The Last Days of Socrates

Summary

The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young. Euthyphro, a self-confident religious expert, is prosecuting his own father for the death of a labourer. Socrates asks him to define piety, and each definition collapses under questioning, most famously when Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved by the gods. The dialogue ends without an answer, as Euthyphro hurries away. The Apology is Socrates' defence speech before a jury of hundreds of Athenian citizens. He explains that his reputation comes from the oracle at Delphi, which declared no one wiser than he, and from his effort to test it by questioning politicians, poets and craftsmen, discovering that they thought they knew what they did not. He describes his mission as a gadfly stinging the sluggish horse of Athens and his divine sign, a voice that restrains him. He refuses to beg for mercy or to stop philosophizing, declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living. Convicted, he proposes free meals in the Prytaneum as his 'penalty', then a fine; the jury condemns him to death. He reflects calmly that death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to meet the great dead, and that no evil can come to a good man. In the Crito, his old friend Crito visits him in prison before dawn with a plan of escape. Socrates argues that one should never do wrong, even in return for wrong, and imagines the Laws of Athens addressing him: having lived all his life under them, he cannot now destroy them by flight. He chooses to stay. The Phaedo, narrated by Phaedo to Echecrates, describes Socrates' last day. Surrounded by friends, he argues that philosophers should welcome death, since philosophy is a preparation for the separation of soul from body, and offers several arguments for the immortality of the soul, ending with the doctrine of the Forms and a myth of the afterlife. As evening falls he bathes, says farewell to his family, and drinks the hemlock calmly. He walks until his legs feel heavy, lies down, and the numbness rises toward his heart. His last words ask Crito to offer a cock to Asclepius, god of healing. Phaedo ends by calling him the wisest, justest and best of men.

Top Lessons

• The examined life

  Socrates claims his only wisdom is knowing that he does not know, and insists that questioning is the highest good. The dialogues model intellectual humility and persistent inquiry.

• Integrity under pressure

  Socrates refuses to flatter the jury or flee from prison. His consistency between belief and action is the model of philosophical integrity.

• Facing death

  The Phaedo presents philosophy as rehearsal for dying and portrays a death without fear. It has shaped Western ideals of the good death for millennia.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Phaedo contains the most famous description of a poisoning in ancient literature: the executioner instructs Socrates to walk until his legs grow heavy, then lie down; numbness rises from the feet, and when it reaches the heart he dies. Toxicologists have debated whether this calm ascending paralysis is consistent with poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), which can produce ascending paralysis but also convulsions and vomiting; Plato may have idealized the scene. The Phaedo is also the classic text of soul–body dualism and of philosophy as practice for dying, central to the history of consolation and of the 'good death'. In the Crito Socrates compares listening to the many with following a trainer or physician who knows, an early statement of expert authority in health. The Phaedo opens with Socrates' discussion of suicide, holding that one must not take one's own life until the god sends a necessity, a passage much cited in debates on suicide and assisted death. His divine sign and his dream commanding him to make music invite reflection on voices and dreams.

• Apology 31c–d; 40a–c

  Socrates' divine sign, an inner voice that only ever restrains him, and its silence on the day of the trial.

• Apology 40c–41c

  Death as either a dreamless sleep or a journey to converse with the dead: neither is to be feared.

• Crito 47a–48a

  Analogy of the trainer and physician: one should heed the expert, not the many, about health of body and soul.

• Phaedo 60e–62c

  Socrates' recurring dream telling him to make music, and his argument that suicide is wrong until the god sends necessity.

• Phaedo 64a–68b

  Philosophy as practice for death: the soul's freeing from the body's distractions and diseases.

• Phaedo 116a–118a

  The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.