“How long will it take?”
“Before they decide? Only the gods know.
No trial lasts longer than a day, I know that.
Simon the cobbler went to watch the trial;
he’s friends with Sokrates.
I asked him to come by afterward and let us know.”
He picked up a lump of clay
and stepped sideways, facing me,
each of us at opposite sides of the table.
He bent forward, starting a ram’s head.
We worked together in the same rhythm,
folding and kneading and rocking the clay.
It was slave’s work, and beneath him,
but he kept at it,
finishing each cylinder,
tapping the ram’s nose against the table,
setting the cylinders in rows.
I knew why he stayed, and I was grateful.
Two hundred and eighty to two hundred twenty —
he’s guilty.
Now once again the philosopher speaks:
it is his right.
And also his risk: to suggest his own punishment;
What shall it be?
Too harsh and he’ll suffer, too light
and he’s likely to madden the crowd —
Catcalls and boos. He raises his hands. Hoarsely he speaks:
I am not angered, gentlemen of Athens, by what has happened: you have found me guilty. Actually, I’m amazed that the vote was so close. If just thirty votes had gone the other way, I would have been set free.
So what penalty do I deserve? Something good, gentlemen of Athens; a punishment that would fit the crime.
As you know, gentlemen, there is a banquet hall in the heart of the city, and famous Athenians — Olympic athletes and so on — are privileged to dine there for free. Most of these men are rich men, and don’t need free meals, but I do. Why shouldn’t I have my meals free, and sit in a place of honor? That would be justice: that’s the punishment I propose for myself. I know I have done no injustice to any man. So I’m not going to treat myself unjustly and say I deserve some harmful penalty.
No doubt someone will say, Sokrates, can’t you please just shut up and mind your own business? This is the hardest thing to make you understand. I can’t shut up. It would be disobedient to the god to mind my own business. The greatest good for a human being is to talk about ἀρετή, to ask questions and examine. A life without examination is not worth living.
As far as fines go, I could perhaps afford a hundred drachmas. My friends here — Plato and Krito, Kritobolus and Apollodorus — are willing to spend thirty times as much to set me free. So I propose three thousand drachmas as a fine; they have promised to pay for my freedom.
Shameless!
a hiss from the crowd,
a ripple of indignation:
This time the old man’s gone too far.
he’ll pay for his crimes.
Arrogant! what kind of thinker can equal the worth of an athlete?
Growing and swelling, the wrath of the mob:
Sokrates must die.
So I am to die. You haven’t gained much, gentlemen. I am seventy years old; I would soon have died without your help. On top of that, you will be found guilty of killing Sokrates, a wise man.
My daimon, who often stops me from doing what I mean to do, said nothing when I came here this morning. It didn’t stop me from saying the things I’ve said. So I think that probably what has happened is a good thing, and death may be something good. Either death is like not existing at all, or it is a change, a migration of the soul.
Now if death is like sleep without dreaming, death will be an unspeakable gain. For eternity will be like a single night.
But if to die is to go somewhere else, and all the dead exist in that place, what greater good could there be than to join them? It would be amazing to meet with the heroes of old and talk to them. What would I give to question Agamemnon, who led his vast army into Troy? or Odysseus? or countless other men and women of fame? It would be almost too much happiness to meet them.
At any rate, in the House of Hades, they don’t kill people for asking questions.
You, too, gentlemen, must look forward to death. Be of good hope. Fix your mind on this one belief: Nothing can harm a good man, whether living or dead. Nor are his affairs neglected by the god.
I bear no grudge against those who have condemned me. Only grant me one favor. When my sons are grown, if they put money or anything else before goodness, question them! Rebuke them and remind them of their souls!
But now it is time to depart, I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.
EXHIBIT 16
Votive offering to Asklepios, terra-cotta, fourth century BCE, found on the southwest slope of the Akropolis.
Asklepios may have been a real person who lived around 1200 BCE and practiced medicine. By the time of Sokrates, Asklepios was considered the son of Apollo and had risen to the status of a god. He was able to heal the sick and even to bring the dead back to life.
The person who gave this clay brick to the temple evidently suffered from an eye ailment. Temples to Asklepios are full of clay representations of body parts: legs, hands, breasts, and internal organs. Many are carved with inscriptions that praise the god for his healing powers.
On his deathbed, the philosopher Sokrates instructed his friend Krito to sacrifice a white cockerel to Asklepios. The sacrifice of a rooster was often performed after an act of healing.
They didn’t kill him for a month.
Every year a ship is sent to Delos
bearing seven youths and seven maidens,
in memory of the fourteen Athenians
who were sent to feed the cannibal Minotaur.
