‘The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy, War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates’
By Matt Gatton
Pegasus Books, 320 Pages

In 399 B.C., a jury of 500 fellow Athenians convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the young, and then affirmed the prosecution’s recommendation of a death sentence. Refusing his friends’ entreaties to escape, the 70-year-old died calmly, preferring to drink the cup of poison that had to be forced upon many of the condemned.

Why did Socrates go to his death so peacefully? Why were the charges against him so vague? Why do we have only Socrates’s defense of himself in Plato’s words, and no record at all of what the prosecutors said? In Matt Gatton’s view of the case, there has been a coverup.

Mr. Gatton presents the trial and death of the world’s most famous philosopher as a murder mystery. A reviewer has to be careful not to spoil the impact of this persuasive book, as it is the search for a solution to a crime that should not be shortened by a summary of the evidence.

As to the impiety charge: Supposedly Socrates had denied the existence of the gods — a charge he denied vehemently and for which no proof now exists and may never have existed. Many of the corruptible young, as Mr. Gatton points out, were dead at the time of the trial — such as one of Socrates’s students, Alcibiades, a traitor who had been assassinated. If there were venal others still alive, they were not called to testify against their teacher.

In general terms, it is understandable why Socrates offended Athenians: He was always asking questions. What others took for granted, he challenged. He seemed subversive by nature. 

In fact, Mr. Gatton might have made more of this contrarian stance. I can imagine the prosecution linking the treachery of Alcibiades, who caused much suffering in Athens by siding with the warring Spartans and then the Persians, to Socrates’s challenge to authority.

Yet Socrates had been a courageous soldier defending Athens, and he never questioned the right of the state to take his life. What, then, could have so riled the rulers and the populace against him?

It all has to do with the Eleusinian Mysteries, at the sanctuary of Eleusis, where Greeks came to experience what it would be like to make the transition to death from life, and what followed. Those who had experienced the mysteries were sworn to secrecy. What little is known, Mr. Gatton explains, is shrouded in vague allusions to some kind of transcendental event.

An expert in optics, especially in the impact of the camera obscura, Mr. Gatton explains what he surmises happened to those who treasured their otherworldly encounters in darkened rooms through which the piercing light of a three-dimensional god appeared. The inference Mr. Gatton makes is that Socrates gave away the secret — in effect, saying: “Seeing is not believing.”

Socrates was always testing peoples’ belief systems. Some of those challenged were grateful and accepted his famous statement: that a life that is not examined is not worth living. Or, as John Stuart Mill put it, he would rather be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

The pigs of Athens prevailed, temporarily. The Eleusinian priests — and a chief villain among them, Callias — are the nemeses who drive forward the plot of this detective story. Callias then goes too far, and loses it all: his fortune but also the esteem of posterity.

Athens, Mr. Gatton relates, regretted its murder of Socrates and the fate of a democracy that turned to oligarchy and then tried to reverse itself back to democracy, all the while prone to the slander that made it all too easy to treat Socrates as a scapegoat.

That truth about what happened to Socrates and why is to be found in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which is about how human beings can be tricked into accepting certain illusions as the truth. In Mr. Gatton’s telling, this is more than an allegory; it is the very explanation of why Socrates had to die. To say more, though, is to defeat Mr. Gatton’s purpose, which is about how one goes about learning what is actually real.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”