Background to Plato's Apology
The type of trial - Graphê and Agôn Timêtos
"In Athens, legal cases fell into one of two basic categories: the graphê and the dikê. The distinction is not to be confused with the modern distinction between civil and criminal cases. Rather, it turns on who may press a legal accusation before court. In a graphê, any citizen could bring a specific charge of wrongdoing. In a dikê, on the other hand, only the victim (or the nearest male relative) could charge another with having illegally caused the harm. Socrates' case is a graphê. Indeed in the Euthyphro he claims he has never even met the man bringing the accusation against him (2b7-9).
"As we just noted, the second speech that makes up the Apology concerns Socrates' offer to the jury of what punishment he is willing to pay. The explanation of why Socrates would have been given this opportunity after his conviction lies in the fact that some graphai carried penalties fixed by law and others did not. An agôn timêtos was one in which the penalty was not stipulated in the law. In this sort of case, the law required that the jury decide what the defendant 'deserved to suffer or to pay' by choosing between the penalty the prosecutor requested, stated at the end of the indictment, and a 'counterpenalty,' or antitimêsis, which would be proposed by the defendant after conviction. As we will later see, it is significant that the jury was required to choose between the two proposals and was not allowed to impose another penalty of its own devising. After a vote to convict was taken and announced to the court, the defendant was apparently given a relatively brief time to explain why he was proposing the particular penalty he was. Because Socrates was charged with impiety, a charge calling for an agôn timêtos, the jury was required to choose between the penalty sought by Miletus ... and the counterpenalty Socrates proposed following his conviction. As we will also see, how we understand Socrates' antitimêsis is of crucial importance to how we understand what Socrates hoped to accomplish with his speech, at least according to Plato."
These two paragraphs are taken from Plato & the Trial of Socrates, by Brickhouse and Smith, Routledge 2004, pp 72-3. I chose them partly for their own interest and partly to illustrate the historical context of the trial and which would have been known to anyone reading Plato's account, whenever it was published. This has some relevance when we try to work out how accurate an account this is - is it all historical or is it a fiction? The answer is likely to be somewhere between the two. The words put into Socrates' mouth must have been (in my view) a passable and plausible version of what was actually said because so many people who had been there at the time would be able to contradict the published version. The text is probably far from a stenographic court record but not so far from the truth.
You can find out about this and much else besides from the Brickhouse & Smith book, or, more succinctly, by consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/.
The type of trial - Graphê and Agôn Timêtos
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| Socrates drank the hemlock 31 days after the trial |
"As we just noted, the second speech that makes up the Apology concerns Socrates' offer to the jury of what punishment he is willing to pay. The explanation of why Socrates would have been given this opportunity after his conviction lies in the fact that some graphai carried penalties fixed by law and others did not. An agôn timêtos was one in which the penalty was not stipulated in the law. In this sort of case, the law required that the jury decide what the defendant 'deserved to suffer or to pay' by choosing between the penalty the prosecutor requested, stated at the end of the indictment, and a 'counterpenalty,' or antitimêsis, which would be proposed by the defendant after conviction. As we will later see, it is significant that the jury was required to choose between the two proposals and was not allowed to impose another penalty of its own devising. After a vote to convict was taken and announced to the court, the defendant was apparently given a relatively brief time to explain why he was proposing the particular penalty he was. Because Socrates was charged with impiety, a charge calling for an agôn timêtos, the jury was required to choose between the penalty sought by Miletus ... and the counterpenalty Socrates proposed following his conviction. As we will also see, how we understand Socrates' antitimêsis is of crucial importance to how we understand what Socrates hoped to accomplish with his speech, at least according to Plato."
These two paragraphs are taken from Plato & the Trial of Socrates, by Brickhouse and Smith, Routledge 2004, pp 72-3. I chose them partly for their own interest and partly to illustrate the historical context of the trial and which would have been known to anyone reading Plato's account, whenever it was published. This has some relevance when we try to work out how accurate an account this is - is it all historical or is it a fiction? The answer is likely to be somewhere between the two. The words put into Socrates' mouth must have been (in my view) a passable and plausible version of what was actually said because so many people who had been there at the time would be able to contradict the published version. The text is probably far from a stenographic court record but not so far from the truth.
You can find out about this and much else besides from the Brickhouse & Smith book, or, more succinctly, by consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/.
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