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How does the trial and execution of Socrates exemplify both the successes and failures of Athenian democracy?
When this guy, Socrates, comes to trial in 399 BCE, Athens is trying to recover from a devastating thirty years of war with Sparta and her allies. Athens has lost this war and it has lost its empire and, in some senses, its credibility in the Greek world as a result of this, so it's a time of great anxiety. When I talk about this to my students, I try to get them to imagine how people felt in Europe after the end of the Second World War when everybody is just exhausted from fighting and everybody's ideas of identity have been challenged in all sorts of ways.
Socrates comes to trial on the charges that he has denied the gods of Athens and therefore weakened Athens' national security, that he is corrupting the youth of Athens by teaching them to ask questions that are seditious and dangerous. Some people are even suggesting that one of his students had been allied with the Spartans and been a collaborator and all these other kinds of things, so Socrates is seen as a political threat.
In many ways, what we see here is the fragmentation or the crumbling of Athens' own democratic ideals, that rather than holding on to what is best and highest about a democracy, Socrates in a way becomes a scapegoat, a fall guy for things that have gone wrong, for Athens' own mistakes.
But on the other hand, you could say that the fact that Socrates comes to trial at all, the fact that he's given a hearing and is allowed to speak for himself and he is even allowed, after he's convicted, to suggest what his own penalty should be, are examples of the extraordinary strength of the Athenian democratic institutions. And Socrates himself tries to frame it that way for his students after he's condemned. His students want him, for example - Socrates is condemned to the death penalty, to drinking poison - and in prison, before this happens, his students are urging him to go into exile or to flee. And Socrates argues that if he does that, he will be undermining the laws of Athens, the very laws that put him in prison and condemned him to death. He says, "The fact that the jury has found me guilty, lawfully under this democratic process, suggests that I really have to die. And if I don't do that, if I defy the laws of Athens and I escape into exile, this will weaken the laws of Athens irrevocably; it will be a weakened democracy."
So the very fact that Athens can produce someone like Socrates and allow him to talk and ask difficult questions for almost seventy years - well, maybe he hasn't been doing that for his whole life, but a long period of his life - that they can tolerate his beliefs, and that he's allowed to have this hearing in an open court, are in many ways exemplary of what we would like to think of as the best of democracy.
But the fact that Athens allows itself to succumb to this kind of paranoia as the result of its losses in the Peloponnesian War might suggest that those institutions are not as robust as they should have been.