I taught a Greek class many years ago on Plato’s Crito, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity (at last!) to write something about this dialogue over at Lapham’s Quarterly. In my new essay, I write about Socrates’ belief that “living among irreverent chaos is worse than dying under the rule of law” and consider more broadly why Socrates, “history’s paragon of free thinking,” capitulates to his unjust sentencing to death-by-hemlock. Here’s a little sip from the poisonous cup, but do go over to Lapham’s to gulp the rest down:

Bested only by Jesus, Socrates is the most celebrated of the West’s condemned men. His story is familiar to readers of Plato’s Apology, an account of Socrates’ self-defense at his 399 BC trial, and to viewers of Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 painting La Mort de Socrate: the Athenian gadfly was found guilty of corrupting the city’s young and straying from its approved theologies, crimes that earned him not a cross to bear but a cup to drink. But less familiar than these two forensic episodes—his courtroom sentencing and execution by hemlock about a month later—are the events that come between them.

So goes the wise but rarely followed advice. (See Eric Posner for some good reasons if you remain unconvinced.) Emerson’s take, through, is my favorite:

And why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not in the lonely place; his heart is in the market; he does not see; he does not hear; he does not think. But go cherish your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of solitude; then, will the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and they will gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that you may presently come into public. Such solitude denies itself; is public and stale. The public can get public experience, but they wish the scholar to replace to them those private, sincere, divine experiences, of which they have been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of place, but independence of spirit is essential, and it is only as the garden, the cottage, the forest, and the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to this, that they are of value. Think alone, and all places are friendly and sacred. The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still. Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, De Stael, dwell in crowds, it may be, but the instant thought comes, the crowd grows dim to their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon, — on vacant space; they forget the bystanders; they spurn personal relations; they deal with abstractions, with verities, with ideas. They are alone with the mind.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics” (1838)

Superlatively celebrated as a “stupendous metaphysical-visual exhalation” by New York, the Met’s exhibition of Micheangelo drawings (“Divine Draftsman and Designer”) closes today after a three-month run in town. In the exhibit’s last room, one finds a tall painting of Michelangelo-as-Moses by Federico Zuccaro (d. 1609) that suggests a view of the exhibition’s subject not simply as a draftsman of the divine but as a draftsman holy himself:

During my last visit, I noticed a Latin epigram underneath Zuccaro’s painting, which reminds me a little of Raphael’s in the Pantheon. Pictured up top, it reads as follows:

Dvm pingis vitam Michaeli Zvccare reddis

Teque una eternvm ne moriare facis

Or in (not especially felicitous) English:

While you paint, Zuccaro, you restore the life of Michael[angelo]

and along with him, you fashion yourself imperishable to avoid dying

A bit hopeful (at least for Zuccaro), but also notably heavy in its slow, spondaic mourning. In fact, aside from the fifth foot of the hexameter and the second half of the pentameter—which require dactyls—the couplet uses spondees throughout.

As gloomy as we might take it, the epigram seems to have kept its promise of long-lasting fame for Zuccaro: there he was in the finale of a “metaphysical-visual exhalation,” enjoying some small portion of that draftsman’s divinity, if perhaps by association.