Person
Socrates
Athenian philosopher condemned in 399 BCE. Plato's Phaedo gives his last words as a request that Crito pay a cock owed to Asclepius.
Life
Socrates was an Athenian who spent his life in argument, in public, and wrote nothing that survives. In 399 BCE a jury condemned him on charges connected with impiety and with corrupting the young. The execution waited while the sacred ship was away at Delos. Plato’s Phaedo is the account of the last conversation and of the hemlock.
Jowett’s translation gives the last words as a debt: a cock owed to Asclepius, which Crito is asked to pay. A cock was a thank-offering to the god of healing. The idea that Socrates was calling death a cure is a later reading, not the wording of the line. The picture on this page is Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Plato says he was not in the room. The painting gathers a crowd anyway. It is a history painting, not a face drawn from life.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An eighteenth-century history painting, not a likeness from 399 BCE. Public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Image file. Public domain. See the Commons file for the reproduction status outside the United States.
