Review, I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Little, Brown and Co., 1988)

The IRE Journal, Winter 1989

After a half-century of covering current politics, I.F. Stone has turned his muckraking skills to ancient Athens. With a fresh perspective that only a scholar outside the academic mainstream could bring, Stone seeks to reinterpret one of the most famous trials in history—the conviction of Socrates in 399 B.C. In the process, he shows the skills of the investigative journalist and those of the historian are not so different.

One advantage Stone the historian has over Stone the journalist is a more relaxed deadline. Since the 2,400-year-old trial is hardly breaking news, Stone figured he could take extra time covering it. When in December 1971 he ceased publication of his one-man investigative newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Stone decided to undertake a history of the ideal his career as a journalist and his belief in democracy had taught him to hold most dear—freedom of thought and speech.

He began his study with the two English revolutions of the seventeenth century, but quickly decided he could not understand these without fuller knowledge of the Protestant Reformation and the connection between religious freedom and freedom of thought. One antecedent led to another until Stone’s studies took him back to ancient Athens, “the earliest society where freedom of thought and its expression flourished on a scale never known before, and rarely equaled since.”

Realizing he could not fully understand Socrates’ social environment by reading ancient classics in translation, Stone taught himself Greek. Then, just as he had been famous for doing as a journalist, he plunged into the primary sources. The painstaking work paid off, as Stone frequently points out the subtleties of Greek words and the possible misconceptions arising from various translations. Near the end of the book, Stone defends his premise that Athenians not only enjoyed free speech, but considered it a basic principle of their democratic government. The Athenians had not one, but four, words for freedom of speech, “more, I believe,” Stone comments, “than in any other language, ancient or modern.”

Stone seems comfortable in his role as historian. But then his attitude always has been that most specialized knowledge is accessible to ordinary people if only they are willing to take the necessary time to understand.

Having made his reputation through his painstaking perusal of official documents, Stone faced the problem of researching a story in which there are no surviving official sources. Stone tackled this problem through careful study of the three surviving contemporary portraits of Socrates—by his followers Plato and Xenophon, and the dramatist Aristophanes, whose play Clouds is about Socrates—and the writings of Aristotle, who was born fifteen years after Socrates’ death. On the points of common agreement between these four, Stone believes he has a fairly accurate picture of the historical Socrates.

Stone’s Socrates is an authoritarian, disdainful of the common people, cruel to his devoted wife, and a favorite target for lampooning by Athenian comic poets. Stone characterizes the famed Socratic method as a “negative dialectic,” by which Socrates “asked for definitions he himself was never able to attain and then easily refuted whatever definitions his interlocuters offered.”

Socrates differed from the dominant Athenian thought on several key points, all of them concerning man’s political nature. Athenian politics was divided into two class-based parties. Both sides agreed the city should be governed by its citizens. But the upper class believed government should be by the aristocratic “few,” while the poorer class supported rule by the democratic “many.” Socrates, however, supported neither view, instead believing in government by a philosopher king, “the one who knows.” People are not virtuous enough for self government, Socrates, said, and so they should unquestioningly obey their rulers. This view placed Socrates outside the bounds of common political debate, Stone comments, making him “not just antidemocratic, but antipolitical.”

Athens, according to Stone, was a vigorous democracy. Two centuries before Socrates, Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, had opened membership in the assembly to all male citizens, even those from the poorest classes. There was widespread freedom of speech, and philosophers from all over Greece came to teach in Athens. But Socrates advocated complete withdrawal from political life in the city. “Socrates is revered as a nonconformist,” Stone points out, “but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed.”

The trial of Socrates was politically motivated, Stone says. The Athenians tolerated him as a harmless crank until he was seventy, but events in the last years of Socrates’ life made him seem more threatening. In both 411 and 404 B.C., conspiracies of disaffected Athenians, aided by the enemy city, Sparta, overthrew the democracy and established dictatorships. Both conspiracies had been led by former pupils of Socrates, the first by Alcibiades, the second by Critias. According to Xenophon, Critias and his associates murdered 1,500 Athenians during their eight-month reign. There is no evidence to suggest that Socrates supported these dictatorships, Stone says, but they certainly were fresh in the minds of Athenians during Socrates’ trial, making his antidemocratic teachings seem far from benign.

None of this evidence, in Stone’s view, justifies the death sentence given Socrates; Athens betrayed its own ideals in convicting the philosopher. Socrates, though, easily could have won an acquittal, Stone argues, if he had defended himself on the basis of freedom of speech. But “Socrates would have found it repugnant to plead a principle in which he did not believe; free speech for him was the privilege of the enlightened few, not of the benighted many. He would not have wanted the democracy he rejected to win a moral victory by setting him free.” Thus, the great irony is that the antidemocratic Socrates became the first martyr of free speech.

Stone realizes he is contradicting the mainstream view of Socrates. But after a career spent standing alone against the dominant intellectual and political current, he is used to the position. Stone is playing the same role he did when he risked his career to publicly criticize the Korean War, began his own radical newsletter at the height of the McCarthy era, and singlehandedly discredited the Pentagon’s 1965 White Paper on Vietnam. After braving such opposition, Stone must have been singularly unaffected by the thought of incurring the wrath of a relative handful of ancient historians.

It must seem ironic to Stone that the journalistic community is taking this book’s publication as an opportunity to praise his entire career, when for so many years he was an outcast from that community. During the 1950s, Stone was blacklisted from the mainstream press and New York Post columnist Richard Rovere once called him “a writer who thinks up good arguments for poor communist positions.” Today he is considered an elder statesman and model for investigative journalists. As this independent-minded study shows, it is not Stone who has changed.