The end of the dialogue reminds us that grief and the desire for a funeral are not exclusively feminine preserves. Crito tries to glean from Socrates some instructions about how he would like to be buried. Socrates teases him for thinking that this question could possibly matter: after all, it is not Socrates who will be interred, but only his body. What foolishness, then, to say at a funeral, 'I am burying Socrates.' 'Such words,' says Socrates, 'bring evil to the soul' (ii5e); they imply, falsely, that the body is the person - not the soul. Instead, Crito must say only that he buries 'the corpse of Socrates' - and do so however he sees fit.
When Socrates takes the cup of hemlock, he refuses to make any clear distinction between this drink and any other beverage. Death is what he has practised all his life. Here is what happens when executioner brings him the cup:
He took it, and very gently, without trembling or chang- ing either his colour or expression, looking up at the man with his usual wide eyes, he said, 'What do you say about pouring a libation to some god from this cup? May I, or not?'
'Socrates,' he said, 'we only prepare as much as we think is enough to drink.'
'I see,' said Socrates. 'But I suppose I may and must at
least pray to the gods, that my journey from here be fortu- nate. So I do pray this, and may my prayer be granted.'
With these words he lifted the cup and very cheer- fully and quietly drank it down. (Phaedo ii7b-c)
Socrates' request to pour a libation from the hemlock cup shows his adherence to traditional religious practices. But it also shows his playfulness, even in the last hour. Usually, a libation is poured from a drink of wine, not poison. People share their best things with the gods. Socrates' request mocks the traditional understanding of death as something bad.
Plato's account of the last hours is intensely moving and again makes a sharp contrast between two different perspec- tives. On the one hand, there is Socrates, cheerfully setting out on a new journey, a prayer on his lips and a cup in his hands. On the other hand, there are the spectators to the event, who cannot help responding with grief:
And up to that moment most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well, but when we saw him drinking, and saw that he had drunk, we could no longer do so, and in spite of myself my tears rolled down in floods, so that I wrapped my face in my cloak and wept - for myself. I was not weeping for him, but for my own loss, deprived of such a friend. Crito had got up and gone away even before I did, because he could not restrain his tears. But Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time before, then wailed aloud in his grief and made us all break down, except Socrates himself. But he said, 'What are you doing, you strange men! I sent the women away mostly for this very reason, to prevent them from behaving in this excessive way.
For I have heard that it is best to die in holy silence.
Keep quiet, and be brave.'
Then we were ashamed and controlled our tears.
(Phaedo ii7c-e)
Death may mean liberation for Socrates, but it forces on his friends a rigid self-control. In one way, Socrates' death is a slow transition, hardly noticeable at alclass="underline" he goes gradually numb, without ever ceasing to be himself. But it is also a cause of wild grief to the friends, which must be suppressed if they are to retain their masculine identity. As readers, we are put into the position of the disciples: struggling, and probably failing, to control our emotions.
the gender of socrates: the last words
Plato puts enormous emphasis on the absence of the women from the scene of Socrates' death. Socrates excludes them because he fears they may spoil the dignity of the moment with their wailing: 'I have heard that it is best to die in holy silence.' This suggests that Socrates hopes not merely to exclude women, but to exclude 'femininity'. He will die in the most absolutely 'masculine' manner.
But as we have already seen, the result of keeping out the women is that Socrates himself must take on many of the tasks that would, traditionally, fall to them at the scene of a death. He bathes his own soon-to-be-dead body and lays out his own body as if for burial. He assures Crito that no trouble need be taken over his funeral, since all mourning rites give the false impression that death is a bad thing. Socrates has appropriated to himself, and so made redundant, one of the major traditional roles for women - the care of the dead.
In the final pages of the Phaedo, Socrates also takes on himself - and undermines - the other major social role afforded to women in ancient Athens: childbirth. We read of how a big-bellied figure walks around the room, watched by anxious friends. Plato describes in precise physical detail the progress of the poison. The climax comes when the numb- ness reaches the lower belly. In a medical description of child- birth, by this point the head of the baby would be engaged, ready to descend to the birth canal. In this narrative, once the chill reaches the area around his groin, Socrates delivers eleven famous last words (in the Greek original): 'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it, and do not forget.'
A great deal of rhetorical weight is put on the last words. But interpreters have had considerable difficulty making any sense out of them. Crito is clearly unsatisfied with the cock to Asclepius as Socrates' final utterance; he demands, but does not receive, 'something else'.
In citing these last words Plato adduces a final piece of evidence for Socrates' innocence of the charges for which he was dying. Far from failing to acknowledge the gods, Socrates died with the name of a god on his lips.
But the god to whom Socrates owes a debt - Asclepius - was not one of the twelve traditional Olympian gods, but a relatively recent foreign import to the Athenian pantheon. This god of medicine, whose worship involved a magic snake, had been introduced into Athens in 420 bc, only some twenty years earlier; the famously pious poet Sophocles had helped care for the snake. So perhaps the allusion to Asclepius is not a demonstration of Socrates' traditional piety, but a defiant reminder that the Athenians themselves have often introduced 'new' gods into their own pantheon.
Asclepius was the god most closely associated with doctors, and the last words have therefore been taken to suggest that Socrates has benefited from the cure of some kind of disease. There are several different possible theories about what the disease might be.
It might be a metaphor for life itself. Socrates owes a debt to Asclepius as soon as he has drunk the hemlock, because now he has been 'cured' of the 'long disease' of life. This is the most common interpretation among modern scholars.
But the metaphor of life as disease appears nowhere in the Phaedo. Moreover, a similar notion is expressed by Cebes in the Phaedo itself: that the soul's entry in the body is 'like a disease'. Socrates adamantly attacks this idea, showing that the soul is immune from any alteration or sickness. It would, as one scholar has noted, be 'strange indeed', if in the last moments of his life, Socrates suddenly adopted a version of a view he had gone to so much trouble to refute earlier in this very text.
Alternatively, perhaps disease is a metaphor for wrong- doing. Elsewhere in Plato's work, bad behaviour is often presented as damaging to the psyche of the perpetrator, just as a disease is damaging to the body. From what wrongdo- ing, then, has Socrates been saved when he has drunk the hemlock? An obvious answer is that he has been saved from the temptation to evade his sentence and escape from prison - the temptation that was the subject of the Crito.