Stone I.F.: Suđenje Sokratovo

I. F. Stone: The Trial of Socrates

NO OTHER TRIAL, except the trial of Jesus, has left such a vivid impression on the imagination of Western man as the trial of Socrates. The two trials have a lot in common. There is no independent contemporary representation of any of them, not even fragmentary allusions. We have no transcripts, no court records. We don't hear the prosecution. We only know the story from the tellings of later beloved disciples.
In the case of Socrates, we have the raising of the accusation. However, we do not have what lawyers would call written details - specific allegations, not general allegations. We do not know under what law or laws the accusations were made.

Both Jesus and Socrates achieved immortality through martyrdom. For Christian theology, the crucifixion fulfilled the divine mission. But even martyrdom would not be enough for Socrates. Socrates did not leave behind his own written works. Of his many and varied students, only the writings of Plato and Xenophon have been preserved. If only Xenophon's memories of Socrates had been preserved, even the final cup of hemlock would not have been enough to immortalize him. (In Xenophon's case, Socrates is rather shabby and banal, sometimes completely philistine, able, as it says in one passage of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates - his memories of Socrates - to offer himself as a pimp to a well-known Athenian courtesan for the sake of a joke.) If Socrates had been freed, if he had died of old age without difficulty, he would now be remembered as a minor Athenian eccentric, a favorite mockery of comedians.

Plato was the one who created the Socrates of our imaginations and to this day no one can be sure how much of his portrait is the real Socrates and how much is Plato's genius of decoration. The search for the historical Socrates, like the search for the historical Jesus, continues to create an ever larger literature, a vast sea of ​​speculations and learned controversies.

However, Socrates' debt to Plato is no greater than Plato's to Socrates. Socrates owes his prominent position as a secular saint of Western civilization to Plato's literary genius. And Socrates is the one who keeps Plato on the success lists. Plato is the only philosopher who turned metaphysics into drama. Without the enigmatic and attractive Socrates as the main character of his dialogues, Plato would not be the only philosopher who, to this day, enchants a huge audience in every generation. Nobody reads Aristotle, or Thomas Aquinas, or Kant as literature.