Emily Baragwanath was one of nine UNC researchers awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Grant to support her participation in an international workshop looking anew at Socrates’ Trial, Politics, and Religion, to be held at Piryoi Thermis, Lesbos, Greece, in June 2025. Questions that are crucial, contested, and timely are opening up in recent scholarship on the political and religious alignments of Socrates, their representation in Socratic literature, and their bearing on the philosopher’s trial and execution in 399BCE at the hands of a large citizen jury of democratic Athens. Fresh literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives have been made available by compelling new research into the fully-extant contemporary prose writers on Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, and by new editions of first-generation Socratic authors whose works survive only in fragments. One explanation for the resilience of the Athenian democracy is how it mitigated and responded to crisis by promoting tolerance and negotiation – an approach that was tested in the events that precipitated Socrates’ trial. Indeed, a partial explanation for the Athenian democracy’s ultimate failure may be found in its limits of tolerance, including its failure to build a multiracial democracy including women as well as men, and its failure to free and enfranchise its slaves. The topic connects to Baragwanath’s personal research agenda: over the course of writing Xenophon’s Women: Friendship, Economics, and War (forthcoming with Cambridge U. Press) she has been expanding her scholarly focus from the ancient historians to the ancient philosophers, and Socrates in particular.
Baragwanath wins Arts and Humanities Research Grant
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