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.