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Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?

Enid Bloch

Journal of the International Plato Society:The Trial and Execution of Socrates, edd. Thomas C Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Oxford University Press (2001)

Abstract

The closing pages of Plato’s Phaedo provide a stunning picture of the effects of poison upon the body of Socrates. Plato describes a slowly ascending paralysis, beginning in Socrates’ feet and creeping steadily up his legs toward his chest, with Socrates’ mind remaining clear until the end. Death arrives calmly and peacefully. It is a remarkable account, rich in emotive power and in clinical detail. But is it true?

Let us recall once again those final hours. After Socrates drank the poison, ‘he walked about and, when he said his legs were heavy, lay down on his back, for such was the advice of the attendant.’ The jailor then began to examine Socrates, much in the way a modern physician might do.



The man … laid his hands on him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. He said ‘No’; then after that, his thighs; 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, and uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said – and these were his last words – ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.’ ‘That,’ said Crito, ‘shall be done; but see if you have anything else to say.’ To this question he made no reply, but after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.

So vivid is this process of dying, most readers through the ages probably have accepted Plato’s account without question, its very attention to clinical detail sufficient evidence of its veracity. Yet it has hardly gone unchallenged. In the 1970’s the classicist Christopher Gill (‘The Death of Socrates’, Classical Quarterly, 23, 1973, pp. 25-8) and the pathologist William Ober (‘Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning?’,New York State Journal of Medicine, 77.1, Feb., 1977, pp. 254-8) suggested that Plato had deliberately distorted the truth for his own dramatic or philosophic purposes. Hemlock poisoning, they claimed, would have produced a far nastier and more violent end. Because Plato wished to portray the philosophic idea of the soul departing peacefully from the body, he needed to envision a quiet, dignified unfolding of symptoms.

Click here to read this article from the Journal of the International Plato Society





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