socrates was put to death simply because he was becoming a threat to maintaining the Athenian political ideal.

                   Socrates was tried in part on the crime of corrupting the youth. The blame that falls upon him for this is heavy, but is it due? How much blame can be set upon Socrates for the actions of his students? A comparison between modern day terror and the danger of Socrates’ beliefs made by one revisionist goes: “If 9/11 had killed a member of your family, would you put the teacher of Osama Bin Laden on trial?” We can assume that Socrates, after decades of instructing, would have spoken his mind to the fullest to the many peers and students that passed through his life. His influence was already so widely stretched that it seems if his silence is what the government had wanted; his death was very long overdue. Yet it came on his seventieth year, when he was an elderly man probably close to dying naturally anyway. The corruption of the youth had much to do with the idea of their enlightenment. From what we can pull from his friends’ writings, Socrates believed that knowledge was the ultimate force of good in the world. Knowledge humbled him rather than boosted his ego, in his own words: “To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.” This is what Socrates did. He was a teacher, expelling the wisdom he believed to be a gift onto those who were willing. He did not force anyone into listening and when they did he did not force them into believing what he did; he only believed that the gift of his knowledge was one that must be shared.

                   The premise of Socrates’ impiety is more closely pinned down as his abandonment of the gods that the city acknowledges and his formation of new ones. Atheism and religious conversion, both of which Socrates was accused of, was looked down upon but was not a crime in ancient Greece. However, the teaching of atheist or conversion practices and beliefs was. And so again the problem falls with Socrates’ “disillusion” of the youth and the public in general. Socrates claimed and was claimed to be an extremely religious man. He talked of how the gods motivate him, how the gift of his intellect and his rhetoric would be wasted if he not profess it, that this would be a betrayal to the gods that gave him this gift. According to A. A. Long: “There should be no doubt that, despite his claim to know only that he knew nothing, Socrates had strong beliefs about the divine". The only possible isolation he made between himself and the gods was in his ideal of enlightenment. It could be argued that to be irrevocably loyal to the gods would mean to not dwell on questions of philosophy, sciences or anything of that sort and simply to trust in the absoluteness of the all-powerful ones. When Socrates begins to question his mortality, to shape himself into an individual being he distances himself from these now-archaic styles of worship. Socrates tried to elicit a change in who people considered themselves to be. He wished to steer them towards a richer life, with chests full of the priceless gold of knowledge. If Socrates were to have formed a new god in his mind, it would be knowledge. And although he preached his worship of the gods and goddesses, Athens may have seen this drift towards individual enlightenment as impiety of the order of worship Athens was built upon.

                   To answer the true question of why Socrates was put to death, we must look to Athens’ unstable politics at the time. Socrates’ threat to the Athenian government lay in his fundamental beliefs. Socrates, being brought up during the time of great democratic reform under Pericles’ guidance, had developed a set of values that would put him at odds with the Athenian government. Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy and in his teachings and it is true that Socrates spoke this criticism clearly and in a way that would seem to provoke radical reform. And it did, students of Socrates were to be the primary source of anti-democratic movements. Socrates also pushed the law as much as he could. The factor which plays most heavily into the death of Socrates is the political results and consequences of the Peloponnesian War (431-404). During the war, Athens democracy was shaken and overthrown in 411, but was quickly restored. When Sparta’s land-based power triumphed over the Athenian’s sea empire, Athens saw a bitter defeat and so did its politics. After the war Sparta placed the “Thirty Tyrants” in control of the newly captured Athens and democracy was destroyed once again. The fact that one of the tyrants, Critias, was a student of Socrates was not seen as a coincidence to the public. The rule of the Thirty Tyrants did not last long and democracy was put in place again, but Athens had suffered deeply during this time of contemptuous politics. The glory it knew with Pericles would never be felt again. The people were in many cases divided politically and Athens was reaching desperately for political stability. Now was not the time for Socrates to become an eminent political philosopher, but that he did. With Socrates’ influence reaching all corners of the city and the students seemingly under his anti-democratic guise, Socrates was now in a dangerous place. His affiliation with the sophist movement did not help his cause either. The people and the government were simply scared of his capabilities and this fear is what forced the trial against him and towards the hemlock cup. With Socrates’ last words he addresses Crito about the god Asclepius, curer of illness: "Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt." He could mean that death was his last freedom and that he would be, if not glad, comfortable to meet it. But writer Robin Waterfield suggests another interpretation of Socrates' last words. In line with the beliefs of much of the public and the government at the time, he says that perhaps Socrates finally viewed himself as the “plague” of Athens that many thought he was. His death is said to have cleansed Athens, to have washed the slate. Perhaps, in his final moments, Socrates saw his death as a final gift to the world that he admired.

                   The trial and execution of Socrates is an event that intrigues and confounds historians to this day. Under the seemingly democratic guise of Athens, a great philosopher was murdered for preaching his beliefs. The charges of impiety and corrupting the youth were simply an excuse to stifle Socrates’ fuse. The truth is that after years of war and political unrest, Athens was trying it’s hardest to gain back the control it once had. In the eyes of the democratic government and the public, Socrates, with his devoted students and proud, impenetrable views, was a threat to this cause. Today, Socrates is seen as the great philosopher that he was. A person governed by his beliefs, whom would rather die than go against them. In Socrates’ own humbling words: “It is not living that matters, but living rightly.”