But Socrates was perhaps the most popular dying pagan of them all, at least for the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Until the time of the French Revolution, the death of Socrates was a cultural obsession all over Europe, Britain and America. In England, Joseph Addison considered writing a play about Socrates before settling on Cato - whose patriotic self-disembowelling was often seen as an alternative model of the ideal death. Dramatic representations of the death of Socrates multiplied: in France there were no fewer than three plays called La Mort de Socrate in the space of six years, between 1759 and 1764.
One obvious explanation for this flurry of interest in Socrates' death is that the dominant sources had changed. Ficino translated the whole of Plato into Latin, but it was difficult to find vernacular versions of most of the dialogues. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Xenophon and Diogenes Laertius were becoming much better known. But in the eighteenth century, far more people were reading
Plato's accounts of the last days of Socrates - the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. One of Diderot's earliest works was a translation of the Apology into French, which Rousseau used for his own study of the Apology. The new interest in the death of Socrates was a logical response to this change in source material.
Moreover, European experiences of death had changed radically at this time. Up until the early eighteenth century, most bodies were buried in town churchyards. But urban populations increased enormously around this time, and to deal with the vast numbers of the dead, large burial grounds were built out in the suburbs. Death thus became less visible in daily life. The death of Socrates fitted this newly distanced perspective on mortality in general, since it is a death that seems to deny the fact of mortality.
But neither textual nor social history can fully explain why the use made of Socrates' death in the mid-eighteenth century was so different from that of earlier ages. I would argue that at the time of the Enlightenment, this event was appropriated to serve a specific cultural need: as an image of the social life of the intellectual.
Paintings of the death of Socrates are rare before the eighteenth century, and the exceptions are strikingly dif- ferent from eighteenth-century versions of the theme. In one painting by an unknown follower of Caravaggio from the early seventeenth century (p. 64), Socrates is saying his last goodbye to his family. The youngest child stretches his arm towards his father, while his mother draws him away. Socrates himself seems to take no notice: all his attention is on higher things. The painting is a rare depiction of the human cost of a life lived for philosophy.
Charles Alfonse Dufresnoy's 1650 Mort de Socrate shows
13. In Charles Alfonse Dufresnoy's Mort de Socrate (1650), Socrates and his friends share a large, vaulted space with other prisoners, who are visible in the background lying on the floor. The man in the head-band who stands behind Socrates is presumably the executioner.
a dignified, well-covered-up old gentleman who sips the cup while his friends gesticulate and lament. The scene takes place in what is clearly an open-plan prison: there are other prisoners flopping down in the background, perhaps already dead from earlier hemlock draughts, while some sinister guards in antique helmets lurk by the gate. This painting reminds us that Socrates was by no means the only Athenian to die in prison. One of the friends points to Socrates as he lifts the cup: the suggestion is almost that, without the gesture, we would hardly notice this death among so many.
The Italian painter, writer and satirist, Salvator Rosa
14. Frangois Boucher's grisaille sketch shows Socrates lying back in a swirl of drapery, clutching his chest as the poison takes hold. We see little of his face, but his strong, sandalled foot is clearly visible, above the empty hemlock cup. Guards watch from the upper level, and disciples crowd round the master. The figures in the foreground may be noting down Socrates' last words - or perhaps sketching the composition.
(1615-73), painted a Death of Socrates which emphasises the master's poverty as well as his cleverness. A skinny, bright- eyed old Socrates smiles knowingly at a few shabby disci-
ples as he prepares to sip his last drink from a rough pewter
tumbler.
In the eighteenth-century versions of the scene, by con- trast, Socrates always gets his own private room and is always centre stage. By mid-century, the event had become immensely popular among painters, particularly in France; it was the topic for the Royal Academy grand prize in 1762. In most of these images, Socrates is old, ugly and very
15. In J. St-Quentin's Death of Socrates, which was entered for the 1762 Grand Prix, Socrates has drunk the hemlock, and seems about to topple from his seat. The round cup on the floor echoes the round prison window - recallingPlato's image of death as an escape from prison. The fetters which have been removed from Socrates'legs are also visible on the floor near hisfeet.
dead. The central question is the close-knit male social group, which depends - perhaps far too heavily - on this single, wrinkly, floppy old man. Socrates' body is usually heavily- bundled up, and his gaze does not meet the viewer directly. The paintings focus not on the personality of the dying man, but on the effect of his death on his friends.
All the artists who treated the topic were highly conscious of Plato's metaphor of life in the body as imprisonment. The physical prison, a prominent feature of eighteenth-century life and imagination, becomes a prototype for all life on earth. The round, barred prison window offers one means of escape, while the round, empty hemlock cup provides the other. The images echo the traditional iconography for the dead Christ lying in his mother's lap: these are secular pietas. Socrates has taught his disciples about the immortality of the soul, but it is clear that his body will not rise again.
David's painting of 1773 (on p. 13) is very different. Far more than any of his artistic predecessors, David makes Socrates look attractive. He inspires his followers by his shining intelligence and sexiness. The philosopher is shown in the moment of accepting the hemlock cup, when he is still at the height of his powers. The composition is focused on Socrates' torso - naked, muscular and fully lit - and on the twin gestures of his arms. The right reaches for death, while the left points to something beyond death. David's paint- ing is crystal clear, almost cartoon-like in the legibility of its action and its environment. But it is a painting about what happens beyond the frame.
The painting is, of course, a call to revolution. David seems to have imagined his Socrates as a classical forebear for his good friend Robespierre. The invisible world he points to could be death, but it could also be the new France, the future time when heads less sturdy than that of Socrates will rightly roll. David, much more than any of the previous painters, allows room in his painting for spaces beyond the immediately foregrounded composition of the master and his followers: the painting, like its central figure, gestures both backwards (to the wife and family in the distant back- ground, going up the stairs; or to the old world in which values like family might mean anything) and also to the new world of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality, for which we should all be delighted to die. David's painting of Socrates is answered by David's own Death of Marat of 1793, where the revolutionary hero is slumped and solitary, murdered in his - extraordinarily vertical - bath.