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 enlarge | Author: I.f. Stone
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 277017
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0385260326
Dewey Decimal Number: 183.2
EAN: 9780385260329
ASIN: 0385260326
Publication Date: February 27, 1989
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Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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 Great read, if academically questionable November 8, 2005
9 out of 20 found this review helpful
I.F. Stone spent his journalistic career glorying in being an antagonist -- an anti-Zionist Jew, a Marxist, a relentless muckraker. Here he portrays Socrates as even more obnoxious than himself.
As some of the reviews reflect, Greek historians will find plenty of faults in Stone's account. But for the discerning reader he tells a great story. Socrates comes off as a rightwing reactionary (!!!) and an intellectual bully and elitist. Kind of how Stone must have viewed William F. Buckley or Irving Kristol! According to Stone Socrates antagonized the Athenians beyond their capacities of tolerance and got what was coming to him.
Of course the picture of the obnoxious intellectual may actually be shaped by Stone projecting fears of his own hypocrasy. As Socrates ran around Athens extolling the superiority of Sparta (even though Sparta would have never granted Socrates such freedom of speech!), so Stone spent his career telling America how much better the Soviet Union was.
BTW -- side note: John Edwards named this book as one of his favorite reads. This drew criticism of him on the campaign trail, based on reports that Stone received secret payments from the Soviets.
Not scholarly, but a worthwhile central premise August 21, 2005
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
It might as well be said right off the top: Stone is clearly not a scholar of classical Greece. Although Stone acknowledges his amateur status, it is clear that it is false modesty: he clearly believes that his lack of formal training in classics is a point in his favour. An enlightened amateurism, supposedly uncorrupted by years of indoctrination into the hagiocracy of accepted scholarship, is a pretension he shares with many journalists, who seem to think that an entertaining and provocative story is more important, interesting and "true" than a complete and accurate story. So much for Stone, but what about his book?
I first read Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo (Plato's description of the trial and death of Socrates) in first or second year university. As it is to many young people, it was a moving experience, and one that set the stage for much of my later interest in Greek history and philosophy. The execution of Socrates has usually been treated as a stain on the otherwise monumental achievements of Athens. The contrast between the Athenians' receptiveness to a multiplicity of ideas has always seemed to me, and to many others, to stand in stark contrast to their handling of Socrates. (This seeming contradiction is a useful one, however, since it reminds us that ancient Greek culture, while incomparably influential on Western civilization, was not a uniformly noble affair). Stone questions this seeming contradiction as a journalist would and finds more worldly reasons for the execution, namely that the Athenians believed Socrates to be an active opponent of the democracy, whose teachings directly counseled his pupils (especially Critias and Alcibiades) to commit treason by siding with the Spartans to install an oligarchy in Athens.
Stone's central premise is not new. Scholars have long called Socrates a scapegoat for the loss of the Peloponessian War. Even ancient sources (e.g., Aeschines in Against Timarchus) acknowledged this, more or less. Stone, however, attempts to reverse our sympathies. To him, Socrates is less a scapegoat than a traitor and an enemy of the people. Unfortunately, the "evidence" for his interpretation is really his perception of human nature as viewed through the lens of the Cold War, rather any actual factual contemporary Greek accounts supporting his point of view. This lack of evidence is why classical scholars have, correctly, been less assertive in their interpretations of Socrates execution. Stone is much too certain, as should be expected from someone who styles himself a "maverick" and "non-conformist".
To his credit, however, he calls on us to remember how turbulent and emotional were the times in Athens following their defeat at the hands of the Spartans and after having endured the tyranny of the Spartan-installed government of the Thirty. He brings this feeling to life for modern readers by imagining how America would react had it lost the Cold War to the Soviet Union, subsequently enduring and then defeating a Soviet-installed tyranny. Might not Americans be forgiven for prosecuting and executing some of the more vocal and influential pro-Soviet academics, especially if their most famous students were active Soviet collaborators?
In summary, then, this book gets low marks for scholarship and style, but high marks for bringing a turbulent period in western civilization to life in terms that the average person can relate to. I give it four stars because it is worth reading.
 A modern sophist takes on an ancient philosopher. March 22, 2005
12 out of 21 found this review helpful
On its own merits, Stone's book deserves only one star, but because it has brought Socrates to the attention of a wider audience than he otherwise would have it gets a second star.
Maybe Stone learned Attic Greek in order to write this book, and maybe he didn't. Nothing Stone wrote in this book required analysis of primary sources or any depth of knowledge of Attic Greek, in contrast with the truly scholarly work on Socrates, which often turns on the evaluation of subtle stylistic and linguistic evidence in the ancient sources.
Stone's methods are those of the advocate, the special pleader, and the polemicist, which of course is what he was for his entire journalistic career. He was clearly not a scholar, in spite of his pretensions. He would have fit in quite well with the clever Sophists Socrates had so much fun arguing against, and so little respect for. Perhaps Stone had a grudge against Socrates because Socrates would never have taken Stone seriously had the two ever met. Socrates would no doubt have taken Stone apart just like he did everyone else he encounters in Plato's Dialogues.
