06 Nov As for the prospect of death itself Socrates believed… (ANTHONY GOTTLIEB)
One story has it that as Socrates was leaving the court, a devoted but dim admirer called Apollodorus moaned that the hardest thing for him to bear was that Socrates was being put to death unjustly. What? said Socrates, trying to comfort him. Would you rather I was put to death justly?
As for the prospect of death itself, he was already very old and close to death anyway, so he says, and he had had a good and useful life.
Besides:
to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not… No one knows with regard to death whether it is really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil, and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable… and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this – that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it.
If there were an afterlife, he added, he would get the chance to meet heroes of the old days who met their death through an unfair trial, and to compare my fortunes with theirs – it would be rather amusing’.
The Dream of Reason
Anthony Gottlieb