Theseus, Prince of Athens,
threaded the maze and slaughtered the monster.
His ship is still docked in the harbor. It’s ancient,
patched so often down the years,
there’s not a splinter of the old wood left.
But once a year, the ship is crowned with flowers
and sets sail for Delos.
From the time the garlands of spring flowers
are lashed to the mast
to the day when the ship comes back,
it’s a holy time. The city has to be pure.
No bloodshed. No man, no matter how guilty, is put to death.
So Sokrates was in prison till the ship came back.
When the time came, he’d drink hemlock:
a poison that turns a man to stone
and stops his breath.
It was better than what might have been.
He could have been strapped to a plank,
garroted, trapped in a pit.
Phaistus was good to me. He told me I could visit the prison.
I didn’t want to. I wished Phaistus
would forbid me to go —
though it wouldn’t have stopped me.
I’d have still gone. But I was afraid to be with a man
who was doomed to die.
The idea made my heart race and my hair rise up,
as if death might be catching.
Zosima gave me a new-baked loaf;
it wasn’t very big, but it was hot.
The jailer let me in. I wasn’t the only one who’d come.
Sokrates sat among his friends —
he was sitting on a bed. Someone must have brought it there
and set it up. His legs were shackled.
He sat with a lyre across his knees.
I didn’t know he played the lyre.
I felt like a fool, standing there with my loaf;
he didn’t see me right away,
but when he did —
“Rhaskos! Come and serve as my judge;
I’ve been setting verses to music, a fable of Aesop.
See what you think!”
I didn’t know what to think.
He seemed merry. He p
lucked the lyre, and I tried to listen.
The song was about the King of the Apes —
who tore a man to pieces for telling the truth.
Sokrates sang it lustily, though his voice was scratchy;
the tune was one he’d made up himself.
“So, Rhaskos! what do you think of my music?
I’ve sometimes heard a voice inside me whisper
that I ought to practice the arts.
I’ve never worried about it,
because what art is greater than philosophy?
But now that I’m about to die, I see;
I ought to have spent more time making music.
I must go on learning, even as I grow old —
Do you like my song?”
“I don’t know, Sokrates.
I don’t know much about music.
It sounds all right to me.”
The men laughed. I felt myself get red.
“You’re an honest fellow, Rhaskos,
not a flatterer. Stay that way.
I remember the first day we met,
you looked at me and said, ‘Honestly, Sokrates, I don’t know.’
I knew right then I liked you.”
He remembered —
but that was the last time he spoke to me that day.
His grown-up friends were there, and they’d brought wine.
They talked about music,
passed the lyre back and forth, singing verses by Homer —
I edged over; left my loaf on the bed.
I muttered that I had to go to work.
I was luckier the second time.
He was alone, asleep.
Lying flat, he looked old and maybe sick,
clutching his cloak like a blanket;
his skin was blotched and purplish,
ribbed and damp.
He had crusts of yellow crud
in the corners of his mouth.
He shifted in his sleep, squirmed against his shackles,
grumbled;
then his eyes opened
and they were clear.
“Rhaskos. My friend.”
That was the best moment.
“Does your master know you’re here?”
“He said I could come.”
“Good.”
He sat up and folded his cloak around his shoulders;
he looked more like himself then,
not like a sick man under a blanket.
He eased his legs over the side of the bed,
rubbed his thighs, and grunted a little.
His ankles had welts where the shackles chafed.
I pointed. “Do they hurt?”
“What? Oh, those. They’re not too bad.
Remember what I told you, Rhaskos —
Men view pain as the greatest of evils,
but they are mistaken. The body feels a sharp pain,
or an acute pleasure, and mistakes those feelings for reality.
Remember: pleasure is not the same as goodness,
and the pain I suffer is no great evil.”
I racked my brains for something to say.
“I don’t have any food this time. No loaf.”
“Just as well. My kind friends bring too much —
savories and treats, things I can’t digest.
I’m not used to all that food,
it’s charming of them, of course.
My wife comes every day.
She brings what I’m used to: plain bread or porridge.
It’s good of her to come.
All this” — he spread his hands,
wiggled his toes to show off his shackles —
“upsets her.
She’s fond of me in her own way.”
He looked at me sideways, a glint in his eye.
“Have you come to hear me sing?”
“No.” I said it too fast. I didn’t want to hear him sing.
All I could think of was that he was going to die.
At last I said, “There’s a story you used to tell —
I heard part of it once, in the Agora.
I couldn’t stop to listen. I never heard the end.
