Emily Wilson
THE DEATH OF SOCRATES
Hero, villain, chatterbox, saint
247pp. Profile Books. £15.99.
978 1 86197 762 5

Once every schoolchild knew the tale of the death of Socrates. The grieving friends, the sage’s matter-of-fact reports of how far his paralysis had progressed, the unstinting discussion of philosophy, and the final reminder of his debt to the gods before he fell silent: though a staple of moral education forty years ago, these are things now less well-known, perhaps less relevant. Emily Wilson’s book The Death of Socrates is the latest in Profile’s series reassessing historical moments, following reappraisals of King Alfred, of the assassination of Julius Caesar, and of Guernica; the summer of 1967 and the 1916 siege at the Dublin GPO will be treated in forthcoming volumes. A professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has written a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding Socrates’ execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock; the probable historical reasons for his trial and judgment; and the ways in which later ages – from Socrates’ immediate successors among the Greeks, through the Romans, Christian apologists, Renaissance thinkers, Enlightenment sages and anxious moderns – have understood the death of Socrates. Her style is engagingly straightforward and inclusive. In short punchy sentences, she suggests that her readers will learn “how this event has been recycled, reinterpreted and re-evaluated . . . . You too must find your own vision of Socrates”. At times, her tone has the deliberate simplification of a freshman lecture course; yet, while the book wisely takes no prior knowledge for granted, it is scrupulous in drawing attention to differences of academic opinion.

Plato’s is the accepted account; what we didn’t learn about in school was Xenophon’s version of Socrates, a dullish wiseacre who gives banal advice about moderation, diet, exercise and self-control to a receptive populace. Only his wife, Xanthippe, is unappreciative of his common-sense views. Wilson engages too with the Socrates of Aristophanes, a fraudulent, word-chopping boffin, whose satirical depiction in The Clouds provides an excellent introduction to Socratic philosophy. Under the headings “Knowledge and Ignorance”, “Socratic Irony”, “Wisdom Is Not For Sale”, “Happiness, Choice and Being Good”, Wilson explains the essentials of Socrates’ credo. At the same time, she shows how Plato’s account of them dovetails with the charges laid against Socrates by the Athenian state: charges of failing to worship the city’s gods, introducing new deities and corrupting the young. Wilson deftly lays bare the political tensions in Athens in the aftermath of the unsuccessful war against Sparta when its democracy was in a precarious state. Anxiety was sparked by Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades, the playboy who had profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries and thus had probably incurred the wrath of the gods. Wilson shows very clearly how Socrates’ strangeness, his notorious ugliness, and his practice of a profession normally associated with foreigners, all combined to make him a troubling figure for the ordinary Athenian.

Socrates did not need to die. He conceded that a fine might be appropriate punishment for the charges against him, but his “supercilious and enraging” manner seems to have provoked the jury to vote for capital punishment. Once judgment was passed, he might have escaped into exile, but he chose to remain and obey the laws of the state, demonstrating once again the foolishness of the citizenry and his own wisdom in thus curtailing the debilities of old age. Wilson’s close reading of Plato’s account suggests interestingly, if not altogether persuasively, that Socrates’ last words, the reminder to Crito that he owes a cock to Asclepius, the god of medicine and of obstetrics, signal the philosopher’s final paradox: “dying is like childbirth and death is like being reborn”. For some Romans, Socrates talked too much while dying a rather comfortable death. According to Plutarch, Cato the Elder called him “a big chatterbox”; the painless demise was contrasted with the hideous suicide of Cato the Younger. As an explicit act of political protest, inspired by Socrates, Cato stabbed himself till his innards extruded; after his wound had been sewn up, he tore it open again and ripped out his bowels. This scene is illustrated, along with numerous versions of Socrates’ end.

Early Christian writers often considered Socrates alongside Jesus; Justin Martyr (first century AD) asserts his conviction that Christianity was the culmination of Socrates’ teaching. For Tertullian, on the other hand, Socrates’ gentle death marks his Stoicism as inferior to the faith and courage of Christian martyrs.

The last two chapters of Wilson’s book are, inevitably, a bit of a gallop. She discusses the revived interest in the death of Socrates in pre-Revolutionary France, and in the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Brecht and Derrida. Finally we arrive at some terrible-sounding recent novels. In one, Socrates is dragged out of Limbo to approve the principles of the Founding Fathers of America; in another, time-travel allows an idealistic student to try to reverse the events of 399 BC. Fittingly, perhaps, Emily Wilson’s book ends with the comic and ironic version of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Tod des Sokrates. In this piece Socrates dies silently and enigmatically, leaving the last word to Xanthippe. She asserts that Socrates’ truth was knowing how to be himself, rather than, like all other men, merely acting a part. The Death of Socrates is sometime populist – as in the suggestion that Xenophon’s Socrates would now be running motivational seminars on self-empowerment – but always informative and enjoyable.

Carolyne Larrington is Tutor in Old and Middle English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Her most recent book is King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and her sisters in Arthurian tradition, published last year.

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