Socrates and his daimon on trial

The city of Athens in the year 399 BCE. After a long and disastrous war, a terrible defeat and the loss of an empire, Athens is a democracy once more. And now, with the populous at the helm again, the hunt for scapegoats in Athens’ downfall is under way. Officially the law of absolution that passed only recently made it illegal to prosecute citizens of crimes committed during the war, but there are ways to bend even that law in search of revenge. You can always blame someone of the crime of impiety, for example. An offence so ill-defined as to include a whole swath of acts by an individual. And when a vast amount of people wants to silence an someone as vocal and as intellectually provocative as Socrates, Impiety will do. And why stop there? Why not tack on allegations of corrupting the youth for good measure?

On trial for his life Socrates still enjoys mocking the dimwitted speakers he’s forced to speak to. Some believe that he is in truth accused of mentoring Alcibiades, the Athenian statesman and general who betrayed Athens in the Peloponnese war that Athens just lost, still others think it is because Socrates allegedly cooperated with the autocratic regime Sparta installed after Athens lost. Either way, Socrates never shied away from criticizing the democracy in the past. But because of the law of absolution, his accusers cannot admit that, and the trumped-up charges are what Socrates must deal with.

At least, this is how Plato, who wrote The Apology of Socrates about ten years after the trial and death of his mentor, wants us to view this trial.

The specific accusations are that Socrates challenged the traditional beliefs of Athens in the city’s gods by introducing unfamiliar deities, as well as encouraging Athenian youth to question established norms. Essentially, his accusers paint him as a sophist, a cunning rhetorician devoid of moral principles beyond the pursuit of victory in argumentation and its accompanying rewards—an assertion Plato will fervently contests in numerous later works. This is the context in which we first hear of the daimon that accompany Socrates anywhere he goes.

Socrates finds the accusation of atheism rather bizarre. Is he not known around Athens as the guy with the invisible divine being that speaks to him directly? His so-called daimonion? Of course he is. But in a sense, that is the exact point his accusers are driving at. Daimons are distinct from the Gods, a distinction not lost on Socrates' accusers. When they level charges of atheism, they imply that Socrates forsakes the traditional Gods in favor of newer, superhuman entities—these elusive daimons he frequently references. It is a distinction worth emphasizing: Both Gods and daimons are supernatural in essence but while the Gods are accepted and familiar so to speak (Zeus is the Godhead, Hera is at his side etc.), Socrates tells of a daimon that is known only to himself, and in a sense not even to him entirely.

Socrates speaks of ‘seeming to hear a voice’ since childhood. This voice would often forbid him, in the form of a warning, to do something that is bad for him. We who live after the invention of modern psychology might be tempted to go the Jungian route and speak of an inner voice. Socrates will have none of that. He is adamant that this voice, the voice of his daimon is divinely ordained. He never says which God sent it, and it’s not clear if he even knows. But while his accusers speak of newer supernatural beings that are foreign to Athenian worship, Socrates never question the fact that daimons are created by the Gods.

“Did ever man, Meletus, believe in the existence of human things, and not of human beings?” Socrates questions his main accuser, “Did ever any man believe in horsemanship, and not in horses? or in reed-playing, and not in reed-players?” A modern equivalent of Socrates’ question would be something like: can you believe in angels and not in God? Socrates makes this point clear to his judges: one cannot believe in supernatural beings but not in the Gods that surely made them and gave them the power to communicate with men.

The word Socrates uses to describe his mysterious companion, ‘Daimon’, can be confusing for us living in the era of post-Christianity. However, the daimon Socrates is talking about is in a deep sense the complete opposite of the demons as we came to think about them. The demons we know are derive primarily from Christian theology. They are most often fallen angels or their offsprings who, after failing to defeat God in the war in heaven (read all about it in Revelation 12), chose to subvert God’s goodness not by open rebellion – which they knew now to be a hopeless act against the Almighty, but by deceit. To take revenge at God by conquering earth through seduction and lies.

In Book V of Paradise Lost, Satan makes his way from his new dominion of hell to earth, in order to whisper a dream inside the ear of the sleeping Eve. In that dream Satan seduces the mother of mankind to eat from the fruit of the forbidden tree by lying to her and telling her that if she “Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods thyself a Goddess, not to earth confined”. In leaving out any mention of God’s decree against the act, in actually not mentioning God at all, it is as if Satan is saying that we are all Gods here in Eden, that there isn’t any true hierarchy to speak of. And so, the God who told you not to eat the fruit, well… that’s just one god’s opinion. There are many others. 

In that sense the seduction and blatant lies of the demons we know today, those evil and fallen angels, resemble the deceitfulness of the Greek Gods, much more so than the benevolent influence of Socrates’ daimon. It’s enough to recall the time Zeus sent Agamemnon a dream to convince him to gather the Greek camp come morning and attack the Trojans (Book II of the Iliad). A decision which almost cost the king of kings the entire army.

Okay. So if it’s not the Christian ‘demon’ Socrates is talking about, and not a Greek God, then what is this daimon anyway?

As we get the story of the trial of Socrates mostly from the perspective of Plato, Socrates’ student, the references to his mentor’s daimon are glanced over. Plato never doubt the existence of the daimon but at the same time never offer any explanation for it. Another Greek author of the time who makes more of an effort to normalize it is Xenophon.

