The Trial of Socrates

"Our attempt at a new understanding of the trial of Socrates will also become a fresh look at classical antiquity. It is our yesterday and we cannot understand ourselves without it." Thus Izzy Stone approaches the death of a secular saint and the decline of democracy in Athens four centuries before Christ.
Stone brings to his penetrating documentation of the missing prosecution case (which throws new light on Plato's eulogy) all the readability familiar to the 77,000 admirers of the radical I. F. Stone's Weekly. An uncompromising campaigner against McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, he set out to discover how a so-called free society, such as existed in Athens, could try and condemn to death its most renowned philosopher. Stone taught himself Greek the better to assess his primary sources --- Plato's dialogues, Xenophon's Memorabilia, Aristophanes, Aristotle and others. His portrait of Socrates is not flattering: Stone accuses him of snobbery, class prejudice and arrogance, and finds "the irrelevant standard by which to judge the competence of statesmen, tragic poets or shoemakers in their respective crafts." Yet he was the victim of a witch-hunt, for, as Stone shows all too clearly, the totalitarianism, political expedience and terrorism threatening the world today had their counterparts at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars. To Stone the shame of the trial is that a society famous for the citizen's right of free speech prosecuted a philosopher "for no other crime than exercising it".
"A marvellously vivid account ... a splendid sequel to I. F. Stone's Weekly." The New York Review of Books
"Stone has read the texts the way he did the Pentagon Papers --- with an eye for the significant detail and the latent connection." Atlantic Monthly
"There's so much more to this book than the conclusions he arrives at. The case Mr Stone makes is impressive, [his] scholarship is alive and engaging." The New York Times