What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking
Odysseus offers Polyphemus the wine of Maron. After a design by John Flaxman.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.
But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.
What Odysseus Most Loves
Many people imagine that the Odysseyunfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.
But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:
For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.
This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.
The Wine That Bested a Giant
Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.
One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.
It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:
He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.
Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.
Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.
The Sorceress’s Wine
Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers carry a wand.)
Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.
Two Kinds of Feast
Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:
And wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile, The grave in merry measures frisk about, And many a long-repented word bring out.
For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.
Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.
Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.
For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.
Odysseus, Calypso, and the Philosophy of Immortality
Calypso offered eternity. Odysseus chose Ithaca.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Would you want to live forever? Then why did Odysseus refuse Calypso’s offer of immortality?
Suppose an attractive goddess offered you eternal youth and immortality. Would you accept? Most of us wouldn’t have waited for the end of my last sentence. Homer, however, tells the story of a man who turned her down.
Calypso is one of the most elusive characters in Greek mythology. Like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘eucalyptus’, her name derives from the Greek kalyptō, ‘to conceal’ or ‘to hide’. She lives on the remote island of Ogygia, hidden from both gods and men. She is beautiful and deeply in love with Odysseus. More than that, she offers him the greatest prize of all: eternal life with eternal youth.
Yet every day Odysseus sits alone upon the shore, gazing out to sea and weeping. He longs not for paradise, but for Ithaca.
The Odyssey is full of monsters and marvels. The Cyclops tests Odysseus’ ingenuity. Circe his self-control. The Sirens his judgement. Yet Homer saves his greatest temptation until the monsters are gone. Calypso cannot be defeated. She can only be refused. Her island may be the most philosophical place in all literature. It asks neither how we survive nor how we succeed, but what makes a human worth living—or even, what makes a human life human.
At first sight, Odysseus’ decision seems irrational. Calypso is more beautiful than Penelope, her island more idyllic than rocky Ithaca. She offers not merely pleasure, or happiness, but eternity. Why exchange eternity for a finite, imperfect, and uncertain human life?
Nor is Calypso a villain. Homer invites us to sympathise with her. When Hermes arrives bearing Zeus’ command that she release Odysseus, she bitterly complains that the male gods freely take mortal lovers while condemning goddesses for doing the same. Before letting him go, she desperately pleads with Odysseus. Penelope can never rival her beauty or save him from ageing and death.
The obvious answer is that Odysseus misses his wife and son. But Homer suggests something deeper. To embrace Calypso would be to abandon not merely his home, but himself. When we fall in love, we fall in love with someone who would change us, but not change us beyond all recognition. Calypso does not ask Odysseus to become a better Odysseus. She asks him to become someone, or something, else.
For thousands of years writers and philosophers and sorcerers have returned to the same question.
Some five centuries before Homer, another hero came to the opposite conclusion. After the death of his friend Enkidu, whom he mourned ‘like a woman mourning’, Gilgamesh set out in search of eternal life. At the end of his long journey and descent into the underworld, he discovered the plant of immortality—only for a serpent to steal it while he bathed. He returned home empty-handed, having learnt that the proper task of human beings is not to escape death, but to make the most of life.
Greek mythology itself offers an even darker warning. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with the Trojan prince Tithonus and, fearing his loss, begged Zeus to grant him immortality. As the centuries pass, the once alluring youth shrivels into a babbling old man, too frail to live yet unable to die. In some versions of the myth, he shrinks into a cicada, condemned forever to thirst and chirp.
Jonathan Swift issues a similar warning in Gulliver’s Travels. The Struldbrugs, though born immortal, continue to age indefinitely. As they lose their memories and outlive everyone they have ever loved, they sink into loneliness, despondency, and envy of mortals.
In his essay The Makropulos Case (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams sought to explain why immortality might ultimately become undesirable. The ambitions and desires that give our lives meaning, he argued, cannot sustain one and the same person forever. Once they are exhausted, we could escape the resulting tedium only by becoming different people, with different ambitions and desires. But then who exactly would be living forever?
Immortality threatens not only meaning but identity. Tolkien reached a similar conclusion, this time by asking the opposite question. In The Silmarillion, his mythology of Middle-earth, death is ‘the Gift of Men’. It is not men who envy the immortal elves. It is the elves who envy men, because only mortal lives possess the shape, urgency, and completion that immortality denies. Far from a punishment, mortality becomes one of humanity’s greatest blessings.
Today, our oldest ambition has become a technological one. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spend vast fortunes on longevity research. Some hope to slow ageing indefinitely. Others dream of uploading consciousness into machines. Cryonics companies promise to preserve bodies until such a time as science might revive them. The quest of Gilgamesh is now drawing venture capital.
Before asking whether any of this will succeed, we should ask, with Homer, whether it should.
Odysseus’ refusal is one of the most astonishing decisions in all literature. Offered eternal youth and immortality, he prefers an ageing wife, a rocky, run-down island, and a fragile, mortal life. Rightly or wrongly, it is not life that Odysseus wants, but his life—not an immortal life, but a meaningful one. Instead of trying to live forever, it is today that we should seek to live.
That, anyway, is what Homer seems to be saying.
What about me? Would I accept Calypso’s offer?
I think I’d compromise and ask for three hundred years. That way, I’d have the best of everything.
There are two things that man can do that God cannot: make wine, and end his own life.
Deus non sibi potest mortem consciscere si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitae poenis. —Pliny
Calypso offered him eternal youth and immortality. He chose home.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What’s Homer got to do with the sitcom Friends?
Over the past ten or fifteen years, journalists have contacted me time and again with questions about nostalgia. More often than not, they want to know the same thing: Why do we keep rewatching Friends? Why do we return to the same books, films, songs, and places, even when we know them by heart?
The obvious answer is that familiar things comfort us in uncertain times. That is true. But I have come to think there is a deeper answer—one that, almost three thousand years ago, Homer already understood.
If Homer’s Iliad is the epic of kleos (glory), his Odyssey is the epic of nostos (homecoming). As a psychiatrist and the author of a book on the emotions, I have been writing about nostalgia for many years. But only recently did I begin to see the Odyssey through that same lens.
The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. A portmanteau of nostos and another Greek word, algos (‘pain’ or ‘ache’), it originally referred to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in flat and foreign lands. Military physicians blamed the condition, among others, on ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Today, of course, we no longer think of nostalgia as a mental illness but as a natural, common, and often beneficial emotion.
Although the word is relatively recent, the feeling is ancient. No writer understood it more profoundly than Homer.
When we first meet Odysseus, he is not blinding the Cyclops or resisting the Sirens. He is sitting alone on the shore of Calypso’s island, gazing out to sea and weeping. Calypso has offered him everything that human beings are supposed to desire. She is beautiful and deeply in love with him. More significantly, she promises him eternal life with eternal youth. Despite all this, he daily returns to the same lonely place by the water and pines for Ithaca.
At first sight, his yearning seems irrational. Ithaca is a small, rocky island. His wife Penelope has grown older. His palace has been overrun by arrogant suitors. Why exchange paradise for hardship, mortality, and uncertainty?
Because what Odysseus longs for is not a better life, but his own life.
This is what makes the scene so moving. Odysseus does not simply long for a place in his past. He longs for the life that belongs to him: his wife, his son, his kingdom, his mortality—in short, his identity. Ithaca is not merely a destination but the place in which he can return to being himself.
Later in the story, the Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan War. Odysseus, who is in disguise, covers his face and weeps. Homer compares his grief to that of a woman throwing herself upon the body of her fallen husband, before she is dragged away into slavery. Only then does Odysseus reveal his identity and begin to tell the tale of his wanderings. As he reclaims his story, his voice blends with that of Homer. Memory becomes narrative, and narrative begins to heal memory.
