He fled.
Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.
As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed great popularity among the people of northern Hellas. For this unseemly conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed, the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth, continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own bad temper.
And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder of Socrates.
When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece in the fifth century before our era.
For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd) had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.
Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little money. The boy therefore had never been able to pay for a regular college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned, he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.
All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.
In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.
All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities; that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and went even farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our destiny.”