ut being so, for it is pretending to
understand what we know not. No man knows what death is, or whether it
be not our greatest happiness; yet all fear and shun it."

His pupil Plato stood up on the platform to defend him, and began, "O ye
Athenians, I am the youngest man who ever went up in this place--"

"No, no," they cried, with one voice; "the youngest who ever went down!"
They would not hear a word from him; and 280 voices sentenced the great
philosopher [Picture: Plato] to die, after the Athenian fashion, by being
poisoned with hemlock. He disdained to plead for a lessening of the
penalty; but it could not be carried out at once, because a ship had just
been sent to Delos with offerings, and for the thirty days while this was
gone no one could be put to death. Socrates therefore was kept in
prison, with chains upon his ankles; but all his friends were able to
come and visit him, and one of them, named Krito, hoped to have contrived
his escape by bribing the jailer, but he refused to make anyone guilty of
a breach of the laws for the sake of a life which must be near its close,
for he was not far from seventy years old; and when one of his friends
began to weep at the thought of his dying innocent, "What!" he said,
"would you think it better for me to die guilty?"

When the ship had come back, and the time was come, he called all his
friends together for a cheerful feast, during which he discoursed to them
as usual. All the words that fell from him were carefully stored up, and
recorded by Plato in a dialogue, which is one of the most valuable things
that have come down to us from Greek times. It was not Socrates, said
the philosopher, whom they would lay in the grave. Socrates' better
part, and true self, would be elsewhere; and all of them felt sure that
in that unknown world, as they told him, it must fare well with one like
him. He begged them, for their own sakes, never to forget the lessons he
had taught them; and when the time had come, he drank the hemlock as if
it had been a cup of wine: he then walked up and down the room for a
little while, bade his pupils remember that this was the real deliverance
from all disease and impurity, and then, as the fatal sleep benumbed him,
he lay down, bidding Krito not forget a vow he had made to one of the
gods; and so he slept into death. "Thus," said Plato, "died the man who,
of all with whom we were acquainted, was in death the noblest, in life
the wisest a