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Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths

by Robin Waterfield
W.W Norton & Company, New York, NY, 10110
320 pp. Trade, $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-393-06527-5.

Reviewed by Allan Graubard

agraubard@yahoo.com

Robin Waterfield, the well-known translator of ancient Greek philosophy and drama, has recently published his study of the death of Socrates; a clear, precisely informed portrait of the times and tensions of that era, and of Socrates’ fate in it. Of Socrates himself ––who the man was, in fact––we cannot be so sure. From Plato and Xenophon an “iconic figure” has come down to us, massaged by other commentators through the centuries. Waterfield does not avoid this issue, knowing full well that his version falls amongst them, but also notes that the historical figuration continues, and may ever continue. Nor is the book a study of the Socratic method, its antecedents and contemporaries, though commentary here is insightful. But the book does hold the reader. For in the question it raises by its primary title, the socio-political and cultural character of ancient Athens unravels, and in it aspects of our own.

The nation-state that founded a political system which we, in the West, have inherited is not something to pass over, especially now when it is just too easy to forget, or forgo, how the place worked. Simply, the radical nature of ancient Athenian democracy was unique. And despite the very recent taste of a virtual “connection” here, the more “immediate” influence of the citizenry in the last Presidential election via the Internet, that democracy still escapes us, and perhaps for good reason. There is the separation of powers to consider, a modern development, and current jurisprudence, which would have been as foreign to an Athenian of the 5th century, BCE, as theirs is to us. And yet the ties that exist do provoke if in a somewhat larger context. A relatively self-sufficient, ancient polis engorges its world, founding an empire that enriches, transforms and imperils it.

And while Waterfield does not score the analogies between then and now, save implicitly by contrast and in the perspectives he dwells on, their implications have consequence. Between 469 BCE, when Socrates was born, and 399, when he was convicted and executed for impiety, Athens had endured a procession of crises: wars and civil war, rebellions, putsches, epidemic, alliances gained and shattered, the centrifugal-centripetal forces of imperial wealth––with drama, poetry and art, to say nothing of philosophy, interpreting the contestive mix.

Sound familiar?

Through it all, Waterfield tracks the social climate in Athens, tying the reader to it, with Socrates its foremost critic. Alcibiades––Socrates’ powerful student and friend, in and beyond Athens––is also a counter-theme that Waterfield weaves throughout. Although history commonly joins the two men in a still ambiguous relationship, somewhat less common, at least in the lay literature, is discussion of their differences: the one a man of action whose risky ventures and brio brought him down by assassination, the other a man of thought also brought down, according to Waterfield, as much by his eccentricities as by the rigor he brought to his thought, alone and in society. Why Socrates did not mount the kind of trial defense that would have saved him, which he quite obviously chose to avoid, is an issue central to the man, his mission, his times, and his sense not only of what Athens might become but also of what his death might offer to that future, which he in large part hoped to form; this hope now dashed.

And it is here that Waterfield turns poignant. Did Socrates, in his last request before the poison that he drank killed him, repay his debt to Asclepius, god of healing, with a “cock,” to allow him to offer his death (a voluntary sacrifice) to heal, or help to heal, Athens of the wounds it had suffered during his life? Of course, we will never know. But this reciprocity is a reminder of the ties that bound Socrates to Athens, its promise and its reality, and the length he would go to preserve them.

Why Socrates Died remains a question. Is there a definitive answer?