Near the beginning of Maximus of Tyre’s Oration 3, Whether Socrates acted properly by not defending himself,Footnote ¹ one finds the following passage:

My focus in what follows is on the phrase καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο. Every modern edition, commentary or published translation of Or. 3 of which I am aware detects in this phrase a reference to the (putative) proposal of a counter-penalty on the part of Socrates at his trial in 399 b.c.e. Footnote ² On this point, I contend, they are mistaken.

While Maximus is frequently regarded as a ‘Platonist’, the extent to which this label suits his general orientation or the content of his Orations is debatable.Footnote ³ With respect to Or. 3 in particular, however, it should be obvious that Maximus is not simply toeing a Platonic line. This oration has as its central conceit the idea that Socrates chose to remain silent at his trial rather than to offer any response to the charges against him. Whatever Maximus’ intentions in making and defending this remarkable claim,Footnote ⁴ it certainly puts Or. 3 at odds with the long tradition of Socratic defences written by other ancient authors, including, notably, Plato.Footnote ⁵ Plato’s Apology famously consists of three speeches attributed to Socrates on the occasion of his trial. The first, and by far longest, of these constitutes a defence against both the formal charges and earlier ‘slanders’ Socrates claims have prejudiced the prosecutors and jurors alike.Footnote ⁶ Xenophon’s Apology also contains at least part of a defence speech similarly credited to Socrates.Footnote ⁷

Plato and Xenophon disagree, however, on the subject of a counter-penalty. For his part, Xenophon insists that Socrates refused either to propose a counter-penalty or to allow his friends to do so on his behalf, since any such proposal would constitute a tacit admission of guilt (Xen. Ap. 23). By contrast, Socrates’ second speech in Plato’s Apology is structured around a series of counter-penalty proposals. The first of these is more a provocation than a serious proposal: Socrates suggests that meals for life in the Prytaneum at State expense would be a ‘penalty’ actually befitting his lifetime of service to Athens (36a–37a). However, he soon drops this suggestion in favour of a more traditional proposal, namely, a fine. In keeping with what he claims are his own relatively modest means, Socrates initially sets the amount at a single mina (38a–b). Finally, and at the urging of some of his wealthier associates (including, we are told, Plato himself), Socrates agrees to increase the amount of the proposed fine to the substantial sum of thirty minae (38b).Footnote ⁸

It is to this speech, or some portion thereof, that modern commentators and translators of Maximus have all found a reference in his use of the phrase καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο. None of them appears to have recognized how awkwardly an approving reference to the second speech of Plato’s Apology would sit within a work mostly dedicated to lauding Socrates’ supposed silence at his trial. To suggest, even implicitly, that Socrates broke this silence to propose a counter-penalty after having steadfastly refused to speak in response to the charges against him would be ham-fisted at best. As the surrounding context makes clear, however, Maximus does nothing of the sort. Just a few lines after the passage cited above, toward the end of Or. 3.2, Maximus points to the fact that Socrates preferred death ‘even though it was possible for him to propose a fine and steal away into exile’ (ἐξὸν αὐτῷ καὶ χρημάτων τιμήσασθαι καὶ φεύγειν ἐκκλαπέντι) as proof that he ‘died voluntarily’ (ἀπέθνησκεν ἑκών). It is noteworthy that Maximus here casts the proposal of a fine in strictly contrafactual terms—that is, as something Socrates could have done to avoid execution had he wished but in fact did not. Accordingly, whatever Maximus may have meant by the phrase καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο, he presumably did not intend thereby to evoke the counter-penalty speech attributed to Socrates in Plato’s Apology, in which a fine is precisely what Plato has Socrates ultimately propose.

Even more generally, I wish to argue that the phrase καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο is not intended to refer to a counter-penalty proposal at all. While it is admittedly a commonplace in studies of Athenian law to claim that the verb ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι served as a technical term in this regard,Footnote ⁹ the evidence to support this claim is actually quite thin. Indeed, there are only two putative examples of such a usage from the entire Classical period, one of which is from Plato’s Apology.Footnote ¹⁰ Near the beginning of this dialogue’s second speech, Socrates is first made to repeat the prosecution’s proposed penalty before musing on what he might offer as an alternative: τιμᾶται δ᾽ οὖν μοι ὁ ἀνὴρ θανάτου.Footnote ¹¹ εἶεν· ἐγὼ δὲ δὴ τίνος ὑμῖν ἀντιτιμήσομαι, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι; (Pl. Ap. 36b3–4). Nowhere else in the remainder of the speech, however, does he again employ a form of ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι. As indicated above, Plato has Socrates cycle through a series of counter-penalty proposals: first, free meals for life in the Prytaneum at State expense; next, a fine of one mina; and finally, a fine of thirty minae. In each case, the wording Socrates employs is strikingly similar: εἰ οὖν δεῖ με κατὰ τὸ δίκαιον τῆς ἀξίας τιμᾶσθαι, τούτου τιμῶμαι, ἐν πρυτανείῳ σιτήσεως (36e2–37a1); ἴσως δ᾽ ἂν δυναίμην ἐκτεῖσαι ὑμῖν που μνᾶν ἀργυρίου· τοσούτου οὖν τιμῶμαι (38b4–5); and Πλάτων δὲ ὅδε, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, καὶ Κρίτων καὶ Κριτόβουλος καὶ Ἀπολλόδωρος κελεύουσί με τριάκοντα μνῶν τιμήσασθαι, αὐτοὶ δ᾽ ἐγγυᾶσθαι· τιμῶμαι οὖν τοσούτου (38b6–9). The repeated use of forms of τιμᾶσθαι—and especially of variations of the formula τούτου or τοσούτου τιμῶμαι—in each of these counter-penalty proposals suggests that the relevant technical term for the defendant’s formal action in this portion of the trial was in fact just the same as that used for the plaintiff’s; that is, the verb τιμᾶσθαι, absent any prefix.Footnote ¹² In the case of Plato’s one and only use of a form of ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι, at Ap. 36b4, the ἀντι- prefix seems designed to stress that any proposal Socrates were to make would be offered as an alternative to the one he has just mentioned in the immediately preceding clause. Something similar can also be said of the only other occurrence of ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι from the Classical period in a related, forensic context: Demosthenes’ one use of this verb in his speech Against Timocrates is likewise directly preceded by an explicit reference to the alternative penalty presumably demanded by the prosecution in the relevant case.Footnote ¹³

