Socrates

They were young and free, and did not like to think of him in prison.

They had visited with him until late the previous evening. Then, before the sun was up, they gathered again near the courthouse at the foot of the Acropolis and stood shivering in the predawn gloom.

The jail porter greeted them with a solemn face. Their hearts sank as he said:

“The Eleven” – those were the Athenian judicial officials – “are taking off his chains, and giving orders that he is going to die today.”

Grief-sticken, the young men stumbled down the damp stone steps to their teacher’s cell. Inside was a small, strongly built squat man with a white beard, bald pate, and pug nose. He was sitting on his narrow bed, rubbing his legs where the shackles had been. Despite his impending death sentence, he looked calm and collected. In the opposite corner of the cell was his wife. She was surprisingly young, with a small boy on her knee. It was the prisoner’s son, even though the prisoner was seventy years old.

His name was Socrates.

When the young men appeared, the woman sprang to her feet. On the verge of hysteria, she blurted out: “Oh, Socrates, this is the last time that you will converse with your friends, or they with you.” Then she burst into tears.

The squat old man spoke calmly to the leader of the group and he gestured toward his wife, Xanthippe.

“Critias,” Socrates, said, “let someone take her home.” One of Critias’s slave took Xanthippe away as she wept unconsolably.

Watching her leave, Socrates smiled with a serene expression that amazed Critias and the others. They were stuck with how “the Master seemed quite happy,” as one of them said later, and how he seemed to face certain death “nobly and fearlessly.”

His students knew Socrates had been convicted by a jury of his peers of blasphemy and “corrupting the youth of Athens.” But they also knew that the charge had been politically motivated and the conviction a foregone conclusion. They knew Socrates’s real crime had been daring to think for himself and convincing others to do the same.

All the same, his calmness – his cheerfulness, almost – in the face of death made them uneasy. When they finally asked why he was so relaxed, Socrates gave them his answer.

“The real philosopher has reasons to be of good cheer when he is about to die,” he said, especially since “he has the desire for death all his life long.”

They asked what he meant. So he told them.

It was a story some had heard from Socrates many times before. It was about how if a man freed himself from the distractions and false pleasures of the body, and dedicated himself single-mindedly to the pursuit of truth, he must eventually find his elusive quarry.

It was a story about how everything that exists in the world we see, taste, feel and hear is only an imperfect copy or reflection of a much higher reality, a realm of perfect standards of all the virtues, including manliness, health, strength, and beauty, and absolute justice and goodness as well.

These absolute ideal standards constitute “the essence or true nature of everything,” Socrates told them. they shared a perfection with our own soul. All the same, grasping that higher reality is not easy.

By now his disciples had found seats around the cell or leaned against wall, eager to hear more.

“When using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense,” Socrates explained, “the soul is dragged by the body into the realm of the changeable, and wanders and is confused,” however, when the soul returns to reflect upon its own nature, “then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives. …And this state of the soul,” he concluded, “is called wisdom” ~ Page 5

In the world of philosophy, the model of someone dying well, without an ounce of fear, was Socrates. Imprisoned on trumped up charges for corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was detained for thirty days before facing his death sentence of drinking hemlock poison. At the time of his death in 399 BCSocrates was around seventy years old. If he had wished, he could have very easily escaped prison, with his friends’ help, and then set up life elsewhere in Greece. But it would have gone against everything he believed in. also, escaping would have permanently damaged his reputation. Since one of Socrates’s main goals was to improve society, that implied he should follow society’s laws, even if he had been treated unjustly. ~ page 166