Matt Gatton, “a scholar based in Santa Fe, New Mexico”, has written a rather interesting (albeit flawed) book about the circumstances which led to a 500-man jury in Athens condemning to death 70-year old stonemason/philosopher Socrates in 399 BC. “The Shadows of Socrates: the heresy, war, and treachery behind the trial of Socrates”, ISBN 978-1-63936-582-1 (2024); 296 pages, including over 40 pages of dense references and notes.
The flaws: My mistake – I should have checked the publication date before ordering the book. Of course, today’s credentialed young women in the publishing house insisted on stating dates as senseless “Before the Common Era” – as if the Era were Common to anyone other than Christians; certainly not Common to the Confucians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, or Muslims of this world. And then there was Mr. Gatton’s decision to write of those long-ago events in the present tense, perhaps aiming to appeal to today’s teenage readers. It says much for Mr. Gatton’s story-telling ability that his book survives those glaring flaws.
The key players in the drama were two fatherless boys who had been taken into the household of the great Athenian Pericles and tutored by Socrates – Alcibiades and Callias. Much is known about Alcibiades – the ultimate alpha-male, as sociopathic as he was attractive. Much less is known about Callias, who was described at the time as an “evil genius”. The two boys hated each other.
Alcibiades’ life almost defies belief. At an unusually young age, he was democratically chosen as one of the generals to lead Athens’ ill-fated invasion of Sicily – ill-fated in part because, when (perhaps through Callias’s machinations) Alcibiades was charged with a religious offense carrying the death penalty, he went over to the Spartan side and showed them how to annihilate his fellow Athenians. However, Alcibiades later carelessly impregnated the old Spartan king’s young queen, resulting in the old king sentencing him to death. Running from the Spartans, Alcibiades joined the Persians and helped them exploit divisions among the Greeks – until the Persians threw him in jail. Escaping from the Persians, Alcibiades went back to … Athens (!), where he was once more raised to great heights before again being thrown out. He was finally assassinated in Asia Minor by persons unknown. Having tutored someone like Alcibiades, Socrates could indeed be accused of having corrupted the young.
Callias preferred to operate out of the public eye, in as much as that was possible for one of the richest men in Athens. He had good reason to want revenge on Alcibiades, who married and then murdered his sister. He also had good reason to want Socrates dead.
Callias was priest of the “Mysteries of Eleusis” – a very important institution in ancient Athens, but one about which little is known since talking about the Mysteries carried an automatic death sentence. Mr. Gatton, a proponent of the experimental field of archeo-optics, presents a hypothesis that a central part of the Mysteries was a kind of reverse camera obscura, in which a flickering image of the goddess magically appeared in front of the celebrants. Mr. Gatton suggests that Socrates famous “Allegory of the Cave”, in which the prisoners confuse shadows cast by fire-light with reality, was inspired by his understanding of how the Mysteries actually operated. As priest of the Mysteries, Callias wanted Socrates to die for the heresy of this subtle breach of the rule of silence, but without making the real reason public.
And thus the aged Socrates was set up to be condemned to death on the dubious charge of corrupting the youth of Athens, and found guilty by 280 to 220 votes in a possibly partly bought-off jury.