Biography | Plato — The Royal Stoa Where Socrates Met the Indictment

People treat the trial of Socrates as a story that happened somewhere in Athens.

The first legal step was this porch.

In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates is waiting at the Stoa Basileios, the Royal Stoa at the northwest corner of the Agora, because the archon basileus has received Meletus's charge of impiety.

The year is 399 BC. Plato was in his late twenties if the conventional birth date holds.

He names himself among those present at the trial in the Apology, and among those who offered to pay a fine.

The charge, as the Apology states it, was that Socrates did not recognise the city's gods, introduced new ones, and corrupted the young.

The stoa is small, 17.72 metres by 7.18 metres, with eight Doric columns on the east face. Foundations and the lithos, the limestone oath-stone on the steps, remain in the excavated Agora.

Pausanias still recognised the building in the second century AD. Identification today rests on his description and on inscriptions of later archons basileis.

The final jury sat in one of the dikasteria whose exact building is still argued. This pin is the office where the case opened, the one Plato put on the page.

Socrates was executed in the state prison nearby, later that same spring. That building is a separate argument on the southwest side of the square.

The stoa sits just south of the point where the Panathenaic Way enters the square, one metre north of the Stoa of Zeus. A modern railway cutting now splits the two foundations.

What a visitor sees is a low stylobate, two battered column drums, and the block that may be the lithos. The porch is still the first public room in the story Plato chose to write.

Photo: Vanbasten 23, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons