“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”
After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to death.
Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit rather than those of the material world.
Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.
For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the scene of their former activities.
But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.
The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans. This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.
Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ. Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.
For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.