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By Root 1725 0

rigid, once it is dead, it will no longer need dousing. Unlike those other Greeks – witness Electra and Antigone, whose hearts were broken because their brother’s body lay outside the city walls, and unwashed – Socrates continues his atypical interest not in the corporeal superstructure, but in the soul within. It is the moment of transition that Socrates anticipates, not death itself. The fate of his physical body seems irrelevant. He has watched those pounding plays of absolute tragedy so popular throughout the fifth century BC. Works of art that drove home the horror of lying unburied. And yet, if his questions at the point of death reflect those he has asked during life, it is what lies beyond the decaying, the turning to worms and bone, that occupies this man’s mind.

So Socrates is now ready to meet death. Family and friends are allowed back in, they are distraught. But Socrates is apparently serene.

And from now until the dying of the light the philosopher will talk, talk, talk.

He is as moderately sensual with his male companions as he has been throughout his life:

He stroked my head and gathered up the hair on the nape of my neck in his hand – he was in the habit of playing with my hair sometimes – and said, ‘Tomorrow, Phaedo, maybe you will cut off this lovely hair’21

Socrates recalls the Homeric heroes, reminding history, and those around him, how all Athenians were basted in an epic past. He quotes Homer, choosing lines that bring home to his friends that he is a mere mortal man, neither a hero nor a creature of ‘oak and rock’. The earth – that troublesome, beautiful orb which, as an ingenu philosopher, he argued was round – is turning. The sun is starting to sink, and at sunset Socrates must die.

And now it is time. The philosopher takes the cup, and looks, as is his manner, ‘directly’ at the jailor who has brought it to him. He asks if he should tip out a little libation. A dusty pool of hemlock. He prays.

Some in this period made the hemlock poison more palatable with herbs – dill was one recorded. Whatever the taste, this was a lethal brew. As planned, the philosopher serves himself the drug – the state likes it this way. Self-administration of the fatal dose will clear the body-politic of any miasma. This is not murder, it is state-sponsored suicide. The Athenians abhorred a messy death. The oozing, viscous, cloying and clinging liquids of the body deeply troubled the Greeks. This is why they strangled men to death, and although some varieties of hemlock can cause you to spew bile, to froth at the mouth, to piss and shit uncontrollably, poison hemlock is not one of them. Water hemlock attacks the central nervous system, but poison hemlock attacks the peripheral nervous system.22 If it was indeed poison hemlock that Socrates took, we can understand why he thanks Athens for giving him an ‘easy’ death.23

Socrates, throughout his life, has watched the dreadful dying of men and boys, women and children. He was there when humans slipped easily into barbarity and murdered countrymen, neighbours, family and friends. Dying in old age, surrounded by his best-loved, lying on a bed is, approximately, his fate.24 It is not a bad end to a good life. His lack of interest in whether his body is buried or burned is palpable. It is the moment of passing that has always fascinated him. Perhaps this is why he covers his face as he dies, to experience this greatest of all journeys alone.

It is the effects of poison hemlock that the prison official of Plato’s Phaedo seems to demonstrate to Socrates’ companions.

And passing upwards in this way, he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And then again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. The chill had now reached the region about the groin …25

Poison hemlock does indeed attack the extremities first, often damaging the peripheral nerve, a massive single cell, up to 4 feet long, that runs from the spine to the toes. There is a terminal seizure as the brain is starved of oxygen. This would normally be a violent spasm, but by this