Even though Socrates was condemned to execution, there was some expectation that he would choose to flee the city instead—that exile was a viable alternative and he wouldn't be pursued. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the jurors who voted for the execution thought that this would be the more likely outcome—which is perhaps why the prosecution pushed for this over fines.
"In the event, friends, followers, and students encouraged Socrates to flee Athens, an action which the citizens expected; yet, on principle, Socrates refused to flout the law and escape his legal responsibility to Athens (see: Crito). Therefore, faithful to his teaching of civic obedience to the law, the 70-year-old Socrates executed his death sentence and drank the hemlock, as condemned at trial. (See: Phaedo)."
The article said that Socrates was nearly blind and (perhaps could feel that he was) approaching senility. He was also associated with the thirty tyrants, and they had been his students.
The arguments end with this:
"And Socrates was wise enough to give his life for it. He had ample opportunity to escape. But he threw himself into this bonfire of psychic incongruity to give one last gift to his fellow Athenians. This sacrifice is, perhaps, Socrates' greatest contribution to his beloved Athens."
I did not know any of that, but I only read the Symposium.
His own arguments in his defence and his nominated penalty suggest that perhaps he was not mentally fit to stand trial. I think a modern defence lawyer could certainly have made that case. And there are other aspects of his life that suggest possible mental illness, including his belief in eudaemonia and his apparently poor standards of personal care.
My interpretation was that he drank the hemlock to rub the Athenians' noses in their own hypocrisy. Once he was condemned, they could neither prevent it nor escape their own role in it.
There are many overlapping possibilities that aren't necessarily incompatible. For example, over here, the Girard's conceptualization of the scapegoat isn't incompatible with your perspective. It's important for the community involved in the process to genuinely believe that the scapegoat is guilty. And, if you look at the timeline, this trial (and others that we may not know about) helped to restore Athens to relative stability.
As I've argued, there's good indication that some of his ideas may have indeed influenced his students to commit treasonous acts. The list of his former students who went on to either overthrow the Athenian government or defect to Sparta is quite long. It's possible that there's something there. But there is a general consensus that he, generally, didn't advocate for it. In Plato's and Xenephon's dialogues he explicitly advocated harmony with the laws of the polis. And Plato posits that one of the reasons why he chose to stay was because of this belief.
That being said, I also think that the Athenians wanted to get rid of him, they didn't want to actually kill him. Usually, in ancient Athens, punishments were carried out in a day or two of their delivery. But due to a festival and other reasons, his punishment wasn't carried out for more than a month and he had plenty of means and opportunity to escape. Socrates was the one who refused to leave. He, for the lack of a better phrase, committed suicide by jury.
The history that you have read is very rarely what actually happened.
There was a famous saying that I remember, "a translation of a poem is like a woman: if she is pretty, she is not faithful, and if she is faithful, she is not pretty."
A thousand pardons for the inherent misogyny; it is not intentional.
It's funny, in the version of the story I had heard before, Socrates was tried while the Tyrants were still in power and he was executed because his ideas were teaching his students that their rule was unjust. But I also had had the impression that the tyrants were basically just a bunch of looters. If it is true that they were actually idealistic fanatics willing to commit mass murder in order to bring about their utopia, the idea that they were inspired by history's most famous philosopher makes a lot more sense.
"Idealists" is stretching it, but it seems plausible to me that they shared the extremely authoritarian class/caste-based ideas Plato would later express. And it's not entirely impossible, even, that those ideas really came from Socrates.
Yeah, in the story as I was taught as a kid, the thirty tyrants period and Socrates actual ideas gets skipped. It sounds like he was killed over unimportant disagreements.
Is that the actual modern equivalent of being forced to drink hemlock? I'm sure it's bad to get banned from those cafes but those two punishments are of very different levels of severity.
A somewhat related question which I've been wondering: Is it likely that The Oracle actually said no man is wiser than Socrates, or did Plato probably just make that up?
Does anyone know if The Oracle made his/her predictions/pronouncements openly or privately? I think it's a lot easier to have a perfect record for accuracy if you only publicly reveal your predictions after they have come true.
So this is about a fucking role playing game. This story and every comment here is about not Socrates. Not anything at all meaningful. But a role playing game.
At least from what I see, it was an actual RPG and not a goddamned CRPG! And that is a miracle for HN.
The comments here are children raging about never knowing one of the widest-broadcast thinkers in human history. Which is apropos . . .
Author here, it was an exercise run by a philosopher and attended by (mostly) philosophers, historians, a smattering of scientists, and a plebeian such as myself.
The idea is to use Socratic arguments and debates as if we were the characters to explore Plato's Republic. And it was really fun! It was historically semi-accurate, well informed, and we had discussions afterwards.
It's about what I uncovered arguing against them as Socrates' prosecutor. As I was arguing against someone who literally taught this at a university, I ended up reading two books in the process and a few papers.
This piece is the product of that. It examines how little we know about the trial and then presents the two hypotheses – the one I argued to convict him and one in his defense.
If you take the time to read the piece, you'll see that every argument is well sourced and covers a fairly comprehensive gamut of thinking on the topic.
"In the event, friends, followers, and students encouraged Socrates to flee Athens, an action which the citizens expected; yet, on principle, Socrates refused to flout the law and escape his legal responsibility to Athens (see: Crito). Therefore, faithful to his teaching of civic obedience to the law, the 70-year-old Socrates executed his death sentence and drank the hemlock, as condemned at trial. (See: Phaedo)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates