The Punning Pundit

It is difficult to pin down exactly who Socrates was; if he had any writings of consequence they have been lost for so long that even the memory of them is gone. What we know of him comes chiefly from Plato and Xenophon, with Plato being considered the more reliable (Russell 84). He was also fictionalized in the play The Clouds by Aristophanes. Socrates did not feel that this portrait was very flattering, and mentioned so at his trial. It is difficult to pin down just what Socrates said and did, much beyond a bare biography and a method. It is useful to examine his method.
Athens had just lost a war, its imperial swagger, and democracy itself. Athens was not in a good way. It was this post-war disaster that Socrates beheld, and it was pre-war values that he questioned. His very method of questioning would serve to drive the sane mad-- indeed it continues to drive prospective law students to suicide even several millennia later. How, then, did this odious little man become beloved by history? He had a penchant for asking the right questions.
Socrates believed that everyone contained within them all knowledge, and that careful questioning would reveal this knowledge. So he would stand on the street corners and harangue passers-by, attempting to elicit understanding. Anyone with older siblings is familiar with his techniques: he would start with the assumption that the questioned was wrong (or, at least that Socrates was correct), and nitpick any answer until ignorance was admitted . Meanwhile Socrates’ students (Plato et al) would stand around and snigger. While this may not be sufficient reason alone to have put Socrates to death, it certainly did not endear him to the jury when the time came.
Still, the questions themselves deserve a moment. Socrates was concerned with discovering the best social system, how leaders are chosen, how children might best be educated. He was concerned with the fundamental truths of the universe, from which everything else might be derived. They were useful questions, But perhaps not well timed.
What was the underlying philosophy of Athens at the time of Socrates? Certainly the democratic impulse of the Athenians must be taken into account. Democracy springs from the belief that humans are fundamentally capable, able to make their own decisions based upon good information and reason. Juries were huge, chosen by lot, and unpaid. Every position was up for election-- including General. The Athenians believed themselves capable of anything.
Greek art must also be considered. Classical art is full of human beings seen at their best, muscles rippling with prowess and ability. Every four years, the cities would send young men out to the Olympic Games to watch them compete, with a profound, nearly mystical belief that they were watching the crème of human achievement. Physical perfection and mental discipline: even when they fell short of this idea, the ideal itself was worth holding to and struggling for. And then came Socrates.
Socrates was accused of evil. He showed this charge baseless. Socrates was accused of corrupting the morals of the youth. He pointed to the crowd of his students and asked which of them was corrupted. Socrates was accused of poor logic , the logical circles he ran around the prosecution was more than enough to put paid to that notion. Socrates was accused of studying things, this charge was laughable. Most famously, Socrates was charged with being an Atheist. He answered this one so firmly that it is impossible to believe a jury could have convinced him of it. Yet Socrates was convicted.
After having proved all the accusations against him groundless, on what bassis might he have been convicted?
But of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me;--I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence. (Plato)
It is precisely this eloquence on which he was convicted. Time and again during his trial Socrates picked out and picked apart a prosecutor and his arguments. In the course of proving his innocence, Socrates demonstrated for the jury the exact quality for which he was to be executed.
It wasn’t merely his eloquence, but rather what Socrates used that eloquence for: “there were few citizens to whom he had not proved how little they knew, how badly they reasoned, and how ill-founded were their most cherished opinions.” (Rostovtzeff 187). Perhaps in other societies this might not be worthy of a capitol punishment. In the Athens of Old, it certainly did.
In attacking each of the citizens in turn, in showing them that they weren’t as smart as they thought they were, Socrates was attacking the very foundations of Athenian society: the belief in the innate capability of humanity.
If the Athenians believed that people were capable and good, Socrates went around exposing the lie of that belief, or rather-- exposed that no one could out-think him in calling it a lie. The fact that he would not use his obvious wisdom and take upon himself a leadership role within the city must have galled the citizens especially. Here was a man who would not do his basic duty but only be a self-described “gadfly”.
Even so, he was given the option of death or some other punishment. It was his right to choose what that alternate punishment might be. He chose one so insulting to the city, one that so undercut their sense of values that the jury voted for death in an even higher ratio than had voted for his conviction (Russell 93).
There are many forms of treason: selling arms to an avowed enemy, giving information or help to a nation that wishes to destroy your own, defecting with an army. These are the things men commonly call treasonous, and for them Dante reserved the most punishing level of hell. There are other ways of committing treason however. Perhaps the most vicious is to take the most cherished assumptions of a society, not the small ones, but the ones which form the axiom of the entire civilization, and show them to be false. It was this exact crime which Socrates committed, it was this exact crime for which he was convicted, and it was this exact crime for which he was put to death. The only real pity is that he never put his obviously amazing intellect to better use.