Plato's Socrates is extraordinary for many reasons, but not least for his attitudes towards his own death. He is able - perhaps more than any character in literature, before or since - to take control of death, to own it, and to tell the whole story of his own life, including its end.
Four Platonic works in particular evoke the last days of Socrates' life. The Euthyphro is set outside the courthouse as Socrates awaits his sentence and is supposedly a transcrip- tion of a conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro. The Apology is a version of Socrates' defence speech to the jury at the time of his trial. The Crito is set in prison, two days before Socrates' execution. The Phaedo is an account of the master's final hours.
These four texts were almost certainly not written at the same time. But read together, they give us an intense impres- sion, plotted almost day by day, of the last weeks of the phi- losopher's life. Each takes the death of Socrates as an event that raises pressing questions about how we should live and die - which we may still find difficult or impossible to answer. What counts as a truly good, truly wise man? Can such a person teach goodness and wisdom to others? Should we decide what to do by deferring to tradition or by thinking for ourselves? Can we know anything about death before we die? How can we weigh up our conflicting responsibilities to family, friends, religion, work, conscience and ourselves? The central underlying question which haunts all these texts, is whether bad things can happen to good people.
Each dialogue focuses on a different moment in the nar- rative, offering a distinct vision of the meanings of Socrates' death. The Euthyphro suggests that Socrates' condemnation on the charge of impiety is caused by a fundamental misun- derstanding of the true nature of holiness. The case of Socrates is an opportunity to examine and question traditional ideas about religion and morality. The text suggests that this process of examination may itself be more truly 'pious' than an unthinking acceptance of any code of behaviour.
The Apology is concerned less with religion than with pol- itics and society. It shows us Socrates the gadfly and offers a plea for dissent as part of a healthy political community. It is also a celebration of the quest for truth, even at the cost of death, and even if truth can never be discovered by any living human being.
The Crito shows us a different Socrates again - an ecstatic, inspired figure, closer now to death, who has seen a vision of his own end coming to him as a woman dressed in white, and who is bombarded by the invisible voices of the Laws. Socrates' decision to die becomes, in this dialogue, an oppor- tunity for Plato to re-examine the proper limits on human autonomy.
In the Phaedo, the meaning of Socrates' death changes again. It is now the supreme example through which to explain and analyse the old, almost stereotypical idea that a good man will not be afraid to die. Plato shows us a Socrates who seems calm, even joyful, at the prospect of death. He proves, both by argument and by example, that death can hold no terror for the true philosopher.
the denial of death
We are told that in his youth, Plato composed a tragedy that he destroyed after meeting Socrates. In fifth-century Athens, tragedies were always performed in groups of four - three serious plays, followed by a jollier one called a satyr play. Plato wrote a new kind of tragic tetralogy, in prose, in his account of the death of Socrates. After the struggles of the courtroom and the prison, the text that deals with the master's last hours, the Phaedo, is both serious and oddly cheerful.
The text is framed as a second-hand report of Socrates' last day in prison, as described to an absent friend by some- body who was present - Phaedo. The narrative form itself allows Plato to put a kind of bracket around the death of Socrates. We can hear him now only through eavesdropping on other people's conversations: his words come to us from beyond the grave.
The paradox that the philosopher spends his life in prep- aration for death, and yet may not kill himself, is central to Plato's account of these last hours. Socrates explains that the philosopher will not take his own life: we are the property of the gods and therefore it is forbidden to leave life until they call us away. But the wise man will desire death and will die joyfully, treating death as a great benefit. Socrates devotes most of his final hours trying to prove that his joy is reason- able, because he knows that the soul is immortal and that a good man's soul will be happy after death.
The Phaedo offers us a picture of an ideal death. Socrates dies with courage, in complete control, calmly, surrounded by his friends. Death, he shows us, is the wise man's friend. Death is also, we discover, fundamentally unreaclass="underline" it is only the gateway to the soul's immortal life. The philosopher becomes more and more himself as he approaches liberation from the body. The text represents this death as painless and even pleasurable, a journey away from the burdens of the material world.
The Phaedo's insistence that death can be understood and tamed by means of reason stands in sharp contrast with the end of the Apology, where Socrates reminds us that death may be only the final instance of the incommensurability of human and divine knowledge. Plato now presents us with a philosopher whose rational, ethical consciousness always masters his physical and emotional responses. He is not the slave of ordinary desires for food or drink or sex, for honour, love, companionship or even life. The death of Socrates rep- resents total control over the body, the passions and mortal- ity.
The bulk of the dialogue is devoted to a conversation with two Pythagorean friends, Cebes and Simmias. They are convinced by Socrates' claims that the soul is far more valu- able than the body and that the wise man dies with equa- nimity. But they ask for further proofs of the immortality of the soul.
Socrates responds with a series of four arguments, which I will summarise only very briefly.
In the 'cyclical argument', he claims that opposites are always produced one from the other. Sleeping comes from waking, heat comes from cold, the weaker from the stronger, the living from the dead. The dead must continue to exist, because they are reborn as new living souls. We should notice that this is an argument not for the eternal happiness of the good person's soul, but for a constant process of rein- carnation - which was a central tenet of Pythagoreanism.
The 'argument from recollection' suggests that our souls must have existed before our births, because certain kinds of knowledge seem to be attained not by learning but by a kind of remembrance. This argument brings in Plato's Theory of Forms: Socrates claims that we can have access to the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful (as opposed to mere instances of goodness and beauty) only because we have known them in our soul's former life.
In the 'affinity argument' Socrates proposes that the soul has more affinity with the immortal, immaterial forms than with the mortal things of this world.
Before the fourth and final argument, Cebes and Simmias raise certain objections to what has been said so far. Simmias points out that there are plenty of things that are immate- rial but not immortaclass="underline" he cites the harmony created when a person plays the lyre. The strings outlast the tune. Cebes in turn points out that even if the soul is stronger and longer- lasting than the body, this does not prove that it is immortal. A man is stronger and longer-lasting than each successive item of clothing he wears and wears out. But his last cloak will outlive him.
Socrates replies with a final argument that again makes use of the Theory of Forms. The soul is the cause of life and can therefore never admit its opposite, death.