Books like The Trial of Socrates

My first exposure to I.F. Stone was in high school when I stumbled upon his Hidden History of the Korean War in the library. The contents were quite upsetting as they contradicted most of what I'd thought I'd known about the event. My second exposure to Stone was at Grinnell College when I saw a documentary about him and his Weekly in the Alumni Recitation Hall. Before that I'd not given much thought to him as a person. Indeed, although I'd seen him cited often enough by others, it hadn't particularly registered yet that he had authored the Korea book.Then, years later, I heard that he'd retired, learned classical Greek and had written a book about Socrates. Now this was interesting. As soon as I found a used copy, I purchased and read it.The book is about Socrates' trial, conviction and sentence. It should be read by the legions of philosophers who purport to teach students about the legendary sophist without knowing much of the history of the period. Stone provides adequate background for the general reader and a convincing argument that Socrates was sentenced to exile or death because of treason.Briefly summarized, the argument is based on the fact that Plato and quite probably Socrates--as witness the idealized Sparta of The Republic--were sympathizers with Sparta. Sparta had recently won the Peloponnesian War and had installed a military garrison on a hill on the outskirts of Athens while forcing the polis to decommission almost its entire fleet. Oligarchical Laconian sympathizers like Plato vied during the postwar period with traditional democrats for power, many of the former being represented sympathetically in the Platonic dialogs. With the garrison nearby, Socrates could not very well be prosecuted for treason. Instead, he was charged with impiousness and the corruption of the youth--most notably, of course, his lover, the repeated traitor, Alcibiades--and convicted by vote on these ostensible grounds. A defender of the First Amendment, Stone is naturally ambivalent about the trial. He himself had been called a traitor often enough and had in fact been blacklisted from his profession during the fifties. On the issue of oligarchy versus democracy, however, Socrates/Plato and Stone stood on opposite sides.