In the ancient world, no figure stands out for the courage of his convictions more than Socrates of Athens, who lived within the ancient Athenian democracy, 469-399 B.C.

Although robust from workouts at the gymnasium, he was stout and paunchy. He had a snub nose and bulging eyes, and was said by his best student, Plato, to be ugly outside even if beautiful within. An eccentric character who usually went about barefoot and could sometimes sink into possibly epileptic trances, he was of sufficient income that he could spend most of his time talking philosophy with men in the agora, the Greek open air marketplace where the shopping was done by the slaves who accompanied m en, not by their wives. In fact Socrates liked some distance from his reputedly shrewish wife, Xanthippe, who remained largely at home as then deemed appropriate for a Greek woman, once married. Other discourse of Socrates occurred with good friends at ev ening symposia, over their customarily half-watered glasses of wine.

By all accounts, Socrates in his talk offered little in the way of positive teaching, specializing rather in putting hard questions to others who claimed to know more than himself.

He especially challenged Sophists, the largely alien but pro-democracy teachers for pay who frequented what Pericles in the Funeral Oration called "the school of Hellas." The Sophists taught their students arts such as clever use of words without havin g any sure grasp of the right ends which could be pursued by such rhetorical means.

Using an ironic style, Socrates was described by Plato as like a gadfly or stingray, maneuvering in stealth around his prey before darting in with his sting. He loved to leave his victims impaled on the horns of a dilemma, or blushing for having been f orced to admit that they contradicted themselves in attempting to define such goods as friendship, wisdom, justice, piety or courage.

He made many friends, including some adults favorable to democracy such as the playwrite Euripides and the courtesan Aspasia, the consort of Pericles. He also had a large following of youths, of whom he could at his trial name only Chaerephon as a supp orter of democracy.

Most of his young followers were of aristocratic or other affluent parentage and largely shared Socrates' openly admitted admiration for the Spartan constitution, even when the city-state was engaged against Sparta in the mutually ruinous Peloponnesian war (the second phase ran 431-404 B.C.).

Notwithstanding his love of talk, Socrates, although born to citizen rights, stopped attending the Athenian direct democracy Assembly, which on an open hillside (in view of the Acropolis across a valley) was always opened with the words, "Who wishes to speak?"

Nor did Socrates voluntarily litigate before the juries of Athens, which used hundreds of people in order both to express the popular will and to avoid any bribery when people got their single day in court (there were no appellate courts)

Such forms of mass citizen participation, Socrates believed, made Athenians worse rather than better persons, when the whole point of politics should be improvement of character.

Yet Socrates performed all civic duties required by law. In his forties, he fought bravely in three battles of the Peloponnesian war. Back in Athens, which had no office comparable to a President or Premier, his name came up by lot to be chair for the day in the Prytany: He served uprightly, refusing to put a matter to the vote when the Athenian people wanted to violate their own law in trying en bloc a set of generals who had committed the sacrilege of abandoning Athenian battle dead, left floating at sea when their ships faced a storm. Including the son of Pericles, the arrested generals were eventually executed.

After major war reversals, the Athenian democracy succumbed to oligarchic tyranny, first under the 400 for 4 months in 411 B.C. and then again under the 30 for S months after being installed by Sparta in 404-3 B.C Each of these oligarchies by either se cretive death squads or open tyranny murdered many democrats, reaching in the second case 1,500 persons, according to the reliable aristocratic historian, Xenophon.

The 30 tyrants may have tried to stop Socrates from teaching "the art of words." Also, Socrates refused their direct order to help arrest for execution a pro-democracy alien, Leon of Salamis. For his open, civil disobedience, Socrates himself could hav e been executed but for the fall of the tyranny by armed outside invasion soon after.

Within four years of his passive resistance to the regime of the 30 Tyrants, Socrates was publicly accused of violating the laws of the restored democracy. One accuser, Anytus, was a wellknown heir of a tanning business who had been a leader of the ove rthrow of the 30 tyrants. Xenophon notes that a son of Anytus had briefly followed Socrates but had eventually become a wretched wino. We know little of the other two accusers, who were Meletus, a poet, and Lycon, an orator. One guesses that Socrates had angered them with his stinging questions, if not by more general criticisms of their arts.

Socrates was accused of two violations of Athenian law, namely, (1) teaching new gods not recognized by the Athenians; and (2) corrupting the youth of Athens.

While Athens had counselors in forensic oratory, one could not have a lawyer actually speak for you in your single day in court. Thus personally speaking in his defense, Socrates really evades the charge of teaching new, unfamiliar gods, which Plato's 7th letter calls a "sacrilegious charge" against Socrates Socrates converted the charge into the accusation that he taught disbelief in all Athenian gods. That was easier to refute. For although the jurors groaned at both of his claims, he had two rebuttals. First, he could say that he taught belief in Apollo, a god certainly recognized by Athenians. For the Oracle of Delphi associated with that god had called him the wisest of Greeks, which Socrates understood as meaning that unlike o thers with pretensions to knowledge, he was aware of his ignorance. Second, Socrates claimed that Apollo gave him a special, divine inner voice (his daimon) which always stopped him if he was about to do or say somet hing morally wrong.

