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Epilogue: Socrates and Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2009

Gregory Vlastos
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Myles Burnyeat
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The lines that close the death-scene in the Phaedo are well known:

“Such, Echecrates, was the end of our companion – a man, we might say, who of all those we came to know was the best and, in any case, the wisest and the most just.”

Was Socrates really as good as that? I have never seen this question raised anywhere in the vast literature on him. I raise it in full view of the fact that throughout his corpus Plato presents his teacher as a man without a peer in three of the virtues most honored among the Greeks – courage, sophrosyne, and piety. Plato is as emphatic on the third as on the other two, making it the crux of the defense against the charge of impiety on which Socrates was to be condemned to death: Socrates' practice of philosophy had been itself a lifelong exercise of piety, obedience to the god of Delphi who had “ordered him to philosophize, examining himself and others.” Plato makes it clear that it was just because of unflinching obedience to that divine command that Socrates had been convicted: had he been willing to propose self-muzzlement as an alternative he could have been acquitted.

So in the case of those three qualities Socrates' character is flawless, granite-solid in Plato's portrait of him. But what of the one that forms the punch-word in the epitaph: “and most just”? Plato feels so sure that on this score too the record is perfect that he has Socrates say he will face divine judgment in the nether world confident that he “had never wronged anyone, man or god.”

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Chapter
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Socratic Studies , pp. 127 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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