Was This Philosopher Treated as Unfairly as People Have Been Led to Believe for Centuries?
Although Socrates’ students led the Thirty Tyrants, he refused to get his own hands dirty in their reign of terror. In one narrative, he was ordered to participate in the roundup and execution of some people. Instead, he heeded the dictates of his inner conscience and went home. Laudable as that might have been, to many Athenians it was not enough. When a popular uprising eventually overthrew the Thirty Tyrants and restored democracy, Socrates had a target on his back. To put it in a modern context, imagine if Americans rose up in revolt to overthrew a radical libertarian regime of Ayn Rand devotees that had slaughtered sixteen million of their fellow citizens, and restored democracy. If Ayn Rand was still alive, even if she had not personally killed anybody, she would probably not fare well.
That was the context in which Socrates was viewed by many Athenians after the Thirty Tyrants’ bloody regime. To many, the city’s most famous philosopher had fed the rich snobs’ sense of entitlement, and fed their resentment of jumped up commoners with a say in government. That philosophy inspired them to commit treason and cooperate with a foreign enemy to overthrow the government and slaughter said commoners. Seen from that perspective, that the Athenians afforded Socrates a trial – a fair and open one in which he got to defend himself, unlike those slaughtered by his Thirty Tyrant acolytes – demonstrated remarkable restraint. They could have simply dragged him out of his house and tore him limb from limb with their bare hands soon as democracy was restored.
