I Go To Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017].

The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. Hughes has also written a book on Socrates, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (review by Tom Holland).

Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This is one of the most famous speeches in the world. But is also one of the most difficult to comprehend fully, since two and half thousand years stand between ourselves and its original cultural context.

We do not know for sure what Socrates said when he was condemned to death: what we have is mediated through the writing of his pupil Plato. And it reads very much as the sort of speech he might have given if he had been unfortunate enough to find himself in similar circumstances. Socrates was also written about by Xenophon, but the Socrates who appears in his pages is sometimes difficult to recognise as the Socrates that Plato writes about. So there is an element of fiction in the portrait which Plato gives. This is not uncommon in ancient writing: Thucydides relates many speeches in his history of the Peloponnesian War which he could not have heard, and which were mostly not recorded in any detail. Instead, he relates what should have been said on the occasion, by those historical figures he was writing about. Plato was present at the time of Socrates’ trial, and did know what Socrates actually said. But unlike Socrates, he was often greatly circumspect, and by that means avoided conflict with the civic authorities in Athens. He is being circumspect here, and so the speech requires some decoding. 

In replying to his judges, Socrates does not explicitly refer to the content of the charges, which were that he showed disrespect for the gods, and that through his conversations with the young, which were sometimes about the gods, he corrupted them. His objection to their judgement is based on two things – their misunderstanding of what Socrates was doing with his life, and their lack of regard for truth.

Socrates does refer to God however, at the end of his speech, and without irony. Only God himself knows whether what Socrates says about being dead and living forever in eternity is true, or not. His impiety was to the gods of the Greeks, whose existence and reality he sometimes doubted in public, rather than ‘God’ in the singular. Plato likewise sometimes spoke of the Divine in the singular (ho theos) in his dialogues, but when talking about the plurality of the gods, he defers all questions of whether or not they are real to members of those Athenian families who claim to be descended from them, on the grounds that they should know the truth or otherwise of the claim better than anyone else.

It may seem slightly puzzling that, in the midst of a thoroughly polytheistic culture in Athens, with its plethora of gods, its many cults and priesthoods in the service of those gods, that both Socrates and Plato could speak of ‘god’ in the singular. Our difficulty here is the result of a modern understanding of the significance of polytheism, which sees the phenomenon as the inevitable precursor to monotheistic belief, which excludes other gods from consideration, or credibility. For modern scholars, polytheistic belief in ancient Greece was something which developed, higgeldy-piggeldy, out of a plethora of local and tribal deities, much embellished with myths about their lives and actions, which served important social functions, but which had no universal meaning, and were not rooted in a model of reality which embraced consideration of what the nature of reality itself might be, or what constitutes ‘truth’.

In this modern model of what polytheism was in Greece, gods could be moved from place to place because their functions and significances were adaptable to local social, ideological and political circumstances, and changes of fortune among noble families. They also could have many birthplaces, as Zeus did.

Yet a close reading of several of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates makes several appearances, often as the main protagonist, shows that two of the main concerns in these dialogues is the nature of reality itself, and what constitutes ‘truth’. The routes taken in each of the dialogues, and the language used to discuss these subjects, is different, but the same underlying theme is present. Socrates is addressing both of these issues in his final speech.

What is the nature of ‘reality itself’ as discussed in Plato’s dialogues? Scholars often represent Plato as having no doctrinal and unchanging beliefs in the course of his writing: however, we are told of the nature of reality in several places, and reality itself is described by Plato as the goal of those who ‘love wisdom’ (which is of course the literal translation of the term ‘philosophy’). It is given a name, ‘The Good.’ It is to be approached very gradually, in the mind alone, through many imperfect representations of what it is, until eventually it becomes possible to apprehend its nature. The philosopher then descends via the same chain of imperfect images, which possess less reality than reality itself (since they are by definition imperfect). Only by approaching what is ultimately real, and what is ultimately true, can true knowledge be acquired.

This is the ultimate source of the charge of impiety: for Socrates, the plethora of gods simply were imperfect representations of the singularity of the transcendent God. They might serve as approaches to the Divine, but he would be guilty of untruthfulness if he accorded them the same honour as he gave to the transcendent God.

We are told by Socrates himself, in one of Plato’s dialogues. that the nature of that ultimate reality has ‘no size, colour or form’, and is beyond all physical representation. It is not located anywhere in the physical world. Despite the inevitable difficulty in accessing it, Plato refers to it several times as ‘the one thing’ which should be the focus of human attention. By characterising it in this way, Plato is making an equation between death, the afterlife, the nature of reality, God, and eternity. They all transcend the world of the here and now.

When Socrates speaks of ‘eternity’, we read the use of the word as a literary convention, and as a metaphor, because we have no real understanding of the meaning of eternity in modern times. It is based on the concept of the plenum, which was once an important idea in philosophy.  It is the idea that behind the world of appearances, there exists a primordial fullness, which transcends day to day reality, and which is the ultimate source of all kinds of abundance, and all good things.

Scholars for the most part don’t associate this idea with Plato and Socrates, though they concede it is a key idea in later forms of Platonism.  But it is there. The concept of eternity used to have this technical substratum, which sees the physical world as being drawn from a level of reality where all things are possible, and all things which might exist, already exist as possibilities.

So when Socrates speaks of future conversations with the great men and the heroes of Greece, he is talking about travelling to a place where these heroes always live, because everything which can come to be is already present in eternity. Socrates does not know whether this understanding of eternity is true, but in any case, once he is dead he will be beyond the travails of earthly existence. 

The hardest thing for us to understand about this is that Socrates thought of his death in terms of a return to health, and consequently, that he regarded his physical existence as a form of ill-health.  For him, real existence is something which is elsewhere, and not here. Return to that transcendent existence he understood as a form of release from the tribulations of physical life. This is why he asked his followers to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, to mark his passing. 

Thomas Yaeger, September 30, 2017.