In Athens there was no public prosecutor. Any citizen could bring a charge on behalf of the community. In 399 BCE three citizens did so against Socrates.

The accusers

• Meletus, a young man, perhaps a minor poet, formally filed the charge and led the prosecution.
• Anytus, a wealthy owner of a tannery, was the most powerful of the three. He was a leading democratic politician who had helped restore democracy in 403 BCE, and he had lost property under the Thirty.
• Lycon, an orator, joined them. Little else is known about him.

In Plato's account, Socrates says that Meletus spoke for the poets, Anytus for the craftsmen and politicians, and Lycon for the orators: the very groups whose claims to wisdom Socrates had questioned.

The charge

The case was a public suit for impiety, called in Greek a graphe asebeias. The writer Diogenes Laertius, centuries later, preserved what he said was the wording, reportedly seen in the Athenian archives. In substance it ran: Socrates is guilty of not recognizing the gods the city recognizes, of introducing other new divine beings, and of corrupting the young. The penalty proposed was death.

Impiety

To modern ears impiety sounds like a matter of private belief. In Athens religion was public. The city's safety was thought to depend on the favor of the gods, honored through festivals and sacrifices that citizens shared. Someone who rejected the city's gods might endanger everyone. Athens had no single holy book and no official creed, so impiety was vague, and juries decided what counted.

The phrase about “new divine beings” probably pointed to Socrates' daimonion, his inner voice. To his accusers, a private divine sign that only he could hear looked like a new god outside the city's control. The Clouds had also spread the image of Socrates as a man who studied the sky and taught that the traditional gods did not exist, an image Socrates denied at his trial.

Corrupting the young

The second charge was in some ways more dangerous. “Corrupting” did not mean sexual misconduct; it meant teaching young men to scorn their elders and the city's values. Wealthy youths followed Socrates and imitated his questioning of their fathers. Xenophon reports that the prosecution said Socrates taught his companions to despise the laws, for example by mocking the practice of choosing officials by lot. And some of those companions had gone badly wrong. Alcibiades had betrayed Athens to Sparta during the war. Critias had led the Thirty.

Was there a precedent?

Ancient writers report other impiety cases, though many of these stories are late and uncertain. The philosopher Anaxagoras was said to have been prosecuted for teaching that the sun was a fiery stone, and to have left Athens. In 415 BCE, during a wave of panic before the Sicilian expedition, statues of the god Hermes across the city were vandalized and people were accused of mocking the sacred Mysteries; some were executed or fled. Impiety charges, in other words, could flare up in moments of fear.

A risk for the prosecutor

Bringing a public charge was not free of danger. To discourage frivolous cases, Athenian law penalized a prosecutor who abandoned his case or who won less than one fifth of the jury's votes: he paid a heavy fine of 1,000 drachmas and lost the right to bring similar charges in the future. Meletus and his colleagues therefore had to believe they could persuade a substantial part of the jury. That suggests they expected the charge to find real support among ordinary citizens, not just among Socrates' personal enemies.

Worked example: reading the charge

Break the charge into its parts, and ask for each what evidence a prosecutor could offer and what Socrates could reply.

• Not recognizing the city's gods. Evidence: his reputation from the Clouds, and his questioning of traditional stories. Reply: he took part in religious life and obeyed the oracle at Delphi, so he could hardly be an atheist.
• Introducing new divine beings. Evidence: his daimonion. Reply: if he believed in divine signs, he must believe in the gods who send them.
• Corrupting the young. Evidence: the conduct of followers such as Critias and Alcibiades. Reply: he never took fees and never taught anyone to do wrong; he cannot be blamed for what others did.

Notice how vague the charges are. None names a specific act. That vagueness worried later readers more than anything else. A law that lets a jury punish someone for not believing the right things, or for being a bad influence, can be aimed at anyone who is unpopular. Modern legal systems try to prevent this by requiring laws to be clear and specific, a principle called legality.