I have found you, [he said], the noblest and best man that has ever come here; and now I am sure that you will not be angry with me, but with those who you know are to blame. And so, farewell, and try to bear what must be as lightly as you can; you know why I have come.

With that he turned away weeping and went out.

Then Crito made a sign to his slave who was standing by, and the slave went out, and after some delay returned with the man who was to give the poison, carrying it prepared in a cup. When Socrates saw him, he asked, "You understand these things, my good sir, what have I to do?"

"You have only to drink this," he replied, "and to walk about until your legs feel heavy, and then lie down; and it will act of itself." With that he handed the cup to Socrates, who took it quite cheerfully, without trembling, and without any change of colour or of feature, and looked up at the man with that fixed glance of his, and asked, "What say you to making a libation of this draught? May I, or not?" "We only prepare so much as we think sufficient, Socrates," he answered. "I understand," said Socrates. "But I suppose that I may, and must, pray to the gods that my journey hence may be prosperous: that is my prayer; be it so." With these words he put the cup to his lips and drank the poison quite calmly and cheerfully. Till then most of us had been able to control our grief fairly well; but when we saw him drinking, and then the poison finished, we could do so no longer: my tears came fast in spite of myself: it was not for him, but at my own misfortune in losing such a friend. Even before that Crito had been unable to restrain his tears, and had gone away, and Apollodorus, who had never once ceased weeping the whole time, burst into a loud cry, and made us one and all break down by his sobbing and grief, except only Socrates himself. "What are you doing, my friends?" he exclaimed. "I sent away the women chiefly in order that they might not offend in this way; for I have heard that a man should die in silence. So calm yourselves and bear up." When we heard that we were ashamed, and we ceased from weeping.[[15]]

Socrates then walked about a little, but soon lay down on the couch, and slowly the numbness crept over him. He knew that when it reached his heart, he would die. Once more he spoke. "Crito," he said, "I owe a cock to Aesculapius; do not forget to pay it." These were his last words, for in a few minutes he was dead.

Such was the end [said the friend who was with him to the last] of a man who, I think, was the wisest and justest, and the best man that I have ever known. But I did not pity him, for he seemed to me happy, both in his bearing and in his words, so fearlessly and nobly did he die. I could not help thinking that the gods would watch over him still on his journey to the other world, and that when he arrived there it would be well with him, if it was ever well with any man.[[16]]

III. GREEK LITERATURE: THE PHILOSOPHERS

The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, and to the Greeks this wisdom was the serious effort made to understand both the world and man. To us philosophy generally means a wise understanding of the right way of living, but with the Greeks it included a great deal of what we to-day call science. Greek philosophy was concerned with finding out the origins of things, and from that knowledge to build up a right way of life. We do not to-day go to the Greeks to learn science: their answers to the questions asked were, some of them, wrong, and some of them inadequate. But modern science has been made possible by the qualities of mind which the Greeks brought to their enquiries: their passionate desire to know the truth about things, their power of going behind old superstitions, and of seeing things as they really are, their open-mindedness and willingness to accept new truths, their powers of patient study and observation and of reaching the unknown from the known.

The earliest Greek philosophers lived in Ionia in the sixth century B.C., and the greatest of them were Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos. Something has already been said about Thales.[[17]] He went further than the Egyptians and Babylonians had done, not so much because of the new discoveries he made, but because he brought to those discoveries not only the desire to know that they were facts, but the desire to go behind the facts and find out the reason for their existence.