Socrates 16 Phaedo last

the phaedo

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last words

Swan Song

The Phaedo gives us an account of Socrates’ death day. To his alreadygrieving friends Socrates describes himself as like a dying swan in his religious service, prophetic skill, and joyful spirit.

You probably think that in prophetic skill I am inferior to swans. They, when they perceive that they must die, although having sung their whole life, do then sing mightiest and best, rejoicing that they are about to go away into the presence of the god whose servants they are . . . Because they belong to Apollo, they have prophetic powers, and foreseeing the good things in Hades they on that day above all others sing and are glad. But I suppose myself to be in the same service as the swans, dedicated to the same god, to have the prophetic skill from our master no less than swans, and to be released from life no less dispirited.

84e4-85b7

The legend that swans sing at death must already have been known in Athens in 458 BCE, when Aeschylus has queen Clytemnestra refer to dead Cassandra “as a swan who sang her last, death lament” (Agamemnon 1444-5).

Certainly Plato uses the legend to great literary effect in the Phaedo. The legend explains a change of character for Socrates. In the Apology Socrates professed not to know whether or not the soul survives the death of the body, although he argued that death was something good in either case ( $40 \mathrm{~b}-41 \mathrm{c}$ ). Only one month later, on his death day, Socrates gives intricate arguments for the immortality of every living soul, in addition professes without argument an account of the geography of the earth and where the souls of the dead migrate, and - the very last words commands Crito to make a religious sacrifice to the god of healing. To the skeptical reader who objects that it is inconsistent for Socrates to profess such knowledge, the legend of the swan song gives a mystical answer: the god Apollo gave Socrates such powers on his death day.

Most ancient and modern commentators have denied that swans sing, and sing best, at death. They are in error, confusing the two species found in ancient Greece, the mute swan (Cygnus olor), which indeed is as mute at death as in life, with the whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus), which can make its most melodious noise at death. The reason is that the whooper has an elongated trachea convoluted within its breastbone. In life the whooper uses the longer trachea to produce a two-tone bugling noise, “the second syllable higher pitched than the first, repeated several times in succession.”

The musicality of this note is a matter of opinion; one authority has compared it to “silver bells,” another to the sound of “a clarionet when blown by a novice in music” . . [But] when [the whooper] dies, the final expiration of air from its collapsing lungs produces a “wailing, flute-like sound given out quite slowly.” In modern times this dirge of the dying whooper was first attested by the great ornithologist Peter Pallas in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has been more recently observed also in other species of wild swan with similarly convoluted tracheae. The American ornithologist Dr. Daniel Elliott once shot a whistling swan (Cygnus columbianus, the American subspecies of the Eurasian Bewick’s swan) for the American Museum of Natural History, "and as the bird came sailing down he was amazed to hear a plaintive and musical song, so unlike the call in life, which lasted until the bird reached the water."1

Plato may not have known or cared if the legend of the swan song was scientifically accurate. On the other hand, he might have taken pains to be accurate in as many incidental details as possible to enhance the overall credibility of his narration. It would be a mistake to reason that Plato’s literary powers required him to invent rather than be accurate in detail.

Hemlock

Those literary powers are at their peak in the Phaedo’s depiction of Socrates’ death by poison. As usual, Socrates acted with ritual propriety. When they saw him drinking the poison, his friends began to cry aloud, one after another. Phaedo narrates how Socrates hushed them:
“This is one of the main reasons I sent the women away, so that they would not make such offensive noises - for I have heard that one ought to die in reverential silence. Come on: bear up and keep quiet!”
His words made us ashamed and we held back our tears. But he walked about and, when he said his legs were heavy, lay down on his back, for this had been the advice of the man who administered the poison. This man put his hands on him, let some time pass, and then began to examine his feet

and legs. He pinched his foot hard and asked whether he felt it - Socrates said no - and then his lower legs. Going on upwards he showed us how the numbness and immobility would spread, and touching the place, this man said, “As soon as it reaches his heart, he will be gone.”
Now the numbness was in the area of his lower abdomen, and uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said - his last words - “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Don’t forget to pay the debt!”
“It will be paid,” said Crito, “But see whether you have anything else to say.”
To this question he made no reply. A short time later he moved; the man uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And when Crito saw it, he closed his mouth and eyes.

