In 399 B.C., when the seventy-year-old philosopher and teacher Socrates was put on trial in his home town of Athens, the proceedings began with the reading of the charges against him: “This indictment and affidavit are sworn by Meletus . . . against Socrates. . . . Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods in which the city believes and of introducing other new divinities. He is also guilty of corrupting the young. The penalty proposed is death.”

A jury of 501 men, all citizens in good standing, all over the age of thirty, was assembled. The Athenian system of government was amateur in the strict sense of the word: There were no district attorneys, no professional lawyers, and few police. If a crime was committed, major or minor, some private citizen had to lay a charge before the proper official, as Meletus did, attend the trial, mount the rostrum, and present his arguments to the jury. In the case against Socrates, Meletus was supported by two other men, both older than he: Anytus and Lycon. When they had taken their allotted time, measured by a water clock, it was Socrates’ turn to speak. He pronounced himself not guilty, defended his life’s work and his ideas, and challenged Meletus to produce the young men whose religious beliefs he had corrupted.

The parade of witnesses lasted for hours, while the jury sat on their wooden benches and the spectators stood behind them. When the speeches were finished, the jurors lined up one by one and dropped their ballots into an urn. The votes were counted in sight of everyone, and the result was announced immediately: guilty 281, not guilty 220. There was no possibility of appeal.

When Socrates was convicted, the jury had next to fix the penalty, which they did by voting once more, this time on choices put to them by the accuser and the defendant. Meletus asked for the death penalty. In reply, Socrates seems to have made a series of frivolous counterproposals – one, that he be allowed to live at the expense of the public in the Prytaneum. His behavior was so offensive to the jurors that, if ancient evidence is true, eighty of them switched their votes in favor of capital punishment. Socrates was then taken to jail, and the jurors went home after receiving three silver obols, about half a day’s pay for a worker. A month later, Socrates drank a cup of hemlock and died, quickly and painlessly, having refused his friends’ efforts to persuade him to flee the country.

While this much about the trial of Socrates is clear and relatively straightforward, remarkably little else is. Socrates is long dead, but his trial lives on as an example of how majority rule can crush the voice of reason and individual conscience. That is why it is still crucial to know the facts behind the myth.

The prime source of the mythology surrounding Socrates is an early work of Plato’s known as the Apology. This book appeared a few years after the trial and pretends to be the actual text of Socrates’ two speeches to the jurors. In fact, that was an impossibility: All the proceedings were oral. There were no stenographers, and no official record was kept other than the text of the indictment and the verdict. Unless the speakers themselves had written their speeches beforehand and preserved them, there was no transcript of the trial. Instead, Apology is a brilliantly dramatic piece in which Plato’s hand is visible in every paragraph. There are two other accounts of Socrates’ trial, both by the historian and philosopher Xenophon (still others existed in antiquity but are now lost), but these versions are not in agreement.

These “apologies” were easily written and circulated precisely because there was no authentic text of what Socrates truly said. In fact, Plato hints elsewhere that, far from making the famed speeches of the Apology, Socrates gave a bumbling performance. He was not an orator but an arguer and a conversationalist. Techniques that were effective in small groups of disciples were ineffectual and even harmful before a large, partly hostile, and inattentive audience. This mattered little at the time of the trial: Most Athenians had had thirty or forty years to make up their minds about Socrates, and no single speech was likely to have changed anyone’s mind in 399 B.C. But the death of Socrates mattered terribly to his disciples, so much so that they, too, wrote the “apologies.” They took a stand on the political and issues of the Athenians - which they disliked - and on the teachings of Socrates and the meaning of his life. Plato’s view of events was not Xenophon’s. But because Plato was by far the greater man and the more persuasive of the two, his view prevails. And yet, that doesn’t prove he was right.

Paradoxically, it is not what Socrates said that is so momentous, but what Meletus and Anytus and Lycon said, what they thought, and what they feared. Who were these men to initiate so vital an action? Unfortunately, little is known about Meletus and Lycon, but Anytus was a prominent patriot and statesman. His participation indicates that the prosecution was carefully thought through, not merely a frivolous or petty persecution.