The second charge of corrupting the youth meant making them somehow worse persons. Traditionally, this charge was wrongly interpreted in terms of man-boy erotic love: That is unlikely in that the Athenians of that time did not view such relations as a morally grave matter. Plato in any case claimed that while Socrates was indeed homoerotically drawn toward handsome aristocratic youths such as Alcibiades (later a traitor to Athens), he refrained from actual sex.

The corruption charge surely meant that Socrates encouraged youthful followers to be too critical of the democracy, or to admire more aristocratic regimes such as Sparta. This charge was quite plausible. Socrates evasively replies that he had always re mained personally obedient to the democracy's laws, even if critical of the democracy writ large for encouraging the corrupting force of public opinion, resulting in lawless behavior of public bodies. Also, he argues that he had striven to morally educate his entourage by forcing them to think about what it meant to live for the sake of mere life, but to live morally well, by not yielding to the corrupting flattery of public opinion.

In part because Socrates refused the usual practice of having his family members wail for 'pity from the court, the jury convicted him on both charges by a vote of 281 to 220.

Surely many within that majority did not want to punish him with death: They would have preferred to have heard him promise his future silence, but he on the contrary promised he would not stop his philosophizing, since his inner voice forbade that. Hi s student Plato, personally present, records him as saying, "I owe a greater obedience to God than to you, and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practicing philosophy..." Further: "Aquit me or not. You know that I am not g oing to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths" (Plato, Apology, 29d, 30c).

When by custom Socrates was allowed to propose an alternative penalty, the jurors surely hoped that he would accept exile or a stiff fine. But he provocatively proposed that he be fed at public expense in the Prytaneum, where only descendants of two ty rannicide heroes were so honored. After that, he suggested a ridiculously small fine.

His alternatives rejected, Socrates was sentenced to drink the hemlock, a poison derived from a wetland annual, not the tree species which we call by that name. While his friends later arranged an escape, Socrates rejected it on the grounds that the At henian laws, like his parents, had protected him, that by living his whole life in Athens when free to emigrate with his property, he had consented to obey the laws, that it is better to suffer wrong (a miscarriage of justice) rather than to do wrong, and that flight would disgrace his family.

Read closely, Socrates ranks types of appeals from better to worse in roughly this order: his divine voice and good of his soul, the good of Athens, the legitimate laws of Athens, any sound principles in public opinion such as respect for law, claims o f his kith and kin, his own merely bodily self-interest, and momentary, usually unsound public opinion.

Never having written much before, Socrates wrote some poems (lost to us) while awaiting execution. On his final day, the prison warder orders Socrates to stop philosophizing with visiting friends, since it would heat him up and slow the action of the p oison once he dutifully swallows it. Revealingly, however, Socrates for a last time says, no, he would not voluntarily be silent: "That is his affair. Let him make his own preparations for administering it twice or three times if necessary" (Plato's Phaedo, 63 e)

Being 70 years old, Socrates cared little about the destruction of his ageing body, thinking that his real being was his soul, and that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a).

Athens, which gave birth to Western philosophy, was also to kill its first moral philosopher. While Aristophanes' Clouds had over two decades earlier mocked Socrates as a natural scientist

hanging in a basket at a "thinkery," the real Socrates would be claimed as father to at least four philosophic schools of thought, the Academics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics. Whatever his doubts of democracy Socrates had no doubt that his philosophi c questioning was right.

Yet I. F. Stone, a journalistic gadfly of our own time, correctly noted in his The Trial of Socrates that in his defense Socrates never appealed on his own behalf to the Athenian ideal of freedom of speech (then c alled isegoria), which seemed in tension with their constitutional principle of the Assembly's right to legislate as it pleased, even if with intolerance or foolishness.

Does Socrates implicitly concede some reasonable limits on freedom of speech, since censorship was practiced in the regimes of Sparta and Crete for which he admitted admiration?

Or does his refusal to invoke unlimited freedom of speech mean that he did not much value the free speech of rather limited people? There is no evidence that he ever defended others whose freedom of speech was impaired by the Athenian state. On the oth er hand, we do not know of any case where he joined in a persecution of heretics, such as Anaxagoras when accused of atheism.

In any case, by his divine inner voice only he had a duty to ask the most vital questions. No one else could claim to share his conscience. Socrates did not think he was like everyone else, except for having to ob ey the law, even if his own case was a miscarriage of justice.

Did he want to use his death to punctuate his insistence that it was important for at least the wise to ask how to live rightly? Socrates' death, like his life, was a class act, teaching us to care for the truth more than for adverse consequences for o urselves. But more generalized defenses of freedom of speech will wait until the 16th century.