But the possibility of escape from prison and hemlock is hardly a live issue in the Phaedo, as it is in the Crito. The Socrates of the Phaedo shows no sign whatsoever of wanting to escape from prison or delay death. He hardly needs the services of a god to be saved from a sin that he was never in any real danger of committing.
A third possibility, the simplest, is to take the disease l iterally. Socrates and his friends owe a debt to Asclepius because someone close to them has recovered from illness.
Only one person is mentioned as ill in the course of the Phaedo: Plato himself. We are told laconically, at the start of the dialogue, 'Plato, I think, was ill' (59b): this was why he could not attend the master's deathbed. This is a resonant moment, one of only three times in Plato's entire oeuvre where he names himself. There is a neat ring composition in the Phaedo, if it begins and ends with references to Plato's illness. On this interpretation, Socrates has somehow learned that Plato has recovered, and is urging Crito and his other friends to give thanks for it to the god. The last words would then be a claim on Plato's part for his own importance as the true successor and biographer of the great man. If Plato had died of his illness, Socrates' teachings would not have been preserved in their most glorious form.
There are, however, serious difficulties with this reading also. Socrates had no obvious way of knowing that Plato had recovered from his illness. There has been no message to that effect in the dialogue and Plato has not been men- tioned since the initial report of his illness. It is true that Socrates claimed to have prophetic knowledge of his own immortality, like a swan who sings for joy before he dies; but he has not claimed to have magical access to the state of his friends' health. It seems strange that Socrates should seem suddenly to be aware of Plato's recovery only after the hemlock reaches his abdomen.
Another possible interpretation, which was current in antiquity, is to say that Socrates was delirious, under the influ- ence of the hemlock. The last words are a pathetic sign that the man who used to be the wisest in Greece is now losing his mind: he babbles about snake gods and roosters, having no clear idea what he is saying. On this interpretation, it seems likely that these really were Socrates' last words; perhaps Plato himself could not understand what they meant.
But in a text as carefully wrought as the Phaedo, it is implausible that Plato would have given so much weight to words that he considered incomprehensible or nonsensical. Since all the usual interpretations are flawed in important ways, I propose a different reading, one that has not to my knowledge been suggested before.
Recovery from sickness was not the only reason to invoke Asclepius, the patron god of doctors. Women, at least in the wealthier classes, were almost always attended by male doctors in childbirth. Although Artemis, the virgin hunter goddess, was traditionally the deity who presided over women in labour, we have evidence that women who sac- rificed to Asclepius almost always did so in gratitude for his help with fertility and obstetrical issues. It is fitting that Socrates, whose own gender becomes so ambiguous in this text, should call on a male god who had himself taken on some of the role of a traditional female deity.
Socrates gives thanks to Asclepius, I would argue, because he has succeeded - metaphorically - in giving birth to his own death. Life is not a disease, death is not a cure. Rather, dying is like childbirth and death is like being reborn. This reading fits the metaphorical scheme of the dialogue much better than the idea that life is like a disease. Socrates has argued that death and life 'are born' from one another: the whole argument for immortality from opposites is framed in the language of birth and generation.
The Phaedo is closely paralleled by another Platonic dia- logue: the Symposium is set at a drinking-party, while the Phaedo is set around Socrates' final drink. Near the end of the
Symposium, Socrates' teacher, Diotima, makes an explicit com- parison between the generation of children from the body and the generation of truth from the soul. Elsewhere, too, Plato's Socrates compares himself to a midwife who helps bring to birth the ideas of other people without giving birth himself (Theatetus, i48e-i5id). In the Phaedo, it is as if Socrates the midwife has finally managed to become fertile: he has given birth to his own truth, his own soul and his own death.
One count against this interpretation is its originality. Perhaps the reason that nobody before me has read Socrates' death as a kind of childbirth is because the idea is far-fetched. But it is also possible that this interpretation has never been considered before because most of Plato's readers have been men. There have been, as we shall see, an enormous number of different responses to the dying Socrates in the course of the 2,400 years that divide us from Plato. But almost all these responses assume that the ideal death must be, in some essential way, masculine.
Socrates hardly obeys his own injunction to his friends: 'Keep quiet!' He does not shout, but he cannot stop talking, even in death. His chattering is, one might think, just like a woman. But Socrates' self-control, his calmness, his rational- ity, his physical courage: all are usually understood as male, not female, attributes. Plato makes the dying Socrates both masculine and feminine; he takes on himself all the powers of a woman, as well as the powers of a man. Later writers have to work hard to claim Socrates' death as an entirely masculine ideal. It is worthwhile pointing to the gender ambiguities in Plato's account of Socrates' death, because the idea that truth is a woman, and that the lovers of truth, 'philosophers', must be men, continues to haunt our own culture - even when we hope to deny the relevance of gender altogether.
'A GREEK CHATTERBOX': THE DEATH OF SOCRATES IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The Romans had serious doubts about whether the dying Socrates could be a moral example for their own culture. In the middle of the second century bc, one prominent Roman statesman called Socrates 'a big chatterbox who tried to make himself the tyrant of his country, to dissolve its customs, and to entice its citizens into forming opinions contrary to law and order' (Plutarch, Life of Cato). The speaker, Cato the Censor (also known as Cato the Elder), was a prominent defender of good old Roman values who felt that the state needed to be defended against all foreign influences - espe- cially Greek philosophers like Socrates.
Romans viewed the dying Socrates within a matrix of spe- cifically Roman cultural preoccupations. The most important of these were political commitment, violence, masculinity, theatricality, and the relationship of contemporary Roman reality to the fantasy-world of Greek literature and philoso- phy.
The Romans always looked back to the Greeks with a certain amount of wariness. They had no native philosophi- cal tradition of their own and many Romans suspected that
Greek philosophy was essentially unmanly and unpat- riotic. These suspicions centred on the figure of the dying Socrates. As Cato remarked, Socrates was a 'chatterbox': he died talking and he died of talking. Rome was a fiercely mili- taristic and macho culture in which physical violence and physical courage were of the utmost importance. Socrates' tendency to babble was hardly appropriate for any man, let alone a hero. Cato's term hints at a fear that will haunt all Roman responses to Socrates: perhaps he talked just for love of the sound of his own voice. Socrates seemed to represent the pointless prattling which was typical of foreign intellec- tuals, and which contrasted with real action in the battlefield or the Forum.
Cato praised Socrates for only one thing and even that became a backhanded compliment: he dealt well with his truly horrible family. 'There is nothing to admire in Socrates,' Cato remarked, 'except that he was always kind and gentle with his shrewish wife and his stupid sons.' Plato's gadfly was more threatening to Roman values than the loyal married man depicted by Xenophon.