Men of Athens, I respect you and love you, but I shall obey god rather than you. As long as I live and am able to carry on, I shall never give up philosophy nor stop trying to win you over and pointing out the truth to any one of you I may meet.
Socrates was found guilty by a majority of sixty votes. For some crimes there were fixed punishments, but when, as in this case, there was no penalty fixed by law, the prosecutor recommended one and the defense another. The jury was asked to choose between them. Meletus sought death, as in the indictment. Socrates teased his audience by saying that he had wanted to propose maintenance for life at the state’s expense as a public benefactor; but in deference to his friends, including Plato, whom he had consulted, he suggested a fine of 3,000 drachmas. The jury, irritated by his attitude, voted for death by a larger majority than they had for his guilt.
The accusers of Socrates had not in fact wanted his execution. Banishment would have been sufficient. But the philosopher refused to escape abroad, as had been expected. He had always obeyed the law and refused to evade its sanctions now. And in any case he had lived long enough. When his wife complained that he was condemned unjustly, he replied: “Well, would you prefer me to have been condemned justly?”
Socrates spent a delay of some weeks in Athens’s small twelve-cell prison (archaeologists have found it) so that a religious festival would not be polluted by his death. He was then told to drink a concoction of poison hemlock. He drained the cup calmly and with no sign of distaste and the small company of close friends in the room broke down in tears.
Plato was absent ill, but his account of Socrates’ final minutes as narrated to a friend by an eyewitness, a disciple called Phaedo, is justly famous. Socrates complained:
“Really, my friends, what kind of behavior is this? Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent this sort of commotion; because I am told that one should make one’s end in a peaceful frame of mind. Calm down and try to be brave.”
This made us feel ashamed, and we controlled our tears. Socrates walked about, and soon, saying that his legs were heavy, lay down on his back—that was what the prison warden recommended. The man (he was the same one who had administered the poison) kept his hand on Socrates, and after a little while inspected his feet and legs; then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. Socrates said no. Then he did the same to his legs; and moving gradually upwards in this way let us see that he was becoming inert and numb. Presently he touched him again and said that when it reached the heart, Socrates would be gone.
The numbness was spreading about as far as his groin when Socrates uncovered his face—for he had covered it up—and said (these were his last words): “Crito, we ought to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius. Make sure it’s done. Don’t forget.”
“No, it shall be done,” said Crito. “Are you sure that there is nothing else?”
Socrates made no reply to this question, but after a little while he stirred; and when the man uncovered him, his eyes were fixed. When Crito saw this, he closed the mouth and eyes.
Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.
Asclepius was the god of healing and Socrates presumably meant by his last words that he was thankful for being cured of the disease of life.
Some years later, a repentant demos executed the leading prosecutor, Meletus, and exiled Anytus and the other accusers for their part in the hounding of Socrates. We are told that Anytus was stoned to death when he visited the Black Sea polis of Heraclea and travelers could still visit his grave in Roman times. In Athens later in the fourth century a statue of the philosopher was commissioned from the great sculptor Lysippus. In effect, Socrates had been canonized.
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The Corinthian War, which had started in 395, continued to go badly for the Spartans. They had some successes, but in 390 the Athenians annihilated a Spartan regiment. The engagement had no strategic consequences, but 250 hoplites lay dead on the field. Sparta could not stand losses on that scale.
All the international powers were coming under strain. Persia was absorbed by revolts in Egypt and Cyprus, the Spartans had acquired a new fleet that Athens feared would interrupt food imports from the Black Sea. Argos and Corinth were also in difficulties.
Prompted by Sparta, the Great King proposed a general peace. Its theme was independence for city-states, but important concessions were made to special interests. According to the treaty, which was agreed in 386, “King Artaxerxes believes it to be just that cities in Asia should be his, as also…Cyprus.” All the other cities in the Aegean and mainland Greece were to be independent—except for the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros: this reservation ensured the compliance of Athens, which was reluctant to lose these new island acquisitions.
Here we witness Sparta (and Artaxerxes) gaining an interval for drawing breath; Athens was obliged to discontinue its hopes of imperial expansion and a reluctant Thebes had to allow the autonomy of the cities of Boeotia. All Sparta had to do for these gains was to stop fighting the Persians and once more to abandon its Ionian cousins, as Plutarch put it, “in the most shameful and lawless way.”
Sparta now had the upper hand to settle various outstanding issues in the Peloponnese, and also in 382 sent a major expedition by land to northern Greece against Olynthus, which headed a growing league of more than thirty poleis in Chalcidice. The city was beginning to threaten Spartan supremacy in that part of the Aegean and needed to be cut down to size. After three years of indecisive fighting, Olynthus, hard-pressed by famine, conceded defeat.
On that journey north the Spartans sought permission to pass through Theban territory, which was willingly granted. However, a regimental commander called Phoebidas, who, writes Xenophon, “was not considered to be a man who thought things through or was very bright,” was let into the city of Thebes by a dissident oligarch. He and his men occupied the citadel, called the Cadmea, and the democratic government was thrown out.
The coup was a blatant breach of the peace treaty and across Hellas there was a hugely negative reaction. Agesilaus gave it his support while at the same time trickily distancing himself from it. Phoebidas was heavily fined, but Sparta kept the Cadmea.
Athens and Thebes were bitterly hostile neighbors, but both were angry with Sparta. They quickly entered into an alliance and went to war with their common enemy.
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Isocrates was the most celebrated intellectual and educationist of the fourth century. When he spoke, many felt he spoke for Greece. And that was how he liked it.
Born in Athens in 436, a few years before the start of the Peloponnesian War, he became one of its victims. His family was rich and his father, Theodorus, gave him a first-class education. He studied under some of the best-known sophists, among them Gorgias, a one-man traveling university whom Plato ridiculed in one of his dialogues for arguing that it was unnecessary to know the truth of things if one had learned the art of persuasion.
Isocrates also fell under the influence of Socrates and in the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates foretell, with a typical touch of Socratic sarcasm, the young man’s future fame as an orator or a philosopher.
In the later stages of the Peloponnesian War the family lost its fortune and Isocrates had to cast about for a way of earning a living. He began his career by writing courtroom speeches. He left Athens during the time of the Thirty and taught rhetoric on the island of Chios. He returned to Athens after the restoration of the democracy and shortly before 390 opened a school of rhetoric. The curriculum was unusually wide and he placed a greater emphasis on the importance of morality than most of the teachers with whom he competed.