And who were the jurors who decided that Socrates must die for what he taught? Every year in Athens, a panel of 6,000 volunteers was drawn up, and for each trial, the requisite number was selected from the panel by lot. Since the population in 399 B.C. could not have included more than 20,000 men who were eligible to sit on juries, Socrates was condemned by a sizable percentage of his fellow citizens. They may have been disproportionately poor (in need of the three obols), or old (in search of an entertaining way to pass the time), or wealthy (with time to devote civic duties). All told, the 501 jurors weren’t an inadequate sampling of Athenian citizens, and judging from their ruling, the city’s people were divided about Socrates. More accurately, they were divided on the question of how dangerous he was, for many of those who were willing to acquit him thought he was merely a fool or a bore or both.

It’s impossible to know what went on in the minds of the individual jurors, and we can’t say why each man voted as he did, but we do know a lot about their collective experience. One noteworthy fact in their lives was Athens had been engaged in a bloody war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 B.C. and did not end (though it was interrupted by periods of uneasy peace) until 404, five years before the trial. The greatest power in the Greek world, Athens led an exceptional empire, prosperous, and proud - proud of its position, of its culture, and, above all, of its democratic system. But by 404 everything was gone: the empire, the glory, and the democracy. In their place stood a Spartan garrison and a dictatorship (which came to be known as the Thirty Tyrants). The psychological blow was incalculable, and there was not a man on the jury in 399 who could have forgotten it.

Nor could they have forgotten the appalling losses of the war. Two great plagues struck the city; in the four years from 430 to 426, they carried off about one-third of the population. In 413, Athens invaded Sicily, which ended in disaster, with half the effective fighting force killed or missing. Finally, the Thirty Tyrants butchered another 1,500 men, drove many others into exile, and plundered wealthy foreigners for their own personal enrichment.

It is testimony to the vigor of Athenian society that the city recovered as rapidly and thoroughly as it did. The Thirty Tyrants had a short life. They were driven out in 403 by the combined efforts of a handful of exiles and survivors. The traditional democracy was re-established, not to be challenged again for a century. One of its first actions was to declare a general amnesty, and so powerful was the spirit of conciliation that both Plato and Aristotle, widely divergent in their beliefs, praised the democratic leaders for it. “It is no wonder,” Plato wrote, “that in this revolutionary period some people took personal revenge against enemies, but in general the restored democratic party behaved justly and equitably.”

Nevertheless, many today think Socrates was tried and executed as an act of political vengeance by the restored democracy. It’s true that Socrates was no friend of Athenian democracy; he criticized it freely and frequently. On the other hand, he was deeply attached to Athens itself; he fought in the hoplite ranks in several battles, and held office at least once. Nothing in Socrates’ life warrants the political vengeance theory, but there may be cause among his friends and disciples. One of his students was the cynical and ruthlessly brutal Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants. Critias fell in the fighting that helped bring down the tyranny, and Charmides, another of the Thirty, died with him. Charmides was Plato’s uncle and a well known disciple of Socrates. It’s easy to understand that jurors saw a poison in them that they traced back to the teaching of Socrates. Because of their bitter personal memories of the war and the tyranny, their votes may well have turned against a man who they believed had wrong ideas and even wronger disciples.

It is curious, however, that neither Plato nor Xenophon so much as hints at this potential motivation. They were both tireless opponents of democracy - Xenophon even fought against Athens on the Spartan side in 394 and went into exile, branded a traitor. How could they have missed this ready-made opportunity to demonstrate the wickedness of democratic rule? How could Plato have praised the spirit of amnesty that prevailed and continue, in the next sentence, to write, “By some chance, however, some of the men then in power brought my friend Socrates to trial?” Plato chose his words carefully. He did not believe politics was responsible for Aristotle’s woes. Some suggest that Plato was right; political revenge is not a sufficient explanation, beyond its background role in the minds of some jurors. The uncomplicated fact is that the indictment accused Socrates of impiety and corruption of the young and of nothing else. While we live in an age that tends to be cynical about such matters, the ancient Greeks took their religion seriously, and the charge of impiety carried great weight.

Greek religion had become extraordinarily complicated over the centuries, with a great variety of gods and heroes possessing numerous and crisscrossing functions and roles. It eschewed dogma in favor of ritual and myth and was thoroughly enmeshed with the family and the state. Consequently, while impiety was a grave charge, it could be leveled against anyone for any number of infractions: for desecrating an altar, for revealing the secrets of a mystery cult, or merely for saying something that was considered blasphemous. But whatever form an act of impiety took, it was a public matter: Impiety was an offense not only against the gods but also against the community; therefore, punishment was not left to the gods but taken in hand by the state.