Virgil echoed the famous scene at the beginning of the Aeneid, the foundational epic of Rome. Arriving in Carthage, Aeneas sees murals depicting the fall of Troy. He too breaks down into tears, before telling his story. Mourning the loss of his Trojan kin, he cries out, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These are the tears of things, and mortal things touch the mind.’
Neither was nostalgia limited to Mycenaean princes. In 586 BCE, Babylonian forces destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, forcing many Jews into exile in Babylon. In the Bible, these Babylonian captives lament the loss of their homeland, in verses later put to music by Boney M: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’
Different peoples, different ages, different homes—but always the same tears. Nostalgia may be a seventeenth-century coinage, but the feeling is as old as humanity itself.
Today, psychologists understand nostalgia not as a mental disorder or disturbance but as an emotional resource. Nostalgia strengthens our sense of self and identity by anchoring our present in a larger narrative and reconnecting us with the people and places that have shaped us. In fact, nostalgia can be thought of as the counterpart of anticipation, and seems to serve the same purpose. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.
This is one reason so many of us return to Friends. Those of us who are old enough often say that we miss a world before mobile phones and social media, when friends met spontaneously, conversations stretched late into the evening, and no one thought of ghosting you. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was over, and many of us were riding high on the Wind of Change. There is a lot of truth in that. But I suspect we are also longing for something more personal. We are remembering a time in our lives when connection seemed fuller, the future seemed more open, and we ourselves were younger. Friends becomes a doorway not only onto that lost world, but also onto the person who inhabited it.
We think of nostalgia as longing for the past. Homer suggests something deeper. We long not simply for what has been, but for the life that feels most truly our own.
What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Great Literature
The longest journey is the one home to ourselves.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why do some books remain alive for thousands of years while others, equally entertaining in their day, quietly disappear? The books that survive are those in which each generation discovers a different book. Even within a single lifetime, we never read the same book twice. Great books are mirrors. Every time we return to them, we see something different—not because the book has changed, but because we have grown.
Homer’s Odyssey is perhaps the greatest example. No one simply receives Homer. Every translator, filmmaker, and reader enters into a conversation with him. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, the first complete English translation by a woman, has drawn renewed attention to aspects of the epic that many earlier translators scarcely noticed, particularly the experiences and voices of women. Wilson has argued that previous translators sometimes allowed their own assumptions to colour the text—for example, referring to enslaved palace women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ where the Greek uses neutral terms or simple feminine pronouns. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, has made a screen adaptation that many reviewers have read through the lens of contemporary concerns such as trauma, displacement, and identity. Every generation inherits the same three-thousand-year-old poem, yet somehow discovers a different Odyssey.
Part of the explanation lies in the hero himself. At first sight, Odysseus seems an unlikely everyman. He is a king, a war hero, the favourite of Athena, the architect of the Trojan Horse, and cleverer than almost everyone else. Yet Homer never reduces him to any one quality. Wilson famously translates his opening epithet, polytropos, as ‘complicated’: ‘Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…’ Elsewhere Homer describes him as ‘much-enduring’ (polytlas) and ‘great-hearted’ (megalētōr). From the very beginning, Odysseus emerges not as a one-dimensional hero but as a many-sided human being, shaped as much by suffering as by triumph. In the twentieth century, Lord Raglan identified twenty-two recurring features of the mythical hero—miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, a royal destiny, and so on. Figures such as Theseus, Oedipus, and Moses satisfy twenty or more. Odysseus satisfies only eight. He stands halfway between mythical hero and ordinary man. Brave yet frightened, wise yet often foolish, loyal yet tempted, he struggles, learns, and changes. We do not admire Odysseus because he is perfect. We recognise ourselves in him because he isn’t.
