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Was Socrates Unwise to Take the Hemlock?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Albert Anderson
Albert Anderson
Affiliation:
Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota
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Extract

It is suitably ironic that Socrates' classic submission to Athenian injustice some centuries before Christ provides, in the face of contemporary criticism of traditional education, amazing relevance for our time. Does citizenship make it immoral to defy the injustices of one's country?

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , July 1972 , pp. 437 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1972

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References

1 Unless I note it otherwise, all textual references are to the Loeb Classical Library.

2 Translation by Church, F. J., in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, The Library of Liberal Arts (The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1956)Google Scholar.

3 Notice the many Platonic rehearsals of Socrates' justification in Phaedo (63–69: “I will try to make a more convincing defense than I did before the judges”), Theaetetus (173–176), Gorgias (474–480: “It is better to suffer wrong than do it”), and Republic (VI, 487–497). If these have any one theme in common, it is this: the enemy of reason is emotion. Hence the true dialectic is there, not between private and public morality, the individual and the state, ideal vs. real, etc. However, an analysis of the various accounts cannot be given in the scope of the present essay.

4 Translation mine.