It was about a cave.
There were some men trapped inside a cave . . .
What happened? Did they ever get out?”
“Ah, Rhaskos! that wasn’t a story.
It’s an idea I have, a metaphor:
Imagine a group of men,
shackled — as I am now —
held captive, inside a cave — ”
“Like the miners in the silver mines?”
That was how I’d imagined them:
trapped men buried alive in the dark.
“Who caught them and chained them up?
Were they slaves?”
“No, no, they weren’t slaves!
It isn’t a true story. It isn’t a story at all.
I wonder what you’ll make of it. Listen.
“Suppose there were a cave —
and the people inside spent their whole lives there.
They’d never seen the sun or the sky;
They were shackled, held in place,
so they always faced the back wall;
and behind them was a fire — ”
“Close enough to burn them?”
“No. Behind them, but at a distance.
Sometimes animals and men
passed between the fire and the people in the cave,
casting shadows on the wall.
Suppose you were there, Rhaskos —
Suppose you stared straight ahead and saw the shadows move.
Suppose you saw the shadow of a horse, for example.
What would you think?”
“I’d be thinking of how to get out.
I’d be worried about starving to death.”
“No, no! Suppose you had plenty of food;
suppose you were used to the cave.
Remember, you’ve spent your whole life there;
you’d be used to the dark.
From time to time, you’d see those passing shadows.
What would you think of them?”
He opened his eyes very wide —
he often did that when he asked a question.
I clasped my knees and tried to think.
It flashed through my mind: this might be the last chance we had
to speak together. I wanted to tell him
how much it meant, the way he talked to me,
and didn’t make me feel stupid.
There was so much I wanted to say,
I felt the pressure of those words inside my throat.
At the same time, there was a picture in my mind:
that dark cave
and the restless shadows, fire-lit.
“I’d be curious. I’d want to know what made the shadows — ”
“Would you?”
I thought harder, deeper. “No . . .
Maybe I wouldn’t be!
I’d just see shapes —
they’d be like painted designs, coming and going.
They wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
They wouldn’t seem real. I might think they were spirits . . .
If I’d spent my whole life underground —
if I’d never seen the sun —
I might not know what a shadow was —
I wouldn’t know a shadow was a shadow!”
He was nodding, smiling.
I felt the familiar excitement.
I wasn’t stupid. He was pleased with me.
“And what if one day you were unshackled
and dragged toward the light?
Past the fire, out into the blazing sun?”
“I’d like that.”
“Would you? Or would your eyes sting,
would you plunge and kick and try to get back underground?”
He flapped his hands to mimic me kicking.
I laughed. “I’d still want to get out!
Maybe the sun would blind me at first;
my eyes would water —
I might like moonlight better than the sun,
nighttime better than day —
but in time, my eyes would get strong.
I’d start to see real things. Maybe one day I’d see a horse —
a real horse —
and I’d think, I’ve seen that shape before.
That noble head, the mane flowing like water — ”
“But this time, you’d see more than the shadow;
you’d see strength
and depth, and color,
and power.”
“I’d see a real horse! I’d be crazy with wonder!
Maybe later, I could ride it —
You can’t ride a shadow.”
“No, you can’t.
You imagine my story well.”
“Then it’s a story? But where’s the ending?
A story is supposed to have an ending.”
“Perhaps you’ll find the ending one day.
Perhaps I will. Soon.
Perhaps I’ve been living in a shadow-world,
and I’ll come to see the real world. Wisdom —
truth —
absolute beauty.
I’ve been waiting and searching all my life.”
I wanted to shake him.
“You sound like you’re looking forward to death!
Aren’t you even angry?”
“What, because I have to die?
Rhaskos, I’m seventy years old.
I should be a fool, pitying myself
because at long last, I have to die.
They say hemlock’s quick.
I won’t go blind, or deaf,
or forgetful, as some old men do. There isn’t time.”
There wasn’t any more time, because just then, the jailer came in,
with a woman and a boy. The boy was sturdy,
broad-nosed, older than me.
I thought he was one of Sokrates’s pupils,
but he stared at me, unsmiling;
I stared unsmiling back. He didn’t like me being there,
the same way I didn’t like him being there.
He didn’t want to share his father.
That’s how I knew who he was.
The woman kept her veil close;
only her eyes showed: a glance like a hawk’s.
She didn’t come right out and say, What are you doing here?
He’s no kin of yours! Get out! She didn’t have to.
I said, “I have to go,” and I went.
The last time I saw him, I saw him die.
The sun was setting. It was crowded in the cell.
Amber and Clay Page 27