The idea that Socrates could have used a "free speech" defense at his trial in ancient Athens is preposterous. The Athenian democracy quite frequently fined, exiled, or put to death its citizens for the flimsiest of reasons. One has only to read Thucydides to learn this. There was no First Amendment in ancient Athens. Athenian law was whatever a jury said it was on any given day. It was for good reason that pure democracy as practiced by Athens developed such a bad reputation that it has never been seriously tried since.
A good antidote to Stone's screed is the paper by Gregory Vlastos called "The Historical Socrates and Athenian democracy", which appears in his book "Socratic Studies". Vlastos also wrote a critical review of Stone's book in The New York Review of Books. It should be noted that Vlastos identified himself as being Leftist in his personal political views, but didn't let that interfere with his scholarship. And I doubt that he ever let KGB agents take him out to lunch.
 True Democracy & It's Wrongful Trial September 26, 2003
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
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What is so amazing about ancient Athens, is it's honest democracy, a true government by the people. This was no counterfeit version of democracy found in modern America with such authoritarian policies of the "war on drugs," and the "patriot act." Unlike the American justice system, revenue motivated decisions did not hold weight and were non-existent in Athens, where education and oratory powers were taught to ALL citizens, who were in turn, truly listened to, as there were no need for high paid lawyers as in today's so called veneer version of democratic society, for in Athens, each citizen was capable of defending himself in court and the court would honor and listen. There was no inside circle of prosecutor-judge-cop-public defender bias. All citizens took part in juries and government decision-making. True free speech existed, something that most people in today's American democratic society have no idea what that really is. For instance, Socrates, attacked such open freedom and democracy for years. The result was never persecution of any sort, but rather, the playwrights writing of various comedies depicting the infantile and foolish nature of the rhetoric Socrates was churning out.The history Stone brings out is well done. He relates the two temporary successful take overs from the Spartan influenced four hundred and later, the thirty, both replacing the democracy with oligarchy and dictatorships, only to fail in the restoration of democracy. Too make matters worse, the political enemies of such coos were former students of Socrates! What makes Stone's book so congruent with ancient Greece is his historical analysis of the Greek democracy and its very foundational working structure that could not endorse the loss of free thinking. The idea of Witch trials, and persecution for free thinking and free speech, however condemnatory of the government did not occur. The comedies, such as Astopheles, "The Clouds," to name just one, was only one of many that used the anti-democratic, anti-Athens attacks of Socrates as dipiction in exposure of tragedy in comical form. Here Socrates was ridiculed and made to look like a fool. Never was there hard feeling, nor subsequent governmental persecution from such plays. Even Socrates is reported to have laughted openly at the plays dipiction of himself and his "thinkery." The problem Stone brings out, and this is the highlight of his book, is that many other historians have literalized such play wrights into literal historical accounts, teaching that true history consisted of the Athenian democracy acting without free speech in punishment and accusations. Here Stone acknowledges such comedies as purely fictional, that is, true characters, places and events fictionally changed, altering either past events, current or future to convey their points. This is reason for their stories that contradict the freedom of the Greek polis, the government of the people, the true democracy. The trial of Socrates was that of paranoia that eventually cropped up in Athens Greece. Two recent governmental take overs occurred with the threat of a third. The previous rebels being Socrates former students. Even here, Socrates could have used a defense that would have surely cleared him, but desired not to. He could have easily reached out to the Athenian ideals of free thinking and speech, the cities gods and goddess of wisdom, persuasion and justice, however his very defense while clearing him, would have both destroyed his anti-democratic, anti-Athens foundational arguments in favor of Spartan-like oligarchy and vindicate the democracy of Athens, the very type of free government that Socrates spent his entire philosophical life attacking. In Athens executed death penalty of Socrates, she went against her very foundation, she sinned against herself. What is so profound about this book and Stone's presentation is the structure of ancient Greece, Athens verses Spartan, and the very make up of Athens democracy. One shudder's when comparing the real deal and element of open Athenian democracy with the modern day American democracy, gaining understanding of both democratic values, vulnerability and today's quasi- democratic counterfeits, that of totalitarian/authoritarian efforts to control.
It should really be the trial of Plato... September 2, 2003
19 out of 23 found this review helpful
Read the editorial reviews for books on or by Plato and you will find the fawning hagiolatry that too many professional philosophers have bestowed upon one of their own (comparable only to the scorn heaped upon the Sophists, who demonstrated by example how philosophical methods can lead to absurd conclusions, and are thus suspect). Anyone reading "The Republic" in earnest cannot fail to be horrified by prescriptions that are eerily reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in China or Pol Pot's reign of terror in Cambodia.I.F. Stone's book demonstrates how Plato's views were those of a disgruntled aristocrat railing against the (relative) democracy of classical Athens who stripped his class of many of its privileges. Some of his associates went beyond railing and actually committed treason in an attempt at restoring the said privileges. Unfortunately, Stone misses his target, and actually believes Plato when the latter fraudulently ascribed his own opinions to Socrates. Most of Stone's scathing criticism and debunking of Socrates should really be understood as applying to Plato. There is very little we can know about Socrates himself and his views, as he did not write, and any speculations on the man are likely to be fruitless or unsupported by hard evidence. A much more rigorous (and devastating) critique of Plato is Karl Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies", but it is certainly less accessible to the layman. For all its flaws, Stone's book is a good read and a first step in reversing centuries of undeserved praise granted to Plato.
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