The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [191]
The reply that comes back is elegant but immutable. All his life Socrates has lived by Athenian laws. How could he possibly now turn his back on them?
SOCRATES [quoting the Laws and Commonwealth of Athens as if they are talking to him]: Are you not intending by this thing you are trying to do, to destroy us, the Laws, and the entire state, so far as you can? Or do you think that state can exist and not be overturned, in which the decisions reached by the courts have no force but are made invalid and annulled by private persons?13
As befits Socrates’ idiosyncratic character, escape is simply not an option.
If I am condemned now, it will clearly be my privilege to suffer a death that is adjudged by those who have superintended this matter to be not only the easiest but also the least irksome to one’s friends.14
How, in any case, do you escape from a city that sleeps lightly? Bribery, violence, subterfuge, all of these things might have been essential. This is not Socrates’ style. But then again, maybe the jailers had given Crito a nod and a wink. Perhaps the hushed conversation as Socrates slept implied some complicity with the escape plan. Possibly Athens is already regretting her decision. Maybe Socrates could have slipped away with very little fuss, while the Eleven turned a blind eye. Remember the democracy called back the ship that was beating through the water to massacre the Mytilenaeans: Athena might have heaved a sigh of relief if Socrates had escaped – no one could then accuse the democracy of a blood-lust that matched that of the oligarchs, and the Spartans, and the juntas of the Thirty.
But in any case, Socrates is having none of it. He does not want to suffer what Homer describes as the ‘creeping humiliations’ of old age. Arguing that it seems ludicrous for an old man to be scared of dying, and that naturally, as always, he has to do what is right, and obey the Laws of Athens, Socrates stays.
SOCRATES: Ought we in no way to do wrong intentionally, or should we do wrong in some ways but not others? Or, as we often agreed in former times, is it never right or honourable to do wrong? Or have all those former conclusions of ours been overturned in these few days, and have we old men, seriously conversing with each other, failed all along to see that we were no better than children? Or is not what we used to say most certainly true, whether the world agree or not? And whether we must endure still more grievous sufferings than these, or lighter ones, is not wrongdoing inevitably an evil and a disgrace to the wrongdoer? Do we believe this or not?
CRITO: We do.
SOCRATES: Then we ought not to do wrong at all.15
And so when a messenger brings news that the Delian ship has indeed landed, Socrates is to be found, not scrambling across some rocky Attic landscape on his way to a waiting boat, but sitting quietly, in his cell, in the Agora. The Eleven give Socrates’ jailor the instruction to start making preparations for his death.
Execution in Athens would normally (for slaves and common criminals) entail a ‘bloodless crucifixion’. Bloodless to prevent pollution. But it was still a hideous way to die. With the victim strapped to a board by his arms, legs and neck, the iron noose was slowly pulled tighter and tighter until he was garrotted. But for Socrates hemlock was in store.16
Killing the philosopher
The hemlock (the ‘poison hemlock’ variety almost certainly, although ‘water hemlock’, also poisonous, would have been available at this time) was ground up with a pestle and mortar. Opium might have been added to lessen the severity of the venom’s symptoms – convulsions and muscle cramp. The opium poppy had been used extensively in Greece as a medicine and a duller of pain since the Bronze Age; carbonised seeds have been