Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

226 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
jurors cast their votes in secret. Each juror was provided with two
tokens, one for conviction and the other for acquittal. The juror deposited
one of these in a wooden urn whose tokens were disregarded,
and the other in a bronze urn whose votes were counted. Judgment
was passed on a majority verdict. In the fifth century b.c.e. , a tie meant
an acquittal. In the following century, odd-numbered juries were the
norm. There was no procedure for an appeal.
Scholars often point out that Greek culture was intensely agonistic
(meaning “competitive”) in nature, a word derived from agôn,
“contest,” and trials are one of the ways in which this agonistic
spirit would have manifested itself. We can well imagine that many
Athenians regarded jury service as a type of spectator sport, particularly
since it was common practice for prosecutors and defendants
to resort to such underhand tactics as parading their children before
the court, no doubt suitably prepped to win the jury’s sympathy.
Sokrates on Trial
Athens’s most celebrated trial took place in 399 b.c.e. , just after
the restoration of democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War.
The defendant was the 70-year-old philosopher Sokrates, who was
accused of corrupting the youth, introducing new gods (the technical
term was “new daimonic beings,” or divine beings who were
not quite on the level of gods), and failing to acknowledge “the
gods whom the city acknowledges.”
The real, though unstated charge, however, was that Sokrates had
consorted with highly undesirable aristocrats who had suspended
the Athenian constitution in 404 b.c.e. and set up a very repressive
government known as the Thirty Tyrants. In addition, many Athenians
probably found Sokrates quite insufferable, because he never
tired of pointing out their faults, often in a supercilious and patronizing
manner. He also manifested a barely disguised contempt for
democracy. In other words, it is fair to say that Sokrates’ character,
no less than his behavior, was on trial. Sokrates himself says as
much in Plato’s Apology, when he claims that his accusers include
not only the three men who have brought charges against him but
also all those who hold a negative opinion of him (18b).
Plato’s Apology purports to be a record of what Sokrates said in his
defense. (The Greek word apologia does not carry the same connotation
of guilt as it does in English. On the contrary, it is the technical
term for any speech delivered by the defense.) Plato, who idolized
Sokrates, was equally contemptuous of democracy. For a variety
of reasons, we therefore need to be wary of treating his Apology as