In two of his texts, his Apology and especially in Memories of Socrates, Xenophon goes out of his way to explain Socrates’ daimon as just one more way the Greeks could divine the future: Most read the flights of birds as omens from the Gods or go and seek advice from the Pythian priestess of Apollo at Delphi. But some, a special minority that includes Socrates have their own direct channel - a daimon who speaks to them and to them only. Obviously, Other Greeks weren’t as convinced as Xenophon.

Socrates wrote nothing for publication. In Plato’s Apology we find Socrates is critical of some of the things that has been written about him before the trial, namely a satirical play titled The Clouds. In Aristophanes’ comedic play Socrates is portrayed as a wise old fool who keeps stating aloud many profound truths that are actually shallow, if not downright hollow. The name of the play is derived from the Gods Socrates supposedly worship: the clouds. In one of the scenes Socrates even claims that he “walks on air and contemplate the sun”.

There are hints that the historical Socrates may have liked the play and enjoyed the satire. But these are most likely apocryphal. In the Apology, Plato’s Socrates attacks the play not simply as an incorrect image of himself. But as an image that posed a significant threat to his life.

Could the argument that Socrates walks on air and worship the clouds – as absurd as it may sound – struck a chord with the man’s real enemies? Plato seems to think so. And under that light, Socrates’ personal daimon seems like a strange but a plausible invention from a man who routinely claims bizarre things about himself.

Xenophon might compare Socrates’ daimon to bird signs or the oracle of Delphi. But are these really the same as having a personal daimon? Sure, Bird signs could be interpreted in different ways. we can find examples of that as far back as the Odyssey by Homer. However, while the interpretation of such an omen might not be accepted by all, the facts are at least known. The birds are either there or not there. For all of Socrates’ professed love of reason and logic, how could you argue with someone who hears voices from an unknown source that cannot be corroborated by anyone else?

Plato goes out of his way to portray his teacher’s accusers as insincere. And yet many others in Athens, his accusers notwithstanding, must have seen his daimon as a mystery and threat. And in any case not as an assurance of Socrates’ belief in the Gods. Towards the end of his Apology Socrates claims a remarkable claim: not only did his daimon prevented him from truly defending himself in the trial for his life, but that even before the trial his daimon persuaded him not to participate in the affairs of the Polis. A serious claim if we consider that voting in the assembly and holding public offices is the duty of any adult male citizen in Athens, and a major part of its democratic ethos. Socrates investigate Meletus at his own trial, but his accuser sticks to the charges he made: Socrates is an atheist in relations to the Gods worshiped in Athens.

Plato also wants us to believe that Socrates’ judges sentenced him to death for reasons that have nothing to do with the official charges, though the fact that they did it anyway suggest that, at the very least, they had to treat this accusation seriously – at least publicly.

This is what I think later philosophers, much later ones, like Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and many many others got wrong about Socrates. They saw him as the man of reason, perhaps the first. As the scientific man par excellence. While Socrates does speak of reason and the search for truth, all in the service of the good life by the way, we should not put all of our emphasis on the So-called Socratic method and see it as a proto method of scientific reasoning akin to empiricism.

For all his incessant questioning and refining of definitions, Socrates is never shy about using other, less inquisitive methods to illustrate his beliefs and ideas: he frequently employs parables and myths, is very hesitant about the new technology of writing, and has his own personal deity advising him. To use Nietzsche’s own parable against him: Socrates is neither the madman in the marketplace who screams about the death of God nor is he one of the scientifically minded men in the crowd who laugh at the madman. Because, let’s face it, even if Socrates wanted to do either thing, his daimon would probably forbid him to.   

Socrates as a new kind of hero

When looking at Socrates through modern eyes, we tend to ignore the complex picture the ancient sources paint for us: followers of Socrates, Plato first among them as always, treat their mentor at various points as a prophet(!) who is in direct contact with the Gods. To them, He is also a new kind of heroic figure.

Unlike Achilles or Odysseus - the heroes of the Homeric epics, the Socrates that Plato is telling us about in his dialogues does not use the divine being he knows to take revenge on his foes or to avenge his honor. Socrates trusts his daimon to lead him away from what is harmful. This divine inner voice might be what provide Socrates a clean conscious and a good night sleep, even when he is faced with his imminent death.

In the platonic dialogue named Crito, Plato makes a point of showing us Socrates as the opposite of the nervous and scared man being condemned to death. When Socrates wakes in his cell a day before his scheduled execution to find his friend Crito already there, he asked him why Crito didn’t wake him up earlier. Crito replies that he didn’t want to disturb the sleeping Socrates, so calm and “peacefully you've been sleeping”.

In that dialogue Crito begs Socrates to allow him to arrange his, Socrates’, escape from prison. Instead, Socrates shares a vision in a dream, of a beautiful woman coming to visit him at night to tell him that in three days he’ll be in Phthia. This is a direct reference to something Achilles says to the envoy send by King Agamemnon to draw him, the mightiest hero of the Greeks, back into to the war after the Greek losses. 

Even though Socrates isn’t going to die young or be remembered as a great warrior (although he did participate in a few battles in The Peloponnesian War), the 70-year-old philosopher equate himself with the Homeric hero. In his mind (and in Plato’s mind of course) he is the modern-day epic hero. Dying for what he holds to be true, “taking no account either of death or of anything else rather than of dishonour” (Apology of Socrates 28d).

Against all the accusations of corrupting the youth, of teaching false things to Athenians, Socrates – right at the start of his defense of himself in the trial – argues that the most heroic thing a person can do is to deny being a “clever speaker” and instead be “one who tells the truth”.

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