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Why Did The Athenians Kill Socrates?
On the life and death of Socrates
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The hour of departure has arrived,
and we go our ways -
I to die, and you to live.
Which is better God only knows.
~ Plato, The Apology of Socrates
A great mystery shrouds the death of Socrates.
Indeed, getting any kind of fix on the life and death of the philosopher is hard. He did not believe in writing things down, and feared, it is said, that a reliance on written letters would dull the mind and induce forgetfulness. Neither did the Greeks yet see the value in recording things for the future, even if Herodotus, sometimes called the father of history, began writing his Histories during the lifetime of Socrates.
All we know of him is thus the little that survives from the words of others.
Plato, his student, cast Socrates as a character in many of his texts. So did Xenophon, though both he and Plato were friends of the great philosopher and hardly the most unbiased of sources. Plato, of course, later used the character of Socrates as a mouthpiece for his…
