Resumo do texto: CARTLEDGE, P. "The Trial of Socrates" in ______ Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice. Cambridge, 2009. p.

76-90 More especially, I shall argue that they did so on the basis of the main charge, that of impiety. []the real reason for Socrates arraignment and condemnation was politics in the narrower sense of that word, a continuation by other, legal means of the ugly and often violent political infighting that had disfigured the streets as well as the formal political arenas of Athens for over a decade. I argue against that view; but I would also preface my rebuttal by reiterating that, in ancient Athens, religion was itself not just politicised but political part of the essence of the political, indeed. It would therefore be anachronistic and misleading to distinguish a political from a religious charge. The Greek city was a concrete, living entity placed under the sure protection of the gods, who would not abandon it as long as it did not abandon them. Religion therefore was implicated with everything, and everything was imbricated with religion even though the Greeks did not happen to have a word for religion and often used some such periphrasis as the things of the gods (ta tn thon). Religion thus either determined (or occasioned) human behaviour, above all of a ritual character, or gave to behaviour that was not primarily or exclusively religious a religious dimension, association or at least flavour. []according to the mythology of the pre-Christian Greeks, however, the world pre-existed the gods (and goddesses), whom it in some sense created. Greek religion was not separable from politics in the broadest sense of communal self-determination and government. In the narrow sense of politicking or political infighting, Greek politics may be separated analytically from religion, though by most modern liberal-democratic standards the link between them was pretty tight even here. Greek polis religion down to and beyond Socrates time was essentially, of its nature, a public matter, expressed primarily by collective ritual action undertaken under communal civic direction. Athens in 399 was a democracy (people-power), as most Greek cities then were not. (That situation was to change within the next quarter century or so, such that the period from c. 380 to 350, which saw for instance the re foundation

of the Boeotian federal state on a moderately democratic basis, was the great era of democracy.) It was, moreover, a radical or thoroughgoing democracy, as most Greek democracies were not (either then or later). Only five years earlier, however, Athens had ceased to be a democracy at all, for the second time within a decade. This was thanks to a Sparta-backed coup that brought to power a small cabal or junta of extreme anti-democrats who thoroughly earned their hateful nickname of the Thirty Tyrants. The lessons to be drawn from this experience are twofold. First, Athens more than any other Greek city gave genuine power to the mass of the ordinary, poor citizens; and that kratos included religious power, the power to determine what was, and what was not, right and proper behaviour vis--vis the gods whom the city recognised. Second, however long established (and Athens had had versions of democracy since 508/7: see chapter 5), democracy was vulnerable and fragile (see narrative III), so that the price of continuing democratic self-government was eternal vigilance. In 399 that need for democratic vigilance was perceived, rightly, to be paramount. Athenian-style democracy was direct, participatory democracy in more than one sense. The citizen volunteer (ho boulomenos, he who is willing) who, as Meletus did in 399, brought a public legal action against another citizen did so overtly, ideally, indeed ideologically on behalf of the city as such, thereby fulfilling the role played by the Director of Public Prosecutions in states where government is not so conceived and conducted. Prosecutors such as Meletus were therefore bound (in more than one sense) to invoke on their side what they represented to be the communal interest: not only what was allegedly in the communitys best interests at the time, but what they claimed to be traditionally and conventionally understood as the communitys best interests. In other words, they claimed to have nomos (custom and convention) behind them, as well as to be publicly defending nomos in the sense of statute, or law and legality more generally. This was in full accord with the dominant ideological conception of what litigation was, and was for, in democratic Athens. In practice, often enough, it was not so much and sometimes it was not at all about finding out the truth of what had actually happened in regard to the breach or otherwise of the citys laws. [] religious crimes that almost all Athenians would unhesitatingly and unthinkingly deem to be heinous and capital.

The Athenians provided a public, political context within which open speculation, not excluding questioning the very existence of the gods, could be taken to the limits though not beyond them.

We do not know when the crime and procedure of the graph asebeias (writ of impiety) under which Socrates was prosecuted were first introduced, nor what exactly the Athenians understood the charge to cover.

We do know, however (at least, we do if we believe that the sources of Plutarchs Life of Pericles chapter 32 were accurate and accurately reported), that at some time during Socrates adult lifetime a seer (mantis) called Diopeithes, a self-styled religious expert, successfully proposed a decree before the Assembly relating to the impeachment of those who do not duly recognise the divine matters (nomizein ta theia) or who teach doctrines relating to the heavens meaning incorrect and untraditional doctrines, especially, perhaps, atheistical ones.

