The Formal Charges Against Socrates

The Formal Charges Against Socrates THOMAS C. BRICKHOUSE and NICHOLAS D. SMITH Ar n9a OF PLATO'S Apology, Socrates begins his defense against what he calls the "first" accusers, whose slanders he sees as posing an even greater threat to him than those of the newer accusers, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon. Because these older accusations are the more dangerous, he undertakes first to defend himself against them. But from 24B to ~8A Socrates elects to address the charges of the "new" accusers by an interrogation of one of them, Meletus , the officiaP author of the indictment against him. This interrogation has been the source of a good deal of puzzlement to scholars, for during the imerrogation Meletus seems to many readers to be ill prepared to defend his own charges coherently. To some, this is a decisive sign that the entire interlude is largely, if not wholly, invented by Plato to discredit Socrates' prosecutors as inept and unprincipled? Other readers see the interrogation We are indebted to Gregory Vlastos, Charles M. Reed, Jean Roberts, Mark McPherran, Ilavid M. Halperin, Walter Englert and the editorial staff of this journal for their helpful suggestions and criticisms of various earlier drafts of this paper, and to the National Endownwm lin the Humanities for helping to fund our research on this topic. All errors, however, are uurs alone. ' Meletus is at least nominally the principal prosecutor of the case, but this of course does not rule out his acting on someone else's behalf. Many believe that Anytus was the real force behind the prosecution (about which, see note 4 l, below). The clearest statement of this position can be found in the treatment of this issue by Reginald Hackforth in The Compositionof Plato'sApology(Cambridge, x933), 1o4-1o. An absurd exueme of this view is argued by Thomas G. West, Plato's Apology of Socrates (Ithaca and London, 1979), 134-5o, who dismisses Socrates' arguments in this section as "among the most ridiculous used by him anywhere in Plato" and see this as proof that the entire interrogation is l'lato's attempt at comedy writing (135). Though we do not take the arguments of this paper as providing evidence for or against the view that Plato's Socrates is an accurate representation of the actual man himself, we do oppose the view that Plato's account in this case must be seen as providing Socrates no serious and substantive defense, for such is precisely what we propose can be lound, even if the defense in question is only one of Plato's invention. ()ne reason for wondering whether this part of Plato's account is his own invention, howincr . we will not take seriously. Someone might wonder whether the incident could take place at [457] 458 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:4 OCTOBER 1985 as showing that neither Socrates nor even Meletus takes the formal charges as the real motive for the prosecution. To Meletus and his collaborators, the formal charges, we are told, are a legal pretext for other complaints that could not themselves legally be prosecuted, but could none the less comprise such a bias against Socrates as to ensure his conviction on the charges they could bring. And on this view, the legal fiction involved was so evident that St)crates would not honor the formal charges with a serious refutation. Instead , he undertook in his interrogation of their nominal author merely to demonstrate to the jury that his prosecutors had shown a careless unconcern for ulorality and the law by employing such patently senseless and unsupportable charges against him.3 In this paper we wish to challenge such established interpretations by showing that both Socrates and his prosecutors may sensibly be taken as having viewed the formal charges as reflecting important issues to be decided by the court, even if (as we are wholly disinclined to doubt) other concerns also influenced the prosecution and outcome of the case? In Part i, we review the meaning of the specific charges themselves. In Part ~, we argue that the three prosecutors can reasonably be assumed to have intended the official indictment to be taken as specifying serious crimes actually...