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Recommended: Socrates's influence

There was probably quite a bit more tension in the Athenian court room than in our mock trial, none the less it was quite interesting to see the different points that were made for and against Socrates during his trial. Looking at the trial today the different points that were made and the evidence, it is absolutely absurd that a man would be sentenced to death based on that. However, we are looking at the situation through different eyes and in a different time. We do not truly understand how those people were brought in that environment and how that affected their thought process. Also the anger with Sparta clearly was not subsided by this time, which allowed some of the jurors to take their anger out on Socrates because of the small correlation. Despite how ridiculously Socrates being brought to trial seems to me, I will avoid casting aspersions on the Athenian men who decided to put him to death because it was a different time, different place, and different thought process. Watching us conduct the trial in person definitely gave me a better understanding of how Athenian justice was carried out. One important distinction is that the evidence presented for both the defense and the prosecution was simply people’s opinions. We spent quite a bit of time during the trial simply attacking the person who was on the stands character. With our idea of convicting someone being that hard evidence needs to be presented, and everyone is innocent until proven guilty this rarely occurs in our American justice system. If someone could be convicted just because a group of people had a bad opinion about them then people would be going to jail consistently without having committed any illegal action at all. The second noticeable asp... ... middle of paper ... ...ed the way they thought they were supposed to. It is possible that they all truly would have voted guilty if they were actually a jury member at that trial, but by comparison to the actual trial where only 56% voted him guilty it is difficult for me to believe that all 100% of them would have sentenced him. This made me think about the vote at the actually trial how many of those 280 votes truly thought of Socrates as a menace to society. Were there just a few loud voices that convinced the others to vote with them? Maybe the majority just thought that it was the right thing to do as this was what was being told to them. It is impossible to understand how those who voted guilty really felt. Did they really find Socrates to have corrupted the youth or were they just going along with the flow of the trial to cast him as a scapegoat to the current problems.

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