Because impiety was such a vague and variable concept, its definition rested with the jury in each case. It decided whether or not a particular act was punishable under the law. In practice, this meant the frequency of such charges and trials in Athens depended primarily on prevailing public opinion at a given moment. And the period of the Peloponnesian War was a dreadful moment. Almost at the outset, a decree was passed forbidding, as impious, the study of astronomy, very likely as an irrational reaction to the plague. The first victim was Anaxagoras, the great philosopher-scientist from Asia Minor, a friend of the Greek statesman Pericles, who was exiled from Athens for star-gazing. Simultaneously, as the cult of Asclepius, the magical healer, came to Athens and shot into popularity, oracle-mongers, diviners, and private soothsayers were rife throughout the city. In 415 B.C., there was the famous double sacrilege, the profanation of the mysteries at Eleusis and the mutilation of the hermai (statues), which drove Alcibiades into exile (and others to their deaths) and may consequently have cost Athens the war.

Against this background, Socrates was accused of a specific form of impiety – namely, that he rejected the city’s gods and introduced new ones. In Plato’s Apology, this charge is vigorously denied, and there is sufficient and convincing proof that Socrates was, in fact, a deeply pious man, who scrupulously performed sacrifices and other rites and rituals. Adding to his defense, the introduction of new gods was a common occurrence at that time. Not only had Asclepius arrived - he was at least a Greek god - but there was also an influx of foreign deities, like the Syrian Mother Goddess, whose shrines were set up with official permission. No one accused Socrates of joining in their worship, but even if they had, there could have been no objection. All that was said against him on this charge was that he constantly referred to his inner daemon, which talked to him regularly and prevented him from taking wrong courses of action. This was more than his conscience: Socrates plainly believed that a god was speaking to him. But in a society where soothsaying was a recognized profession, that was thin grounds for prosecution.

The last charge against Socrates was the most crucial: corruption of the young. Plato’s Apology emphasizes and justifies Socrates’ role as a teacher and allows Socrates to admit that his disciples were young men with time for study - in other words, the sons of the wealthiest citizens. Plato does not add that they came from primarily those circles opposed to democracy, specifically the Thirty Tyrants, but this was a widely known fact. Since there was no use in denying it, one could only concentrate on the moral and religious sides of Socrates’ instruction. Xenophon’s Apology portrays a dramatic moment when Socrates turns to Meletus in court and challenges him: Name one man whom I corrupted from piety to impiety. Meletus answers: I can name those whom you persuaded to follow your authority rather than their parents’. Yes, replies Socrates, but that was a matter of education, in which one should turn to experts and not to kinsmen. To whom does one go when one requires a physician in general? To parents and brothers or to qualified experts?

This fictitious interchange strikes at the heart of the issue. Until some fifty years before the trial, there was no Greek schooling to speak of. Children were taught to read and write and figure by the servants who looked after them, usually old male slaves. Beyond that, formal instruction was restricted to music and physical training. Men of Pericles and Sophocles’ generation learned everything else around the dinner table, at the theater, during great religious festivals, in the Agora, at meetings of the assembly - in short, from parents and elders, precisely as Meletus said they should.

Roughly in the middle of the fifth century, there was a revolution in education in Athens. Professional teachers - Sophists - appeared. They attracted young men of means and were paid well to instruct them in rhetoric, philosophy, and political science. In the process, they cultivated a startlingly new attitude among their disciples; namely, that morals, traditions, beliefs, and myths were not a fixed doctrine to be passed along unchanged and without question from generation to generation, but instead were ideas to be analyzed and studied rationally, and if necessary, to be modified and rejected. Inevitably, these innovations were eyed with distaste and suspicion in many quarters.

It may not be a fair portrayal of Anytus, but the words attributed to him surely represented a widely held view, but for a portion of the younger generation, liberation from rigid tradition meant unlimited freedom of self-assertion, unlimited rights, and no responsibilities except to themselves. One may speculate on how this conflict of values might have been resolved had the war not intervened. But the war did intervene. Then it was no laughing matter when young aristocrats organized a dining club called the Kakodaimonistai (literally, devil worshipers), whose program was to mock superstition. They tempted the gods by dining on unlucky days, and once, just as the Sicilian expedition had been well launched, the citizens of Athens awoke one morning to discover that, throughout the city, the sacred Herma, which kept guard over streets and house entrances, had been mutilated by the Kakodaimonistai. Worst of all, Anytus said, are the cities that do not expel the Sophists. Anytus was not alone in wanting the Sophists and their young delinquents expelled from the city. There was a limit to how much blasphemy the gods would tolerate: When they had had enough, the whole city would suffer the consequences, not just the individual blasphemers. And so corruption of the young became, in the eyes of many, not a matter of abstract principle, but a practical danger to the city at a time when it was beset with troubles.

