corrupting the youth,” as well as not believing in the accepted gods. With a
slender majority, a jury of five hundred found him guilty.
He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have
saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not
have been Socrates. He valued his conscience—and the truth— higher than
life. He assured the jury that he had only acted in the best interests of the
state. He was nevertheless condemned to drink hemlock. Shortly thereafter,
he drank the poison in the presence of his friends, and died.
Why, Sophie? Why did Socrates have to die? People have been asking
this question for 2,400 years. However, he was not the only person in history
to have seen things through to the bitter end and suffered death for the sake
of their convictions.
I have mentioned Jesus already, and in fact there are several striking
parallels between them.
Both Jesus and Socrates were enigmatic personalities, also to their
contemporaries. Neither of them wrote down their teachings, so we are forced
to rely on the picture we have of them from their disciples. But we do know
that they were both masters of the art of discourse. They both spoke with a
characteristic self-assuredness that could fascinate as well as exasperate.
And not least, they both believed that they spoke on behalf of something
greater than themselves. They challenged the power of the community by
criticizing all forms of injustice and corruption. And finally—their activities cost
them their lives.
The trials of Jesus and Socrates also exhibit clear parallels.
They could certainly both have saved themselves by appealing for
mercy, but they both felt they had a mission that would have been betrayed
unless they kept faith to the bitter end. And by meeting their death so bravely
they commanded an enormous following, also after they had died.
I do not mean to suggest that Jesus and Socrates were alike. I am
merely drawing attention to the fact that they both had a message that was
inseparably linked to their personal courage.
A Joker in Athens
Socrates, Sophie! We aren’t done with him yet. We have talked about
his method. But what was his philosophical project?
Socrates lived at the same time as the Sophists. Like them, he was
more concerned with man and his place in society than with the forces of
nature. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years
later, Socrates “called philosophy down from the sky and established her in
the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life,
ethics, good and evil.”
But Socrates differed from the Sophists in one significant way. He did
not consider himself to be a “sophist”—that is, a learned or wise person.
Unlike the Sophists, he did not teach for money. No, Socrates called himself a
philosopher in the true sense of the word. A “philosopher” really means “one
who loves wisdom.”
Are you sitting comfortably, Sophie? Because it is central to the rest of
this course that you fully understand the difference between a sophist and a
philosopher. The Sophists took money for their more or less hairsplitting
expoundings, and sophists of this kind have come and gone from time