The Lives and Opinions of Eminent PhilosophersDiogenes Laertius
Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laertius
Philosophers, Ancient -- Biography; Philosophy, Ancient
XXI. So when he had been condemned by two hundred and eighty-one votes,
being six more than were given in his favour, and when the judges were
making an estimate of what punishment or fine should be inflicted on him,
he said that he ought to be fined five and twenty drachmas; but Eubulides
says that he admitted that he deserved a fine of one hundred. And when
the judges raised an outcry at this proposition, he said, “My real
opinion is, that as a return for what has been done by me, I deserve a
maintenance in the Prytaneum for the rest of my life.” So they condemned
him to death, by eighty votes more than they had originally found him
guilty. And he was put into prison, and a few days afterwards he drank
the hemlock, having held many admirable conversations in the meantime,
which Plato has recorded in the Phædo.
XXII. He also, according to some accounts, composed a pæan which begins—
Hail Apollo, King of Delos,
Hail Diana, Leto’s child.
But Dionysidorus says that this pæan is not his. He also composed a
fable, in the style of Æsop, not very artistically, and it begins—
Æsop one day did this sage counsel give
To the Corinthian magistrates: not to trust
The cause of virtue to the people’s judgement.
XXIII. So he died; but the Athenians immediately repented[22] of their
action, so that they closed all the palæstræ and gymnasia; and they
banished his accusers, and condemned Meletus to death; but they honoured
Socrates with a brazen statue, which they erected in the place where the
sacred vessels are kept; and it was the work of Lysippus. But Anytus had
already left Athens; and the people of Heraclea banished him from that
city the day of his arrival. But Socrates was not the only person who
met with this treatment at the hands of the Athenians, but many other
men received the same: for, as Heraclides says, they fined Homer fifty
drachmas as a madman, and they said that Tyrtæus was out of his wits.
But they honoured Astydamas, before Æschylus, with a brazen statue. And
Euripides reproaches them for their conduct in his Palamedes, saying—
Ye have slain, ye have slain,
O Greeks, the all-wise nightingale,
The favourite of the Muses, guiltless all.
And enough has been said on this head.
But Philochorus says that Euripides died before Socrates; and he was
born, as Apollodorus in his Chronicles asserts, in the archonship of
Apsephion, in the fourth year of the seventy-seventh Olympiad, on the
sixth day of the month Thargelion, when the Athenians purify their city,
and when the citizens of Delos say that Diana was born. And he died in
the first year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, being seventy years of age.
And this is the calculation of Demetrius Phalereus, for some say that he
was but sixty years old when he died.
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