What explains the force, significance and applicability of Diopeithes decree is that its main target was the thinkers and teachers lumped together, by no means justly, under the opprobrious title of Sophists (sophistai charlatans, quacks: see chapter 6). Plato, however, not Diopeithes, is chiefly responsible for giving the Sophists an enduringly bad name, desperately keen as he was to refute the contemporary Athenian perception that his revered mentor Socrates was nothing but a Sophist. Against that slur, as he saw it, Plato emphasised above all that Socrates unlike the purely or largely mercenary Sophists did not practise his art for sordidly materialistic reasons, and that his pursuit of genuine wisdom was a disinterested quest for the truth, or at least self-enlightenment, even or especially if that came at the cost of creating greater perplexity or bafflement (aporia) in his auditors. Socrates, Platos Socrates, was thus keen to deny that he knew anything, in any strong epistemological sense: if he was indeed the wisest man on earth, as the Delphic Oracle (fount of all religious wisdom) was said to have announced, that was (only) because he knew he knew nothing. An overstatement, no doubt, or perhaps, strictly, a logical contradiction, but one that was entirely consistent with the famous Delphic injunction Know yourself (Gnthi seauton) as indeed was the burden of Socrates philosophising as a whole, as that is represented by Plato.

Platos defence of Socrates in particular was far less successful than his attack on the Sophists in general. Actually, during most of Socrates own lifetime not all Athenians by any means had always shared Platos negative view of all Sophists, and merely being thought to be a Sophist would not necessarily have been a disaster for Socrates in ordinary, happy circumstances for the city. In 399, however, Athens was no longer a happy place of free and open speculation and uninhibited debate. It had by then become, thanks to the rigours of the failed Peloponnesian War []

[] even more so than that stereotype suggests, for in 399 the Athenians no longer contented themselves with merely shooting black looks but took their fellow citizens to court and prosecuted them on major capital charges, such as impiety. In 400/399, in fact, there were to our knowledge no fewer than six major public trials, all relating in some way to the disastrous events of the last years of the war and its aftermath.

Insofar as the defendants could be portrayed as irreligious free thinkers, the trials also constituted a popular, anti-Sophistical reaction, literally with a vengeance. For they were seeking to exact revenge for the religious pollution that the Athenians felt they had or might have incurred by harbouring in their midst men who either by word or by deed had allegedly violated the citys most basic religious norms and code.

That could have been the other half of the corrupting the young charge.) Meletus, son of Meletus of the deme Pitthus, has brought this charge and lodged this writ against Socrates son of Sophroniscus of the deme Alopc. Socrates has broken the law by [Ia] not duly acknowledging the gods whom the polis acknowledges and by [Ib] introducing other new divinities. He has also broken the law by (II] corrupting the young. The Penalty proposed is Death.

Greek or Athenian official religion could be glossed or even paraphrased as ta patria, the things of the fathers/ancestors. In short, the religious charges brought against Socrates were as weighty as they could have been, both in general terms that is, as judged by the normal standards of Athenian piety and its official policing by the democracy and specifically in the highly charged, highly unstable political circumstances of 399. They would, in my opinion, probably have been sufficient by themselves, if

persuasively enough argued, to convince a majority of the 501 jurors to vote Socrates guilty. It breached the 403 amnesty in spirit, if not formally, since its burden was to accuse Socrates of politically motivated anti-democratic behaviour in the leadup to and during the regime of the Thirty. This was a breach that the prosecution team knew they would be able to get away with, however. Without accusing Socrates himself in so many words of being an antidemocratic traitor, it implied that Socrates was at the very least guilty by association. For corrupting the young was a euphemistic, allusive way of saying that Socrates had been the teacher of corrupt young men, specifically both of Alcibiades, a proven traitor, and of Critias, leader of the virulently anti-democratic Thirty Tyrants; and it implied that what Socrates had taught them was precisely to be anti-democratic traitors. The syllogism Socrates taught them, they were traitors; therefore Socrates taught them to be traitors was logically false, but it would have been none the less persuasive for that. (It is a separate and massively controversial issue whether Socrates really was anti-democratic, either in theory or in practice.) [] For the kind of trial Socrates underwent (an agn timtos) was divided procedurally into two parts. In the first, the issue was the defendants guilt or innocence. In the second, if the majority voted guilty, the issue was the nature of the convicted mans penalty (tim), and prosecutor and defendant again spoke to that. Meletus, of course, argued strenuously for the death penalty. Impiety of this sort was, after all, a heinous political crime, and the Athenians had no scruples about inflicting the death sentence in cases in which they felt that major public crimes had been committed that threatened the good of the whole community. Socrates, not unnaturally, demurred. Instead of making a plausible counterproposal of a truly heavy penalty (exile or a large monetary fine), however, it seems that at first he in effect claimed he ought to be treated as a public benefactor and feted (like an Olympic victor) with free dinners at the citys hearth for the rest of his days. This did not go down well. Nor was his eventual final offer (prompted perhaps by some residual respect for his friends earnest wishes) of paying a substantial but by no means substantial enough monetary

fine a winning move. So, if Socrates would not himself offer either to pay a really seriously large fine or to remove himself into permanent exile, then he would have to be removed forcibly and irrevocably from the Athenian community by an act of the people.