399 BCE. Athens gave him every exit except betrayal. He chose the poison.

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.

Socrates has beenand always needs to be remembered.

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THE PERSON

He was a soldier before he was a philosopher.

Three campaigns of the Peloponnesian War. Potidaea in 432 BCE. Delium in 424. Amphipolis in 422. At Potidaea he marched through a winter siege barefoot in a thin cloak while other men bundled against the cold. At Delium, when the Athenian line broke and ran, he walked off the field at his own pace. Plato later wrote that anyone who saw him retreating would realize that it was safer to approach him than to attack him. He carried the wounded Alcibiades out of danger at Potidaea, when the general was twenty and not yet famous.

He was the son of a stonemason and a midwife. He took no fee for teaching. He had a wife named Xanthippe and three sons, the youngest still a baby when the trial came. He was snub-nosed, bulging-eyed, and known by face to every Athenian who walked the agora. He had been asking questions in public for forty years.

THE CONTEXT

Athens in 399 BCE was a city that had lost a war and not finished bleeding from it.

The Peloponnesian War had ended in 404 with Spartan ships in the harbor and the long walls torn down. Spartan-backed oligarchs took power for eight months. The Thirty Tyrants executed roughly fifteen hundred Athenians and drove thousands more into exile. Two of the Thirty had been associates of Socrates. Critias, the most violent of them, had once been his student. Charmides was the subject of a Platonic dialogue named for him.

Alcibiades, the general who had defected first to Sparta and then to Persia, had once been the brilliant young soldier Socrates had carried off the field at Potidaea.

The men whose names made Athenians flinch were, in part, men who had sat at his feet.

When democracy was restored in 403, an amnesty was declared. No citizen could be prosecuted for political acts during the Thirty. Socrates therefore could not be charged for what the city was actually angry about. So they charged him with something else.

Three men brought the indictment. Anytus, a wealthy tanner, was one of the leaders of the democratic restoration. Meletus, a young poet of no distinction, swore out the formal complaint. Lycon, the third, had lost a son to the Thirty. The charges were impiety and corrupting the youth. The grievance was political. Fifty years later the orator Aeschines told another Athenian jury what no one would say in the courtroom: You executed Socrates the sophist because he was clearly responsible for the education of Critias.

The religious charge was not pretextual. Athenian civic religion was civic order, and to question the gods of the city was to question the city itself. But the question of why this man, in this year, was the question every juror carried in without saying.

THE DECISION

Athens did not corner him. Athens offered him exits.

He could have left before the trial. Voluntary departure was permitted under Athenian law and was the expected move for any prominent defendant with the means to travel.

He stayed.

He could have flattered the jury. The standard performance required tears, family brought weeping before the court, and supplications for mercy. He did none of them. He told the jurors he would speak in the same plain Greek they had heard from him in the agora for four decades; at seventy he was not going to learn a new way of talking. He cross-examined his accuser Meletus until Meletus contradicted himself. He told the court that he had been assigned to Athens by the god the way a gadfly is assigned to a great noble horse, to keep it from going to sleep. He told them that if they acquitted him on the condition that he stop philosophizing, he would not accept the condition. I shall obey the god rather than you.

The jury convicted him by a margin of about thirty votes.

He could have proposed exile. Under Athenian procedure the convicted defendant proposed a counter-penalty, and the jury chose between the two. The accusers had proposed death. Exile was the expected counter and would almost certainly have been accepted. Instead he told the jury that since he had spent his life conferring on Athens what he considered the greatest possible benefit, what he deserved was free meals at the Prytaneum — the public hearth where Olympic victors and city benefactors were honored. Then, pressed, he offered a fine of one mina. His friends Plato and Crito and Critobulus and Apollodorus guaranteed thirty.

The jury voted him to death by a larger margin than they had voted to convict him.

He could have escaped. The execution was delayed for thirty days because the annual sacred ship had sailed to Delos and the city was ritually pure until it returned. His old friend Crito came to the prison before dawn one morning with a full plan. Bribes paid. A route arranged. Refuge in Thessaly waiting. Socrates refused. The argument he made to Crito was not that the verdict was just. It was that one must not answer injustice with injustice. He had lived under the laws of Athens for seventy years. To flee them now, at the end, would teach his followers exactly the wrong lesson about what philosophy was for.

Each refusal closed a door he could have walked through. Together they made the cup inevitable.

THE AFTERMATH

The sacred ship came back.

He bathed himself in the morning so the women would not have to wash his corpse. He sent his wife and the baby home. He spent the day talking with his friends about the soul. When the executioner came with the cup of poison — the substance later tradition identifies as hemlock — he asked what was required, drank it without delay, and walked until his legs grew heavy. He lay down. The cold worked up his body from the feet. When it reached his torso he uncovered his face and spoke. Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do not forget to pay the debt.

Asclepius was the god of healing. Twenty-one scholarly interpretations of the line have been offered. The most enduring is the simplest: he was paying a debt for a cure he was about to receive.

The city did not celebrate. Within a generation, Athenian shame about the verdict was on the record of philosophers, orators, and historians. Plato founded the Academy and spent the rest of his life writing dialogues whose central figure was a man Athens had killed. Xenophon wrote his own defense. The three dialogues that record the trial and death — the Apology, the Crito, the Phaedo — became the founding texts of a tradition that did not yet have a name: the tradition of the thinker who would not retreat under mortal pressure from a life of asking what was true.

THE MEANING

He was not a man who chose death. He was a man who refused every form of survival that required him to call his life a mistake.

Exile would have meant agreeing that philosophy was a crime to be fled. Flattery would have meant agreeing that truth was a thing to be ransomed back from power. Escape would have meant agreeing that the laws he had argued for all his life applied only when convenient. Silence would have meant agreeing that the examined life was an unaffordable luxury. Each was a small lie. Each lie would have ended the man before the hemlock did.
The unexamined life is not livable. He said it from the stand. He meant it as a description, not a slogan. The kind of life Athens was offering him — quiet, distant, ransomed — was not a life he could agree to. The hemlock was what it cost not to agree.

He was seventy. He had been making the same choice his whole life — in the phalanx at Potidaea, in the agora at noon, under the Thirty when they told him to bring in Leon of Salamis to be killed and he walked home instead, in the courtroom, in the cell. Athens killed him in a single afternoon. The choice he had been making for fifty years outlived them all.

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Sources: Plato, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo (Loeb Classical Library and modern translations); Xenophon, Apology of Socrates to the Jury and Memorabilia; I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Little, Brown, 1988); Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths (W. W. Norton, 2009); Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Socrates; Gregory Nagy, Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies; Enid Bloch on the medical effects of Conium maculatum in the Phaedo death scene.

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Next in this series: Vibia Perpetua — a twenty-two-year-old mother in Roman Carthage who kept a diary in her own hand as she waited for the arena.

Charles C. Jett writes the Courage and Consequence series at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com. A Naval Academy graduate and Harvard MBA, he is the author of six books and the host of three podcasts. His Eight Critical Skills framework was endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor and Harvard.