What Were the Earliest Chrages Brought Agains Socrates
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The Formal Charges Against Socrates THOMAS C. BRICKHOUSE and NICHOLAS D. SMITH Ar n9a OF PLATO'Southward Apology, Socrates begins his defense confronting what he calls the "first" accusers, whose slanders he sees every bit 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 confronting them. Just 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 ain charges coherently. To some, this is a decisive sign that the entire interlude is largely, if non 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 Chiliad. Halperin, Walter Englert and the editorial staff of this journal for their helpful suggestions and criticisms of diverse before drafts of this paper, and to the National Endownwm lin the Humanities for helping to fund our enquiry on this topic. All errors, all the same, are uurs alone. ' Meletus is at least nominally the master prosecutor of the example, but this of course does not rule out his acting on someone else's behalf. Many believe that Anytus was the real force backside the prosecution (about which, see note iv fifty, beneath). The clearest argument of this position can be plant 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 past Thomas Grand. Westward, Plato's Apology of Socrates (Ithaca and London, 1979), 134-5o, who dismisses Socrates' arguments in this section as "among the most ridiculous used past him anywhere in Plato" and run into this as proof that the entire interrogation is l'lato's try at comedy writing (135). Though nosotros do not take the arguments of this newspaper as providing evidence for or against the view that Plato'south Socrates is an accurate representation of the actual human being himself, nosotros do oppose the view that Plato's business relationship in this case must be seen as providing Socrates no serious and substantive defence, for such is precisely what nosotros propose tin exist lound, even if the defense in question is only one of Plato'due south invention. ()ne reason for wondering whether this part of Plato's business relationship 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:four OCTOBER 1985 as showing that neither Socrates nor fifty-fifty Meletus takes the formal charges every bit the existent motive for the prosecution. To Meletus and his collaborators, the formal charges, nosotros are told, are a legal pretext for other complaints that could not themselves legally exist prosecuted, but could none the less comprise such a bias confronting Socrates as to ensure his conviction on the charges they could bring. And on this view, the legal fiction involved was so axiomatic that St)crates would non honor the formal charges with a serious refutation. Instead , he undertook in his interrogation of their nominal writer merely to demonstrate to the jury that his prosecutors had shown a careless unconcern for ulorality and the law by employing such manifestly senseless and unsupportable charges against him.3 In this paper we wish to challenge such established interpretations past showing that both Socrates and his prosecutors may sensibly be taken equally having viewed the formal charges every bit reflecting important issues to be decided by the court, even if (as we are wholly disinclined to dubiety) other concerns likewise influenced the prosecution and outcome of the case? In Part i, we review the meaning of the specific charges themselves. In Part ~, nosotros debate that the three prosecutors can reasonably be assumed to have intended the official indictment to be taken equally specifying serious crimes actually...
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Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/226822