As he had expected, and as the tenor of his speech had assured
his friends would be the case, Socrates was found guilty--but by
a majority of only five or six in a body of over five hundred.
He would make no proposition, as was his right, for a mitigation
of punishment; and after sentence of death had been passed upon
him he spent the remaining thirty days of his life in impressing
on the minds of his friends the most sublime lessons in philosophy
and virtue. Many of these lessons have been preserved to us in
the works of Plato, in whose Phoe'do, which pictures the last
hours of the prison life of Socrates, we find a sublime conversation
on the immortality of the soul. The following is an extract from
this work:
Socrates' Views of a Future State.
"When the dead arrive at the place to which their demon leads
them severally, first of all they are judged, as well those who
have lived well and piously as those who have not. And those
who appear to have passed a middle kind of life, proceeding to
Ach'eron, and embarking in the vessels they have, on these arrive
at the lake, and there dwell; and when they are purified, and
have suffered punishment for the iniquities they may have committed,
they are set free, and each receives the reward of his good deeds
according to his deserts; but those who appear to be incurable,
through the magnitude of their offences, either from having
committed many and great sacrileges, or many unjust and lawless
murders, or other similar crimes, these a suitable destiny hurls
into Tartarus, whence they never come forth. But those who appear
to have been guilty of curable yet great offences, such as those
who through anger have committed any violence against father
or mother, and have lived the remainder of their life in a state
of penitence, or they who have become homicides in a similar
manner--these must, of necessity, fall into Tartarus; but after
they have fallen, and have been there a year, the wave casts
them forth, the homicide into Cocy'tus, [Footnote: Co-cy'tus]
but the parricides and matricides into Pyriphleg'ethon; [Footnote:
Pyr-i-phlege-thon, "fire-blazing;" one of the rivers of hell]
but when, being borne along, they arrive at the Acheru'sian
lake, [Footnote: Ach'e-ron. Cocytus signifies the river of wailing;
Pyriphlegethon, the river that burns with fire; Acheron, the
river of woe; and the Styx, another river of the lower world,
the river of hatred. Thus Homer, in describing "Pluto's murky
abode," says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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