SOCRATES, THE MARTYRED MESSIAH
[AN ESSENTIAL HISTORY OF CLASSICAL ATHENS]

October or November 432The Congress of Spartan Allies meet. The majority vote for War.

Sparta and her Allies begin preparations for war. Yet Sparta attempts one more time to dissuade Athens from further aggression. It comes in the form of an ultimatum: Cancel the Megaran Decree, abandon the siege of Potidaea, restore the independence of Aegina. And evidently hint that cancellation of the decree against Megara would suffice to prevent hostilities.

The Athenian Assembly meets. Some speakers advise that the blockade of Megara be rescinded. Again it is Pericles who insists on War and carries the Assembly with him.

There will be War, the Athenian Empire against the Spartan Alliance.

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Summer 430A Peloponnesian army again invades and devastates Attica. People pour into Athens, the city suffering and wretched from overcrowding and its byproducts.

The Plague appears with its first symptoms.

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Ethical Idealism

More than anything, Socrates’ life and philosophy reflected one another. He advocated an idealistic code of honorable, just conduct, strictly in accordance with one’s Moral Conscience. Friends and disciples remarked how Socrates possessed the uncanny ability to avoid committing a wrongful act of any kind. He must have kept very close watch over himself, and said he was guided by a “spiritual sign”. We would call this “sign” Moral Conscience, and Socrates’ must have been especially insistent and strong-voiced if it regularly called to him so noticeably. Of course, his noble, dangerous actions – as shall be told – after Arginusae and during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants bespeak moral integrity virtually unheard of in the real world.

Socrates’ philosophy and life – his ethical idealism – may perhaps be summed up in a question he was accustomed to ask himself, forever instructing his students and listeners in like manner:

Always ask yourself, “What is the ethical thing to do?”
. . .

Criticism of Leadership

Leaders in the Democracy were, no less than the People certainly, sharply criticized by the moral and political philosopher Socrates. They were all bad in his opinion, their values and their policies based on these values. He reserves, significantly, a deeper dissatisfaction for the Greats of Athens’ past than he does for the rowdy, unscrupulous demagogues who succeeded them.

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Summer 421Scione. Athens besieges Scione and obtains surrender. In the all-too brief words of Thucydides:

About the same time in this summer,
the Athenians reduced Scione. They put
to death the men of military age, made
slaves of the women and children,
and gave the land to the Plataeans to live in.

I have a little more information: The Athenians considered "the men of military age" to include any boy 15 years old.

This was not the first time Athens used a peace treaty with Sparta to crack down on the subject states of the Empire. Here was a rather notable instance: Genocide at Scione. Another result of a free, democratic vote at Athens.

420Euripides produces Andromache, a drama of the Trojan hero Hector’s noble wife Andromache, now a slave of the Greeks after the fall of Troy. The villain of the piece is Menelaus, king of Sparta. On the surface, one ignorant of literary symbolism, and of Euripides, might take this for a patriotic, anti-Spartan theme. But Menelaus was not intended to signify Sparta. His attempt to murder Andromache and her small boy after Orestes has arranged the murder of her protector Neoptolemus evokes Scione a little too strongly for patriotic comfort.

Socrates, continuing in face-to-face cross-examination throughout the city, doing with philosophic discourse what Euripides was doing in the theatre; again and again inquiring as to the Justice and Wisdom of the way people were voting in their relentless pursuit of Power and Money; asking whether individuals and states must not eventually pay for wrongdoing, not to mention atrocities.

420Alcibiades. The intellectually and militarily (as shall be shown) brilliant, handsome, wealthy (he donated fabulous sums to the city) and aristocratic (an Almaeonid), flamboyant and charming with a gift for oratory, ambitious and amoral pupil and good friend of the moral philosopher Socrates (who with mixed results persisted in trying to subdue his vanity and self-indulgence), joins the anti-peace party as a way, surely, of expressing his immense talents. The tradesmen demagogues must have been shocked to find this young illustrious aristocrat in their midst. And increasingly dismayed as this man of versatile talents proved an able demagogue.

Alcibiades seems to have had no ideological principles of any kind. He truly appears to have desired nothing more nor less than to show off his simply tremendous abilities.

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399 BC
The Trial of Socrates
(Plato’s Apology)

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(2) The Anabasis

This alone might have been sufficient to want Socrates out of the way. Socrates represented opposition to a resurgence of imperialism and war. The Anabasis signified a menace to the government and democracy itself.
. . .

So the government wanted Socrates either exiled or dead. Both the Apology (the Greek word apologia translates as defense, not apology) and the Crito affirm that Socrates could have left Athens after the writ had been served but before trial. Yet he refused, preferring to stand trial.

A number of factors affected his decision. For one, it has been well remarked that in ancient times “the loss of civic life meant to a Greek the loss of his higher interests”. Of no one could this be more applicable than to Socrates. His life’s blood was his Mission and Ministry in Athens.

The jury he had to face was composed of 501 men over the age of 30. It would not have been a good jury for him, excluding young people as it did, and including many poor and old people who sat for the 3 obols payment, possibly many of them conscious of Socrates’ opposition to State-pay for such activity and the imperialism which (until 404) had largely paid those wages.

On the other hand, Athenians were generally tolerant of a man’s speech and opinions, and the death penalty for talking was not a common punishment. Socrates and his talk were old familiar figures in Athens – he and it were not shockingly new threats. He was an old eccentric character in the city over whom opinion had always been divided.

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