(186-94)
This does not sound much like the death of Socrates accord- ing to Plato's Phaedo. If Plato sanitised the real symptoms of hemlock poisoning, this would suggest that his version of Socrates' death is largely fictional, albeit based on a real event.
But the sceptical view has been convincingly challenged in a brilliant article by Enid Bloch. She shows that Plato gives a perfectly accurate description of Socrates' medical symp- toms in the last hours of life. The hemlock family of plants is a large one, including water hemlock, poison hemlock and 'fool's parsley' or lesser hemlock. They all look almost iden- tical. Whereas water hemlock attacks the central nervous system, producing seizures - as described by Nicander
poison hemlock works on the peripheral nervous system. Consequently, those who take it are affected just as Plato describes: they go gradually numb and then die - painlessly
once the paralysis affects the respiratory system or the heart.
The effects of poison hemlock are relatively unfamiliar to the modern medical profession, but they were much studied in the nineteenth century, when it was hoped that hemlock might offer a cure for cancer. One case closely paralleled the medical symptoms described in the death of Socrates. In 1845 the children of a poor Scottish tailor called Mr Gow kindly made a sandwich for their hungry father. They used what they thought was fool's parsley growing wild. But they had gathered poison hemlock by mistake. The man grew gradu- ally numb, losing the use of his legs, then his other limbs. His intellect remained unimpaired up to the very end. A few hours after eating the fatal sandwich, he was dead.
Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) still grows wild in parts of Europe and many states of North America, such as Ohio and Wyoming. It continues to cause difficulties for farmers, who have to try to keep their sheep and cattle from enjoying a Socratic death.
The Greeks did not have separate words for these botani- cally distinct plants, and there is no way of knowing, a priori, whether poison hemlock or water hemlock would be meant by the Greek koneion, or Latin cicutum. In any case, Plato avoids using a specific term: in the Phaedo, he always calls Socrates' poison simply to pharmakon, the 'drug', the 'poison' or the 'medicine'. The Athenians often mixed their poisons: it is quite possible that Socrates took some strain of poison hemlock cut with crushed opium from poppies, which would have increased the sedative effects of the poison.
There is, then, no reason to doubt the medical facts of Plato's description of Socrates' last hours. But even if true, it is still a good story. Thanks in large part to Plato, Socrates' death by hemlock has come to seem not merely the means by which he happened to be executed, but essential to the meaning of his life.
overview of this book
In the first chapter, I describe Socrates' philosophical teach- ing. I show why his beliefs seemed so dangerous to his con- temporaries - and why his philosophy remains challenging for us today. I suggest that the Athenians may have had good reasons to put this strange, radical thinker to death.
But Socrates' philosophy cannot give us a complete expla- nation for his execution. I turn, in the second chapter, to the social context of the trial. In order to make sense of Socrates' death, we need to know about the history of his time, his friends, his family, his enemies and his lovers. Socrates was killed not only for his beliefs, but also because of the people he knew.
In the third chapter, I move back to the question of sources. All our knowledge of Socrates is filtered through the words of others: we can have no unmediated access to the event itself. It is through his pupils Plato and Xenophon that the death of Socrates became a legend.
In the remaining four chapters, I evoke the later recep- tion of the death of Socrates, showing how this pivotal cul- tural event has been linked with significantly different sets of problems at different moments of our history.
First, I discuss the Romans and Greeks living under the Roman Empire. For them, the most pressing question raised by the death of Socrates was whether imitation of his calm, philosophical death was either possible or desirable in a world of violence and imperial power. Some Romans sus- pected that Socrates was just a Greek show-off, and many in this period wondered whether intellectuals have the moral right to cut themselves off from political engagement.
In the fifth chapter, I concentrate on parallels between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus. This comparison has been made repeatedly, throughout the Christian tradition. But the analogy was particularly important at two turning points in Christian history: in the second and third centuries ad, when the new cult was first establishing itself as the offi- cial religion of the Roman Empire, and in the Renaissance, when humanist scholars began to revive 'pagan' learning. At both these moments, debates about the relative moral values of paganism and Christianity were articulated through com- parisons between Socrates' peaceful, painless, confident death, unblessed by Christian revelation, and Jesus' agony on the Cross.
The eighteenth century is a climactic moment in the story of this book. It was a period of particularly intense interest in the death of Socrates. The philosopher who talked to his friends as he sipped hemlock seemed to resemble a fashion- able French intellectual or philosophe discussing the issues of the day in his salon or the coffee house. The death of Socrates became an image of the shared life of the mind, and pro- vided a locus for debates about the power and limitations of reason.
My final chapter takes the story into modern and post- modern times, describing the persistent contemporary inter- est in this ancient story. I suggest that there was a radical shift in perceptions of Socrates's death after the Enlightenment. It now represented not the pleasures of intellectual friendship, but the solitude of the intellectual who resists social con- formity. In the twentieth century, Socrates facing his judges was viewed through the lens of modern totalitarianism.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, our perspective seems to have changed again. The dying Socrates is assumed to be a hero for our times, but he is often found acceptable only in a radically simplified guise. Contemporary responses often show particularly deep discomfort with his actual death.
For example, Ronald Gross's Socrates' Way: Seven Keys to Using Your Mind to the Utmost (2002) provides a 'step- by-step' programme for self-improvement and worldly success, through such 'keys' as 'Know Thyself' and 'Speak the Truth' - mottoes supposedly inspired by Socrates. But the book deliberately underplays the end of its hero's story. Presumably people who are searching for greater success with colleagues and friends are not often willing to risk death to get it. One Amazon review of Gross's book warns us that Socrates failed to observe his own 'precepts' prop- erly, 'as his ultimate demise demonstrates'. All the more reason to hurry up and master those seven 'keys' as quickly as possible: otherwise you too could find yourself in a dank prison cell, sipping hemlock. In our times, a Socratic death
seems to have become not something to aspire towards but
something to avoid for as long as possible.
The relative lack of interest in Socrates' death in the past generation or so may be a symptom of our increasing dis- comfort with death in general. We no longer look for models of the ideal death. We hope, ideally, not to have to die at all. Failing that, we would rather not think about it. Our society may also be increasingly suspicious of ideology in general, as well as of many of the '-isms' with which the dying Socrates has been associated - including rationalism, liberalism, indi- vidualism and secularism.
This is all the more reason to turn back to the tradition and think again about why the death of Socrates has mat- tered in the past, and what meanings it might still hold for us today.