The last day of Socrates, told by a young man who was in the room, ending with the cup of poison at sunset.
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The death of Socrates. Phaedo of Elis, who was there, tells how the last day went: friends crowd the cell, the talk turns to whether the soul survives the body, and at sunset the jailer brings the cup. The Phaedo is in the press now and not yet readable here. A gift from you helps open it.
Plato wrote it perhaps fifteen or twenty years after the execution in 399 BC. He is careful to say he was not there himself: listing the friends who were present, Phaedo adds that Plato, he thinks, was ill. The Greek calls the poison simply the pharmakon, the word Greeks used for a medicine, a drug and a spell alike.
Socrates calls philosophy a practice for dying, and compares himself to the swans, which sing their best song before death because they are going to their god, Apollo. His last words are a reminder to Crito: 'we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it, and don't forget.' Asclepius was the god of healing, and readers have argued for two thousand years about what Socrates thought he had been cured of.
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