Or shall I propose imprisonment? And why should I pass the rest of my days in prison, the slave of successive officials? Or shall I propose a fine, with imprisonment until it is paid? I have told you why I will not do that. I should have to continue in prison, for I have no money to pay a fine with. Shall I then propose exile? {373} Perhaps you would agree to that. Life would indeed be very dear to me if I were unreasonable enough to expect that strangers would cheerfully tolerate my discussions and reasonings, when you who are my fellow-citizens cannot endure them, and have found them so burdensome and odious to you that you are seeking now to be released from them. No indeed, Athenians, that is not likely. A fine life I should lead for an old man, if I were to withdraw from Athens, and pass the rest of my days in wandering from city to city, and continually being expelled.[10] The alternatives were not accepted, as indeed Socrates knew they would not be, and he was condemned to die. He accepted the sentence calmly, "and with infinite gentleness and manliness. No one within the memory of man, it is said, ever bowed his head to death more nobly."[11] But death offered no terrors to Socrates. If death [he said to his judges] is a journey to another place, and the common belief be true, that there are all who have died, what good could be greater than this? Would a journey not be worth taking, at the end of which, in the other world, we should be released from the self-styled judges who are here, and should find the true judges who are said to sit in judgment below? Or what would you not give to converse with Orpheus and Homer? I am willing to die many times if this be true. And above all, I could spend my time in examining those who are there, as I examine men here, and in finding out which of them thinks himself {374} wise, when he is not wise. What would we not give, my judges, to be able to examine the great leader of the expedition against Troy, or Odysseus, or countless other men and women whom we could name?. It would be an infinite happiness to converse with them, and to live with them, and to examine them. Assuredly there they do not put men to death for doing that. For besides the other ways in which they are happier than we are, they are immortal, at least if the common belief be true. But now the time has come, and we must go hence; I to die, and you to live. Whether life or death is better is known to God, and to God only.[12]