THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES
I.F. Stone
Boston: Little, Brown, 1988
267 pp., $18.95
The trial and execution of Socrates has provided material for countless legends, paintings, and dramatic re-creations of the historical events. Since most of what we know is derived from two of the martyr's disciples, Plato and Xenophon--both remarkably gifted storytellers--Socrates has gone down in history as the innocent victim of ignorance and bigotry. Simultaneously, of course, the Athenian people who condemned him to death have also been immortalized as the most civilized and enlightened community of the ancient world, the creators of art and philosophy, and the first nation to experiment seriously with democracy.
In the other great "witch hunts" of human history, modern spectators chose their sides. At Salem and Boston, we are either for the Mathers and their allies or we are against them; at Dayton, Tennessee, we support either the biology teacher or the people who tried him; in the 1950s, we line up with either the liberal defenders of civil liberties or the junior senator from Wisconsin who uncovered a massive conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. Supporters of McCarthy or Cotton Mather may choose to deplore their excesses or take issue with some of their methods, but they will not go so far as to declare the innocence of the witches or the patriotism of communists. In the case of Socrates, however, even serious scholars (to say nothing of run-of-the-mill professors and journalists) are quite content to lionize both Socrates and his persecutors.
Flawed scholarship
This apparent paradox has obviously troubled I.F. Stone, a political journalist who has taken up the study of classics in his declining years. A man of Stone's leftist sympathies might have brandished the cudgels for either side--democracy or civil liberties--and written a very good book on the death of Socrates, but that would have required a knowledge of Greek, history, and philosophy that is not easily acquired by a journalist who has spent his life uncovering public scandals. In fact, Stone has written an almost unbelievably bad book whose inaccuracy, sloppiness, ignorance, and stupidity cast doubt not only on the competence of his publisher but on the integrity of his entire career. If this is an example of Stone's "investigative journalism" (the phrase used in the publisher's blurb), then longtime subscribers to I.F. Stone's Weekly have a right to demand their money back.
A few details should suffice: In the part of the book that actually deals with his subject--the political motives lying behind the trial of Socrates--Stone advances what he thinks is a novel thesis, that democratic Athens had grown suspicious of a philosopher who publicly derided democracy and who had among his students both the dissolute and ambitious Alcibiades and several leaders of the notorious Thirty, a proto-Fascist group of aristocrats who seized power at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Although the critics who undertook the prosecution accused Socrates of teaching religious innovation and corrupting the youth, the real motives had more to do with his politics and his association with the enemies of democracy.
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