Forms of ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι do not appear at all in the section of Xenophon’s Apology in which it is denied that Socrates either proposed a counter-penalty or allowed others to do so on his behalf. Xenophon there instead repeatedly employs the verb ὑποτιμᾶσθαι.Footnote ¹⁴ This same verb is also found in connection with advice for a defendant’s (counter-)penalty proposal in a passage from the Ars Rhetorica by the fourth-century b.c.e. rhetorician Anaximenes of Lampsacus.Footnote ¹⁵ And while ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι does not occur in a forensic context in any Greek work that survives from the Roman Imperial period, both the writings of Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 115 c.e.) and the report of the discourses of Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135) by Arrian (c. 86–c. 160) also use forms of ὑποτιμᾶσθαι for the proposal of a counter-penalty in ancient Greek trials, the latter with specific reference to Socrates’ case.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, the spurious epistle from Aeschines to Xenophon that appears as part of the Cynic collection of ‘Socratic epistles’ preserved in codex Vaticanus gr. 64, and which was likely composed sometime during the second century c.e.,Footnote ¹⁷ also twice employs the verb ὑποτιμᾶσθαι in connection with the proposal of a counter-penalty at Socrates’ trial.Footnote ¹⁸ In sum, while the case for ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι as any kind of technical term for the proposal of a counter-penalty is weak even for the Classical period, what little evidence survives would actually seem to suggest that ὑποτιμᾶσθαι was preferred in the Greek literature of Maximus’ own time, perhaps under Xenophon’s influence.Footnote ¹⁹

This is not to deny that other aspects of Plato’s writings—or even of his Apology specifically—continued to exert considerable influence on writers of the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’.Footnote ²⁰ But Maximus himself seems to rely at least as much, if not more, on Xenophon when it comes to details of Socrates’ trial. Consider, for example, the following passage from Or. 18.6:

Key elements of this passage find parallels in Xenophon’s account(s) of Socrates’ trial but not in Plato’s Apology. The latter lacks any references to Critias or Alcibiades, for example, or to the idea that Socrates’ personal association with either underlay any of the accusations against him. Xenophon, by contrast, makes Socrates’ connection to Critias and Alcibiades integral to the accusation of corrupting young men (Xen. Mem. 1.2.12–48). Furthermore, only Xenophon makes explicit reference to the issue of Socrates swearing by other gods in connection with his trial (Xen. Ap. 24).

For all these reasons, Plato’s Apology—and especially its second speech—seems a poor candidate to illuminate what Maximus may have intended by his use of the verb ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι in Or. 3.2. Fortunately, there is more help to be had in the surrounding context of the oration itself. In the clause immediately preceding καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο, Maximus employs a form of the verb ἀντιψηφίζομαι. The ἀντι- prefix in this case is clearly intended to highlight the fact that Socrates responded in kind to the action taken by his opponents: that is, when the Athenians condemned him (ψηφιζομένων Ἀθηναίων), he in turn condemned them (ἀντεψηφίζετο). It is along these same lines, I suggest, that we should understand the subsequent use of the verb ἀντιτιμᾶσθαι. Maximus’ word choice is not meant to indicate that Socrates proposed any kind of counter-penalty for himself; rather, it emphasizes that he responded in kind by passing sentence (ἀντετιμᾶτο) on the Athenians who sentenced him (τιμωμένων). This point also foreshadows the conclusion of Or. 3, where Maximus imagines the content of a counter-indictment of the Athenians by Socrates and the resulting judgment and sentence rendered by ‘God and the truth’ (θεὸς καὶ ἀλήθεια) against them (Or. 3.8).

If one must look for a parallel in Plato’s Apology, the better place to do so would be the only speech therein compatible with Maximus’ contention that Socrates remained silent during the trial itself; namely, the third of the speeches Plato attributes to Socrates. This speech, which notably has an analogue in Xen. Ap. 24–6, is set after the official proceedings of the trial have concluded. Addressing his friends and supporters, Socrates there references not only the sentence passed against him but also the one his accusers now face (Pl. Ap. 39b4–6):

In any event, the idea that Socrates was not only the one sentenced as the result of his trial is surely the intended meaning behind Maximus’ use of the phrase καὶ τιμωμένων ἀντετιμᾶτο in Or. 3.2. The universal failure of modern translators and commentators to recognize this simple fact should serve as a warning against the pervasive tendency in contemporary scholarship to filter any ancient evidence about Socrates through a Platonic lens, sometimes to distorting effect.