Great books are psychologically spacious. Into them, we project not only ourselves, but our deepest concerns—and the concerns of our age. Looking into the Odyssey, Freud found a map of the unconscious. Simone Weil discovered a moral philosopher of attention. James Joyce found the voice of modern consciousness. Given my background as a psychiatrist and philosopher, I tend to read the Odyssey as a psychological and moral tale. On the surface, it is a geographical tale about a man trying to get home. But underneath, it is a psychological tale about finding our way home to ourselves and becoming the people we were meant to be. Every island offers Odysseus a different way of abandoning his journey—and abandoning himself. Each asks him the same question in a different form. The Lotus-Eaters ask, ‘Will you forget who you are?’ Circe asks, ‘Will you surrender your humanity to animality and pleasure?’ Calypso asks, ‘Will you give up your mortal life?’ The Cyclops Polyphemus asks, ‘Will you let your pride destroy you?’ The Cattle of Helios ask, ‘Can you resist immediate gratification?’ You, reading the same poem, may yet discover an entirely different Odyssey. That is not a weakness of the work. It is what enables it to endure.
Not all of us get to sail around the Mediterranean navigating Sirens and sea monsters. But all of us are on a journey home to ourselves. Like Odysseus, we too must grow and change before we can truly arrive. His wanderings are not simple delay but essential schooling. Every trial teaches him something—or, more importantly, strips something away. He must learn patience and perseverance, love and remembrance, humility and restraint… Only by losing and recovering himself does he become fit to return to Ithaca. Ithaca, or home, is not simply a place, but a life that feels genuinely our own.
The Odyssey does more than invite interpretation. It embraces it, making it part of the story itself. Many people imagine that the epic unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians. But before he begins speaking, Homer has him weep. Hearing the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, Odysseus breaks down. Only then does he recover his own story. As he weaves his years of wandering into a coherent narrative, his voice blends with that of Homer. In telling his story, he transforms himself. His next journey will take him home.
For nearly three thousand years, we have become the Phaeacians, listening to a weary traveller trying to make sense of his life, as we try to make sense of our own. All along, we thought we were interpreting the Odyssey. All along, the Odyssey was interpreting us.
Continue Exploring
If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of why myths endure, and how they continue to shape our imagination, our values, and the civilisations we inherit.
Plato’s Apology: Why the Father of Philosophy Refused to Save His Own Life
The Hemlock Cup
An outline and summary of Plato’s Apology, explaining why Socrates chose death rather than abandon philosophy.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
At his famous trial, Socrates could almost certainly have saved his life.
He could have appealed to the jury’s emotions, begged for mercy, proposed exile, or simply promised to stop practising philosophy. Instead, he did none of these things. He was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and sentenced to death by hemlock.
His defence speech, preserved by his student Plato in the Apology, is one of the founding texts of Western philosophy—not because it saved Socrates’ life, but because it illuminates why he refused to save himself.
The Official Charges—and the Real Charge
Plato’s Apology consists of three speeches delivered by Socrates before the supreme court of Athens (heliaea): the first in reply to the charges, the second concerning the appropriate penalty, and the third in response to the passing of the death sentence.
Three Athenians, Meletus, Anythus, and Lycon, had charged Socrates with refusing to recognise the Olympian gods and introducing different gods, and, relatedly, with corrupting the youth. Seeming to associate or confuse him with Anaxagoras and the sophists, they accused him of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching those same things to others’.
Although Socrates had been charged with the crime of impiety (asebeia), the underlying reason for his indictment may have been his anti-democratic leanings and close association with aristocrats such as Charmides and especially Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants. Both Critias and Charmides died in 403, fighting against the exiled democratic forces. Although Socrates had refused to be tainted by the tyranny, he had remained in the city throughout, and, for all his moralising, had done little to actively oppose the regime. To many democrats, Socrates no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for sufferings of the tyranny.
At his trial, before replying to Meletus and the other prosecutors, Socrates first answered what he called his ‘older accusers’: the rumours and prejudices that had dogged him for decades. These anonymous but far more dangerous enemies had turned many Athenians against him. Even the comic playwright Aristophanes had mocked and misrepresented him on the stage. But as many of the jurors could attest, he had never pronounced himself on divine matters, nor, like the sophists, pretended to understand virtue or taken money from his students. What, then, had given rise to the accusations against him?
