Socrates died in 399 BCE. His trial has been argued over ever since, and it shaped how later thinkers understood freedom of thought, the limits of majority rule and the duties of conscience.

Plato and the schools

The most immediate result was Plato's career. Shaken by his teacher's death, Plato turned away from politics and toward philosophy. Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy in Athens, a school that lasted, in one form or another, for centuries. Plato's student Aristotle, Aristotle's student Alexander the Great, and much of Western philosophy follow in that line. A later story says that when Aristotle himself faced an impiety charge in 323 BCE, he left Athens so that the city would not sin twice against philosophy. The story may not be true, but it shows how the trial was remembered.

Other followers founded their own schools. The Cynics admired Socrates' indifference to wealth, and the Stoics took him as a model of a man who could not be harmed by anything outside his own character.

A martyr for free thought

Over time Socrates became the classic example of a person punished for speech and inquiry. In On Liberty (1859), the English philosopher John Stuart Mill opened his defense of free expression with him: “Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision.” Mill's point was that majorities, even well-meaning ones, can be catastrophically wrong, and that silencing a dissenter robs everyone of the chance to test their beliefs. If Athens could kill its wisest citizen, no majority should be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be spoken.

Majorities and rights

The trial is also a standing argument about democracy. Socrates was condemned by a democratic jury following democratic procedures. Critics of democracy, starting with Plato, used the trial to argue that rule by the many is rule by the ignorant. Defenders reply that the lesson is not to abandon democracy but to limit it: to protect certain rights, such as freedom of conscience and speech, from being overridden by any majority. That is the logic of modern constitutions and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion in Article 18 and freedom of opinion and expression in Article 19.

Conscience and civil disobedience

Socrates' refusal to arrest Leon of Salamis, his vow to obey the god rather than the jury, and his acceptance of the penalty have inspired people who break unjust laws openly. In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Socrates, comparing the tension nonviolent protest creates in society to the tension Socrates created in the mind, so that people could rise from prejudice to understanding. King also cited Socrates' practice of what he called academic freedom as an example of civil disobedience.

The trial in art

The story has also shaped how people picture moral courage. In 1787 the French painter Jacques-Louis David completed The Death of Socrates, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It shows Socrates seated on his prison bed, one hand reaching for the cup of hemlock and the other raised as he keeps teaching, while his friends turn away in grief. Painted two years before the French Revolution, it presented calm self-sacrifice for principle as a civic virtue, a message its viewers would soon see tested in their own politics.

A more critical view

Not everyone sees Socrates as a hero. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in the 1880s, treated him as a symptom of decline who replaced healthy instinct with endless argument. Others note that Socrates' circle came largely from the wealthy, that his views on expertise could be used to justify rule by elites, and that Athens had suffered real harm from some of his companions. Taking these points seriously does not excuse his execution. It does complicate the image of a simple saint destroyed by a mob.

Worked example: Socrates today

Picture a town meeting where a resident repeatedly questions the mayor and council about a popular plan, asking them to define their terms and exposing contradictions. Many neighbors find him rude. Someone proposes banning him from speaking at future meetings for “disrupting civic harmony and setting a bad example for young people.”

• The Athenian parallel: a vague charge, a popular target, and a majority irritated by being made to look foolish.
• Mill's response: his questions may be wrong, but answering them is how the town tests its plan. Silencing him harms everyone.
• A fair limit: rules about time and turn-taking apply to everyone equally. Banning one speaker for his views does not.
• The Socratic duty: the questioner, too, owes his neighbors honesty and respect, and should aim at understanding, not humiliation.

The trial of Socrates does not tell us exactly where to draw every line. It reminds us why the line matters. A society confident in its values should be able to survive its gadflies, and a society that cannot tolerate questions has more to fear from itself than from them.