The Death of Socrates

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Why should we still care about a man who did little in his life except talk, and who drank poison in an Athenian prison in 399 bc - over 2,400 years ago?

Some stories shape the ways people think, dream and imagine. The death of Socrates has had a huge and almost continuous impact on western culture. The only death of comparable importance in our history is that of Jesus, with whom Socrates has often been compared. The aim of this book is to explain why the death of Socrates has mattered so much, over such an enormously long period of time and to so many different people.

The death of Socrates has always been controversial. The cultures of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain relevant not because we share the beliefs of the ancients, but because we continue to be preoccupied by many of their questions, worried by their anxieties, unable to resolve their dilemmas.

The trial of Socrates is the first case in recorded history when a democratic government, by due process of law, con- demned a person to death for his beliefs. Athens, one of the world's earliest democracies, raised Socrates, educated him and finally sentenced him to death, having found him guilty of religious unorthodoxy and corrupting the young. The trial and its outcome represent a political problem with which all subsequent democratic societies have struggled: how to deal with dissent.

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