The Oracle of Delphi and Socrates’ Lifelong Mission
Over the years, he says, he acquired a certain reputation for wisdom—not the superhuman wisdom of the sophists, but the sort of wisdom which is within our ken. When he learnt that the Oracle of Delphi had pronounced him the wisest of all men, he did not know what to make of it. So he questioned a politician with a reputation for wisdom and cross-examined his words to reveal their inconsistencies and contradictions. But the result was that the politician, instead of thanking him, hated him. Whereas both he and the politician knew nothing, he at least knew that he knew nothing, and, in that much, was wiser than the politician.
After that, he went from one man to another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of the god of the oracle, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test. Over the years, he made many friends, but also made many enemies, people who got angry at him rather than at themselves and who, not knowing why they were angry, made up all sorts of charges against him.
Now, at the age of seventy, that lifelong mission had finally landed him before the courts of Athens.
Cross-Examining his Principal Accuser
Having addressed his older accusers, Socrates turns to Meletus and reproaches him for being too eager to prosecute men for matters in which he takes no interest. To prove his point, he asks Meletus to name the improver of the youth. After some hesitation, Meletus replies, ‘the law’. ‘Who,’ asks Socrates, ‘knows the laws?’ ‘The judges, Socrates, who are present in court.’ Under questioning by Socrates, and forced to follow his own logic, Meletus blurts out that every enfranchised Athenian improves the youth except for Socrates.
Having proven his point out of Meletus’ own mouth and, by the same token, made a demonstration of the method which landed him in court, Socrates puts it to Meletus that, when it comes to horses, it is not the case that everyone does them good except for one man who does them harm, but rather that no one does them good except for one man, namely, the horse trainer.
Socrates now sets out to show that, if he did corrupt the youth, he could not have done so intentionally:
S: Do not the good do their neighbours good, and the bad do them evil?
M: Certainly.
S: And is there anyone who would rather be injured than benefited by those who live with him?
M: Certainly not.
S: And when you accuse me of corrupting and deteriorating the youth, do you allege that I corrupt them intentionally or unintentionally?
M: Intentionally I say.
Hereupon, Socrates argues that he could not have corrupted the youth intentionally because he would have known that doing so would have amounted to injuring himself. Thus, if he did corrupt the youth, he must have done so unintentionally, and ought to be educated rather than punished.
This argument reflects his general outlook that people only do wrong because, in the moment, they think that it is the right thing to do. To put this differently, all people incline towards goodness, but are waylaid by their foolishness or narrowness.
Finally, Socrates asks Meletus what he meant when he accused him of teaching the youth to acknowledge gods other than those acknowledged by the state: did he mean that he believed in some gods but not in the right ones, or that he did not believe in any gods at all? The latter, says Meletus, ‘since you believe the sun to be stone and the moon to be earth.’ Socrates points out that these are in fact the beliefs of Anaxagoras. But as for himself, he would not have introduced different gods, as charged, if he had not believed in at least some gods.
The Gadfly of Athens
Having done with Meletus, Socrates turns back to address the jurors.
Despite its dangers, he had chosen the life of a philosopher because it seemed like the right and best thing to do. Had he chosen safety over philosophy, he would have been pretending to a wisdom which he did not possess, for no one knows whether death is the greatest evil or, in fact, the greatest good. It is not death that Achilles feared, but living in dishonour by failing to avenge the death of Patroclus. ‘Let me die at once’ he said, ‘…rather than remain here, a laughingstock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’
Just as he had not abandoned his post in battle, so he would not now abandon the life of philosophy.
Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practise philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wealth and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honours as possible, whilst you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?