All this had little to do with Socrates. He was a philosopher and a teacher of sorts, but he was not a Sophist. Indeed, he was their bitter opponent. He objected to their teaching for pay, to their lack of fixed ethical principles, and to their irreverence. The tragic irony is that he was sentenced to be executed for their “crime” because he was confused with a character in a play. In Aristophanes’ The Clouds, first produced on stage in 423 B.C., Socrates is the central character, an amalgamation of the scientist-philosopher like the Sophist Anaxagoras and of pure invention. Of the real Socrates, there is little known other than his poverty, and even that is caricatured.

We have no idea how much Aristophanes knew about the teaching of Anaxagoras and Protagoras and Socrates, but expert or not, he took the line that distinctions were irrelevant. If one was corrupted with his astronomy and another with his ethics, or if one took pay and the other did not, what did it matter? They were all corruptors of youth. There were several reasons why Socrates was Aristophanes’ choice of victims for the cruelty of The Clouds. He was the best known of various intellectuals under attack, and he was a local figure; most of the others were foreigners who came and went, whereas Socrates was a citizen and a native of Athens. He was poor and ascetic, proud of his unassuming clothes and his bare feet. Finally, he was regarded as ugly and easy to mock. Just imagine small boys gaping from a safe distance at Socrates, with his satyr-like face, talking and talking and talking. Small boys grew up to be members of Aristophanes’ audiences and jurors at Socrates’ trial. Although Aristophanes didn’t invent the popular themes he exploited, he surely intensified them, and he bears a heavy responsibility, at a distance, for the eventual trial and execution of Socrates.

The distance from The Clouds, however, was twenty-four years. The question still remains: Why was Socrates put on trial in 399? By chance, precisely as Plato said. Anytus and Meletus and Lycon joined together for personal reasons, which we can only guess at. That they were able to do so is no problem: Personal grievances have been the root of many trials, in Athens and elsewhere. Their success, however, remains difficult to understand.

If only thirty-one jurors voted the other way, Socrates would have been acquitted. There was no lynch-mob psychology, not even any indication public emotions were wildly aroused. No one was creating a martyr - that came afterwards. To those close to Socrates and others interested in philosophy, this was no mere personal tragedy but something much deeper and more universal. Over the next two generations, these men created the symbol and the myth. The actual indictment, Plato said, was a matter of chance. But the force behind it was inherent in a society where power rested in the hands of a group simply because it had wealth or numbers or some other purely external qualification. Only the virtuous - the philosophers - should govern; otherwise, there could be only evil consequences. Democracy was the worst form of misrule, but, for Plato, the death of Socrates symbolized the evil of any open or free society, not just a democratic one.

The nineteenth century in particular abstracted one part from the myth created by Plato and seized on the dangers of mass rule. In truth, the fate of Socrates demonstrates the old axiom that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Freedom is never so secure that it can’t be lost. In fifth-century Athens, the elements of insecurity were both numerous and strong. Chronic poverty of resources, with its never-ending threat of famine, the long, drawn-out war with Sparta, and widespread superstition and irrationalism all infringed on the reality of democracy. Then there was the fact that freedom and democracy were, by definition, the privilege of a minority and excluded slaves and numerous noncitizens. And there was the technical weakness in the system. Juries had too much latitude: They could not only decide a person’s guilt, they could also define the crime that had been committed. With impiety as the catch basin, no one’s life was safe.

That much can be conceded to the myth in its modern version, but no more. The execution of Socrates is a fact, and it is one of several such facts that reveal that Athenian democracy was not a perfect instrument. It is equally a fact, which both ancient and modern spokespeople for the myth conveniently overlook, that the case of Socrates was isolated in its time. No better witness to this exists than Plato. In Athens he worked and taught, freely and safely, for most of his long life. And much of what he taught was hostile, down to its very roots, to much that Athenians believed and cherished. No one threatened him or stopped him. The Athenians are entitled to have their record judged whole for the two centuries in which they lived under a democracy and not solely by the missteps they made. On this basis, their record is an admirable one, an argument for a free society. Ironically both Plato and Xenophon (and some modern historians) idealized Sparta against Athens. Sparta was the Greek closed society par excellence. There, Socrates could never have begun to teach, or even to think.