12 - The Death Scene

Summary

This chapter argues that, just as the opening of the dialogue repeatedly alluded forward to the theories Socrates goes on to develop, Socrates’ death scene repeatedly refers back to these theories. It does so by showing Socrates living in accordance with the views he has defended over the course of the dialogue about the soul, courage, temperance, how to act toward the gods, and the correct way to interpret them. Scholarship on the death scene, especially in the last thirty years, has been dominated by Socrates’ famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. All of you must pay what is owed and not be careless” (118a7–8). Given its obscurity and the temptation to project our own desired message back onto these words, it is especially important to place them within their context in the death scene and the dialogue as a whole. My procedure is first to set up constraints within which an interpretation should operate, and then suggest a series of interrelated possibilities that fit within these constraints. Doing so provides the opportunity to review some of the dialogue’s major ideas.