By exhorting men to excellence, he had brought the greatest good to the state. Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else that is good for men. Such is the core of his teaching: if it is held to corrupt the youth, then so be it. By condemning him to death, the jurors would be doing themselves a far greater harm than they would be doing him, since putting an innocent man to death is much worse than dying oneself. Besides, they would struggle to replace him. In homage to the god, he had attached himself to Athens like a gadfly to a noble but listless horse, and his poverty was proof enough that he had never taken payment for his service.
He had at one time considered going into politics but his daimonion (inner voice, or guardian spirit) had dissuaded him from doing so on the grounds that a dead man is of no use to anyone. Nevertheless, he had behaved in the private sphere with the same integrity as in the public sphere, and it is a matter of public record that he opposed the collective prosecution of the generals at the Battle of Arginusæ and disobeyed the Thirty Tyrants when they sought to implicate him in the execution of Leon of Salamis.
Although he had freely conversed with rich and poor alike, he had never taught anyone anything, and could be neither praised nor blamed for their subsequent actions. If he did indeed corrupt the youth, why had their fathers and brothers not come forth to accuse him? And why had Meletus not called upon them as witnesses?
This is all the defence that he has to offer. Some of the jurors may take offence that he did not shed tears, resort to prayers and supplications, or bring forth his young children, but such bathetic scenes would hardly have been worthy of him, or them, or Athens, or philosophy.
The jury pronounced him guilty by a margin of sixty votes.
Proposing a Penalty
Under Athenian law, once a defendant had been convicted, both prosecution and defence proposed an appropriate penalty, and the jury chose between them. Socrates might have proposed exile. He might have asked for imprisonment. He might have offered to pay a substantial fine. Instead, he courted the death sentence by asking for what he truly deserved: free meals in the Prytaneion, or town hall.
He had never wronged anyone and was not going to start now by asking the jury for a penalty that he did not deserve. He could ill afford a fine, and imprisonment would turn him into a slave. Exile could be tolerable, but only if he were willing to hold his tongue:
For if I tell you this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.
Only upon the insistence of his friends did he reluctantly propose a fine of thirty minæ (half a talent, or around 13kg of pure silver). But it was too late. In the second ballot, eighty more jurors voted for the death sentence than had voted for the guilty verdict, a split, this time, of 360 to 141.
The Final Address
After the death sentence had been passed, Socrates addressed the jurors one last time.
To those who had voted to acquit him, he offered a remarkable reflection. Throughout his life, his daimonion had often intervened to restrain him from making some momentous mistake. Yet throughout the trial—even when he had refused to flatter the jury or propose a more acceptable punishment—it had remained completely silent. This could only mean that what had happened was not, after all, an evil.
Death, he argued, must be one of two things. If it is a state of unconsciousness, there is nothing to be feared. But if it is a journey to a land inhabited by great men such as Homer and Hesiod, he would take infinite delight in conversing with them.
For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not… Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth—that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Having concluded that it would be better to die than to live, he was not in the least angry with those who had accused and condemned him. For although they had not meant to do him any good, neither had they done him any harm.
He asks only that his friends take good care of his three sons:
When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing… The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
Why Socrates Chose to Die
On the force of the arguments alone, Socrates had produced a brilliant defence. But instead of behaving with the customary humility and contrition, he turned the tables round and made himself judge and jury, cross-examining all of Athens before his court of philosophy. For the first and last time, he let drop his ironic mask, and his unapologetic apology turned many a juror against him. After being found guilty, his arrogance in suggesting a punishment of free meals and insolence in proposing a paltry one-mina fine only hardened hearts.
But this, from such a fine psychologist, may well have been the intention. Socrates knew that his best years lay behind him, and that a timely death could be a blessing as much as a curse. Moreover, by martyrizing him, the Athenians promised to preserve his memory, and, more importantly, the memory of his method and philosophy. Had the Athenians acquitted Socrates, you would not have read this book, and I would not have written it.
For Socrates, the hemlock was never a deadly poison, but the very elixir of life.
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