Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/509

 HIS DEATH BY POISON. 437 the loss )f life was to him compensated by the missionary successors whom he calculated on leaving behind. Under ordinary circumstances, Sokrates would have drunk the cup of hemlock in the prison, on the day after his trial. But it so happened that the day of his sentence was immediately after that on which the sacred ship started on its yearly ceremo- nial pilgrimage from Athens to Delos, for the festival of Apollo. Until the return of this vessel to Athens, it was accounted unholy to put any person to death by public authority. Accord- ingly, Sokrates remained in prison, and we are pained to read, actually with chains on his legs, during the interval that this ship was absent, thirty days altogether. His friends and com- panions had free access to him, passing nearly all their time with him in the prison ; and Krito had even arranged a scheme for procuring his escape, by a bribe to the jailer. This scheme was only prevented from taking effect by the decided refusal of Sokrates to become a party in any breach of the law ; l a reso- lution, which we should expect as a matter of course, after the line which he had taken in his defence. His days were spent in the prison, in discourse respecting ethical and human subjects, which had formed the charm and occupation of his previous life : it is to the last of these days that his conversation with Simmias, Kebes, and Phaedon, on the immortality of the soul is referred, in the Platonic dialogue called " Phoedon." Of that conversa- tion the main topics and doctrines are Platonic rather than Sokratic. But the picture which the dialogue presents of the temper and state of mind of Sokrates, during the last hours of his life, is one of immortal beauty and interest, exhibiting his serene and even playful equanimity, amidst the uncontrollable emotions of his surrounding friends, the genuine, unforced persuasion, governing both his words and his acts, of what he had pronounced before the dikasts, that the sentence of death was no calamity to him, 2 and the unabated maintenance of that earnest interest in the improvement of man and society, which had for so many years formed both his paramount motive aud his active occupation. The details of the last scene are given with minute fidelity, even down to the moment of his dis 1 Plato, Krito, c. 2, 3, teq * Plato, Pha ..on, c. 77, p. 84, E.