The Trial and the Cup

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury of several hundred citizens convicted Socrates, then about seventy years old, on charges of impiety and of corrupting the young men of the city. Plato's Apology, written as a reconstruction of his defense speech, has him arguing that his questioning served the city rather than harmed it, and that he would rather die than abandon philosophy. The jury convicted him by a narrow margin and then, under Athenian procedure that let the defendant propose an alternative penalty, sentenced him to death after he treated the counterproposal with what ancient readers took as characteristic irony. Plato's Phaedo describes his final hours in an Athenian prison, drinking hemlock among his students while discussing the immortality of the soul, a scene that became one of the most retold death scenes in Western literature. Because virtually everything known about Socrates passes through students with their own philosophical agendas, chiefly Plato, Xenophon, and the comic playwright Aristophanes, scholars refer to the difficulty of recovering the historical man beneath their portraits as the Socratic problem. The trial itself is not in doubt, it is recorded independently across these sources and situated firmly in Athenian political history following the recent restoration of democracy, but how faithfully any single portrait captures what Socrates actually thought remains an open scholarly question.