Introduction: Athens in 399 BC

Hello, I'm Angie Hobson.

I'm the professor of the Public

Understanding of Philosophy at Sheffield University.

And today I'm going to give a series of talks about Plato's apology,

in which the character of Socrates gives

the defence speech at his famous trial in 399 BC in Athens.

But first we need to set the scene.

We need to look at what's been going on in Athens at the end of the fifth century.

In the years leading up to Socrates trial. Why was Athens and such a nervy state?

Why did it put

a philosopher on trial?

So I think the first thing to mention is the very long,

brutal civil war between Athens and Sparta that had taken place

in the final third of the fifth century BC

and in which Athens finally lost horribly. So there's been great poverty.

There's been famine has been plague, and finally, there's humiliation.

As part of that conflict,

Sparta set up an oligarchy of 30 tyrants who ruled Athens very brutally,

and anybody who was associated with this tyranny in

any way whatsoever was later vilified by the Athenians.

Now, by 399,

the 30 tyrants have gone democracy has been restored, but it's a very fragile,

nervy democracy.

Athens is not at ease with itself.

There isn't the same tolerance of freedom of expression that there had been before

the brutal war with Sparta and before the tyranny of the 30 oligarchs.

Now, in this febrile climate, we've got Socrates.

For many decades he's been walking around Athens barefoot,

accosting people famous and not so famous people and interrogating them,

cross examining them on their life, on their beliefs,

on what they think certain virtues are.

What is justice? What is courage? So he'll ask a general what he thinks.

Courreges. He'll ask a politician what he thinks justice is,

and by the series of questions and answers,

he will try to get people to understand that

they don't know what they thought they knew.

They're not the wise experts they thought they were,

that their views contradict each other, that there are holes in their beliefs.

And

of course, he makes many enemies in the process,

particularly as he does this in public.

And he can humiliate often very grand, uh,

political figures in these public places.

But he was, as I said, and he was tolerated for many decades.

But now, in 400 things are getting

much more difficult for him.

The numbers of his enemies are rising

amongst his associates have been many young men who have hung on his every word.

And some of these young men have gone

on to be associated with the oligarchical tyranny,

the 30 tyrants.

So though Socrates himself, there's no evidence that

he was particularly interested in politics. In this way, there's no interest.

There's no evidence that Socrates himself, uh,

particularly had oligarchic sympathies,

though he's not particularly democratic either.

But he's associated with people who now have a bad name.

There's also aristo phonies. The comic playwright Aristo phonies is play.

The clouds absolutely lampoon Socrates

and Lamb. Princeton.

Quite an interesting way because it says, on the one hand,

he's a useless natural philosopher.

He studies the things in the air, the things beneath the ground,

all these sort of useless things in the heavens and under the earth,

in the way that people like an X cigarettes or Fails

had been doing the philosophers we now call pre Socratic.

Of course, they weren't called that then,

but also aristo phonies, ridicule, Socrates for being a soft fist.

Now the Salafists were itinerant teachers of rhetoric, of political theory,

of philosophy.

They walked around the Greek world from city to city city.

They charged young men very high sums of money or, more likely,

the fathers of young men,

very high sums of money to learn the skills

that would enable them to speak in the assembly,

to speak in the law courts, to make a name for themselves in public life.

And they got very rich in the process.

And they taught these young men how to win an arguments.

And the less scrupulous Salafists

taught young men how to make even the weaker argument

appear. The stronger argument in practise

and therefore got sophistry a bad name. The older generation were very shocked.

I thought this was a very immoral

practise.

They were very worried about what was being done to the minds of these young men.

So if Aristotle phonies, the comic playwright portrays Socrates as a Salafist,

then that's going to give Socrates a really bad name in the minds of the multitude.

The people who don't study philosophy,

who are not particularly interested in philosophy but are

just very worried about corrupting influences on the young.

So all

this sort of this cauldron has been building up this boiling cauldron.

Socrates is making more and more enemies.

There are more and more slanders being made about him,

and this is in a political atmosphere with where anybody with

any associations to the oligarchic regime of the 30 tyrants,

it seemed to be suspect.

Anybody who asks

any questions at all about the value of democracy, it seemed to be suspect.

And it's in this climate that Socrates is three official accuses, uh,

an itis speaking on behalf of the politicians.

Malita, speaking on behalf of the poets

and like own speaking on behalf of the orators,

accuse him

and say that he is corrupting the young. But he does not believe

in the city's gods and that he is introducing new.

They're called demonic.

Figures will say more about that in a later section, new demonic

beings into Athens that he worships not the traditional gods but these strange,

demonic creatures.

Instead,

that's the climate