After a clamorous trial in which the philosopher Socrates
was accused of corrupting the youth and believing in novel gods, the Athenian
jury of Five Hundred declared him guilty by a narrow margin (56% in modern
estimates). Following the conviction, both sides proposed punishments. Socrates
suggested that he be forced to dine in the Prytaneum and hold a position in
high society, which would be the opposite of his philosophy of calling all
norms into question. His accusers, representing business concerns, religious laymen,
and other philosophers, argued that Socrates should be compelled to suicide by
drinking hemlock.
This form of execution was traditional in ancient culture, where
there was worry about reprisals from the gods if an innocent person was
accidentally executed. Instead, the legally guilty would kill himself and then receive
a more noble place in the afterlife for taking personal responsibility. On a
practical level, however, it was customary for the guilty party to flee town
before nightfall and go into exile, thus freeing the city of nonviolent social
misfits. Following this understanding, the jury sentenced Socrates to death on
a wide margin of 72%.
Socrates’s longtime friend Crito begged Socrates to make an
escape. Socrates, however, was determined to follow the letter of the law, even
if it was against the unspoken spirit, as was outlined in a dialogue between
them written by Socrates’s student Plato. Surrounded by many of his friends and
favorite students, Socrates drank the hemlock made from leaves of the Conium
plant by a city official. While the philosophers debated and his friends began
mourning, Socrates described to them how his feet had gone numb, not even
feeling a pinch. The cold feeling crept up his legs toward his heart, where it
was expected to kill him.
As he struggled to take his final breaths, he called out, “Crito,
we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.” There is
much debate about whether Socrates’s last words were a reminder to settle his
books so that there could be not even an unpaid medical bill against him, or
perhaps a reference to the healer demi-god granting immortality to his words, or
if it was a suggestion to attempt a resurrection as the mythological Asclepius
himself had done. Said to be the son of Apollo, Asclepius was the first
physician and founded medicine, but when he cured death itself by resurrecting
Hippolytus after his horses threw him, the gods struck Asclepius down for
impudence.
Whatever the meaning, Crito was not satisfied and asked for
Socrates to say something more, anything at all. Socrates then stopped
breathing.
Crito threw himself into an embrace of Socrates’s chest,
where he noticed that the old philosopher’s heart was still slowly beating. He
cried out that if Socrates would not take in breath, he would give it to him, and
blew into his mouth. The body did not reflexively deflate, so Crito pushed the
air out from the torso and breathed again.
The young philosophers were divided, some believing Crito to
have gone mad, while others were fascinated. While Crito worked, they examined
the body and found that Socrates’s heart continued to beat and, in fact, grew
stronger rather than stopping. Crito became exhausted, and soldier-scholar Xenophon,
who had just returned from a disastrous campaign in Persia, stepped up to continue
the artificial breathing. Over the course of the next two days, the students
took turns breathing for Socrates, although he largely breathed for himself
through the last night. After sleeping several hours more, Socrates awoke.
Athens was shocked. The official who had given the poison
was put on trial and proved with witnesses that he had given the appropriate
dose. Socrates had fulfilled his execution and yet lived. A cult swiftly broke
out around him as a miraculous return to life, and his philosophy students
found themselves as priests to a swarming congregation.
There are few recorded words from Socrates after his
near-death. Descriptions from Plato paint him as sickly and slow to respond, likely
due to at least some brain-damage during his low-oxygen state. He survived for
at least a year more before passing away more conventionally.
Yet Socrates lived on through his apparent apotheosis. Those
who had accused him either quickly converted or were hounded out of Athens,
prompting many of the “new gods” or “daimons” Socrates was convicted of
worshiping to become accepted. These were explained by Plato and others as
forces of nature and spirit. Study of natural philosophy flourished,
incorporating a great deal of numerology from previous thinkers such as
Pythagoras. Soon Socratics developed statistics, economics, and biology, with a
special emphasis in medicine.
Many students under Antisthenes broke away to create their
own Cynic cult, rejecting many of Plato’s diamons that directed human activity.
The more material-directed thought spread to the fledgling Roman Republic
through the Greek colony at Syracuse, where the philosopher Archimedes had
applied many principles into engineering. Using enormous war engines and efficient
logistics, the Romans conquered Greece despite its vast wealth in a social
system that knew almost no poverty.
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In reality, Socrates died in self-execution and swiftly
became a martyr. His “Socratic method” of admitting ignorance, asking questions
to reveal foundational truth, and then building logically from there became the
groundwork for the Western style of philosophy, which would be expanded through
his students, especially Plato for the generations to today.
Hemlock is wildly poisonous to animals, its alkaline
structure blocking the neuromuscular activity of the respiratory system.
Although the victim would die after ingesting seven or eight leaves or even
fewer seeds, it has been shown that an artificial respirator can provide a cure
by breathing until the poison is worked out of the patient’s system.
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