The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy, War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates

by Matt Gatton ($29.95, hardcover, available to order online here or call the store, 505-988-4226)

Review by William deBuys (Enchantment and Exploitation, River of Traps, and Valles Caldera, and many more. Call the store to order any one or more of his titles.

The Shadows of Socrates by Matt Gatton made me reach for my pencil many times. One of the sentences I made a note of was this one: “A democracy can make a tyrant, but a tyrant can unmake a democracy.” Relevant to the present? You be the judge. For me the book was a sort of political and ethical primer.

Athens in the age of Socrates was almost continuously at war, often with Sparta and sometimes with itself. Its governments rose and fell, and each fall produced a purge, one of which swept Socrates into its wake. Much is clear: Socrates was put on trial for heresy and for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was convicted and sentenced to death. But questions remain. For nearly two and a half millennia the Western world has debated what was meant by those charges and who was behind them. 

Gatton sets out to solve this mystery, promising the reader a historical whodunit, and, boy, does he deliver. To do so, he’s obliged to conjure up a flesh-and-blood Athens, sketching its civil and economic life, its leading personalities, its military and diplomatic misadventures, and the tensions among its factions. The sources he draws on are many, yet they are often vague, conflicting, or incomplete. The biggest challenge—vital to understanding Socrates’s alleged heresy—is to decipher the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries, an essentially state religion.

Astonishingly, Gatton accomplishes this task via experiment, in a dark room with a bright light and a “projection technology” that the Mysteries’ ancient priesthood had evidently mastered. The chain of evidence then leads to one of Socrates’s most profound teaching allegories and thence to his indictment and trial.

Over the years, I’ve periodically wrestled with Plato’s Socratic dialogues—and always lost. Happily, with Gatton as a guide, the outcome was different. In a collegial, informal voice, he coaches his reader through the ancient texts that illuminate his tale, pointing out the grudges, ironies, and sly digs embedded in conversations that have echoed for centuries. The mortal personalities of the speakers come forward. The marble busts that have obscured them recede. And from their world, a world full of rancor, pettiness, and self-interest that is not so different from our own, a certain ugly and disagreeable individual emerges. He is that rarest of human beings: a wholly honest man, Socrates.