Several things had already happened when Socrates, the summons in his hand, greeted Theodorus in the spring of 399 {Tht. 143d1-2), and it is best to set them out in order.
Meletus of Pithus was Socrates’ chief accuser. He was the son of a poet also named Meletus, but was himself‘‘young and unknown’’ {Euthphr. 2b8).3 To charge Socrates, a fellow citizen, Meletus was obliged to summon him to appear at a preliminary hearing before the relevant magistrate, namely, the king-archon {archon basileus), who had jurisdiction over both homicide and impiety. This Meletus did by composing a speech or document that stated the complaint and demanded that the defendant, Socrates, appear on a specified day. It was not necessary to put the summons in writing, or for the king-archon to agree in advance about the date of appearance, but at least four days had to be granted between the notification and the hearing.
Athenian public prosecutors, selected by lot and paid a drachma per day, had only narrow functions, so, when Meletus made his accusation, he became both plaintiff and prosecutor in Socrates’ case. The summons had to be served on Socrates personally and preferably in public: active participation in Athens’ extensive religious life was a civic obligation; thus to prosecute impiety was to act in the public interest. Any citizen could serve and, though it was not obligatory, could add his name to Meletus’ document, if Meletus put his complaint in writing {as Ap. 19b3-c1 implies he did). If a defendant could not be located, it may have been permissible to announce the summons in front of his house {as allowed some decades later); but the sanctity of Socrates’ house could not be violated for that purpose. One or two witnesses accompanied Meletus in his search for Socrates, men who would later swear that the summons had been properly delivered. These may have been the two men who would be Meletus’ advocates (synegoroi) in the trial, Anytus of Euonymon and Lycon of Thoricus, men of very different dispositions.4
Anytus was rich, having inherited a tanning factory from his self-made and admirable father (Pl. Meno 90a). Plato emphasizes his hatred of sophists at Meno 90b, 91c, and 92e. He was elected general by his tribe, and in 409 tried but failed because of storms to retake Pylos from the Spartans. Prosecuted for this failure, he escaped punishment by devising a new method of bribery for use with large juries that was later given the name dekazein and made a capital crime. In 404, he supported the government of the Thirty, but it soon banished him, whereupon he became a general for the exiled democrats (though his protection of an informer to the Thirty cast doubts on his loyalties). When the democracy was restored in 403, he became one of its leaders. Anytus served as a character witness in another of the impiety trials of 399, that of Andocides. Xenophon calls Anytus’ son a drunkard (Xen. Apology 31.1-4).
Lycon is known to us through an extended and sympathetic portrayal by Xenophon (in Symposium) who depicts him as the doting father of a devoted son, Autolycus, a victorious pancratist in 422 who was later executed by the Thirty. Lycon was a man of Socrates’ generation who had become a democratic leader after the fall of the oligarchy of 411. In comedies, his foreign wife and his son are accused along with him of living extravagantly and beyond their means; he is accused with his son of drunkenness; but he alone is accused of treachery, betraying Naupactus to the Spartans in 405.
It is sometimes said that political animosity lay behind the impiety charges against Socrates, both because some of the men he was rumored to have corrupted were political leaders; and because, it has been claimed, he could not legally be charged with the political crime of subverting democracy (Stone 1988; cf. Burnyeat 1988). Although the labels ‘‘democracy’’ and ‘‘oligarchy’’ are ubiquitous, politics in Athens in the late fifth century resists reduction to a simple clash between broad-franchise democrats and narrow-franchise oligarchs for several reasons: many central figures changed sides, sometimes repeatedly; the oligarchies themselves varied in number (the 400, the 5,000, the 30); clan and family interests as well as individual loyalties often cut across affiliation. During the long Peloponnesian War, from 431, Athens remained a democracy except for a brief period in 411. After a decisive Spartan victory in 404, however, the Assembly (ekklesia) elected 30 men, three per tribe, to return the city to her predemocratic ancestral constitution. The Thirty quickly consolidated their power and wealth through executions and confiscations, driving supporters of the democracy into exile. After about eight months of tyranny, in 403, the exiles retook the city in a bloody civil war, later driving the leaders of the Thirty and their supporters to Eleusis. An amnesty was negotiated with Spartan help that separated the two sides and made it illegal from 402 to bring charges against anyone on either side for crimes committed during the rule of the Thirty. Suspecting that the former oligarchs were hiring mercenaries, the democrats raided Eleusis in the early spring of 401 and killed all who were left. In the courts, from 400, the amnesty was observed for criminal charges, but residual hostility continued, and it was common to attack one’s opponent for remaining in the city instead of joining the democrats in exile, as had Socrates’ childhood friend Chaerephon (Ap. 20e8-21a2). Socrates did remain in the city, but he opposed the Thirty - as his record shows - and there is no evidence that there was an underlying political motive in Socrates’ case.
Upon receipt of the summons, to resume the narrative, Socrates enjoyed a citizen’s right not to appear at the preliminary hearing, though Meletus’ suit would then proceed uncontested to the pretrial examination stage. Even if charged with a murder, short of parricide, a citizen also had the right to voluntary exile from Athens, as the personified laws remind Socrates (Crito 52c3-6). Socrates exercised neither of those rights. Rather, he set out to enter a plea before the king-archon and stopped at a gymnasium on his way.
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