117d7-118a14
The literary effect is enhanced by the vivid details of the slowly ascending paralysis that leaves Socrates’ mind clear till the very end. Ancient readers tended to accept the account at face value as an answer to the request within the dialogue “to describe every detail as carefully as possible” (58d8-9). Since the seventeenth century, however, medical science and classical scholarship have raised doubts that the details of the text cannot be squared with the medical facts of hemlock poisoning. It was only in 2001 that Enid Bloch dispelled the doubts, identifying the poison as the poison hemlock plant (Conium maculatum). While many other members of the same plant family (Umbelliferae) are similar in appearance and also poisonous - such as water hemlock and the hemlock known as fool’s parsley - they produce death in much more violent ways. Only poison hemlock produces the alkaloids that cause death by slowly ascending paralysis in the manner recorded by Plato. ${ }^{2}$
Though we can have no certainty in this matter, Plato’s clinical accuracy about death by hemlock poisoning suggests that he used the same accuracy in his record of Socrates’ curious last words. But what is the meaning of those words? What debt was so important to Socrates that an exhortation to pay it was his last speech?
It was ritually proper for ancient Greeks, after healing from disease, to sacrifice a cock to the god Asclepius. Thus Socrates’ words, we owe, suggest that he and others present at his death had together suffered and then been healed. What disease and what act of healing did Socrates have in mind?

Ultimate Disease

In Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates,” Nietzsche made famous an answer going back to at least 500 CE: Socrates thought that death cures us of the disease of bodily life: "To live - that means to be

a long time sick." On this reading, death is seen as a release from the suffering of being imprisoned in a physical body. Socrates never describes embodiment as a disease and regards suicide - unless compelled by a god - as taboo ( $62 \mathrm{~b}-\mathrm{c}$ ), but he does say that any philosopher is eager to die ( $61 \mathrm{~b}-\mathrm{c}$ ). Indeed the entire metaphysical argument of the Phaedo is an answer to Cebes’ and Simmias’s doubts about the goodness of death (62c9-63b5). But Nietzsche is unfaithful to the text, attributing to Socrates these words: “I owe a cock to Asclepius,” whereas in the text Socrates says to Crito, “We owe.” Nietzsche must alter the text because, on his interpretation, with death imminent for no one else, only Socrates has a debt to Asclepius.

We get a more faithful interpretation by noticing that in the course of the Phaedo Socrates explicitly identifies the worst disease a human being can suffer and worries that he himself suffers from it, while Phaedo, narrating the dialogue, explicitly states that Crito and the rest of those present came to suffer from that disease in the course of the dialogue but were healed by dialogue’s end.

According to Socrates, the most dreadful condition is the spiritual illness of misology, the distrust and hatred of reasoning.
“Let us guard against suffering from a certain condition.”
“Of what sort?” I [Phaedo] asked.
“Let us not become misologists,” he said . . "for no one could suffer from anything worse than this: the hatred of reasoning."3

89c11-d3
The distrust and hatred of reasoning are symptoms of a kind of psychic death, when “reasoning vanishes” from one’s soul (89c1-2).

To show Phaedo just how dreadful this kind of psychic death is, Socrates compares it to the death of a beloved friend, referring to the hair-cutting ritual of grief that Phaedo will perform after his beloved Socrates dies:
“Tomorrow, Phaedo, perhaps you will cut off your beautiful hair.”
“It’s likely, Socrates,” I said.
“Not if you do as I say.”
“What’s that?” I said.
"I’ll cut my hair today and you yours, if reasoning dies for us and we cannot bring it to life again. And I would make a vow, like the Argives, not to let my hair grow until I fight back and defeat the objections of Simmias and Cebes.

89b4-c4
In comparative terms, Socrates is making a wild claim: the death of reasoning in a soul, not a beloved friend’s death, is reason for significant

grief. From such a perspective, a human being can have no greater reason for making a sacrifice to Asclepius than to be healed of misology.

Socrates says that misology is analogous to misanthropy, the condition of disliking and mistrusting all human beings. He speculates that misanthropy develops when a person makes friends uncritically and is repeatedly betrayed by them (89d-e). Likewise misology:

When people who lack skill at reasoning trust some bit of it to be true, and then a little later the same bit seems false, and this happens over and over and especially with those who spend their time arguing just to contradict others - you know how it is: they end up thinking that they have become wiser than everyone, and that they alone have discovered that there is nothing healthy or secure in any speech or subject matter . . . The condition is pitiful - assuming that it is possible to discover some true and secure bit of reasoning - since . . . they would be deprived of true understanding of reality.

90b6-d7
And Socrates worries that he himself suffers from this dreadful illness.
Let us be on our guard against this, and let us not admit into our souls the notion that there is no health in arguments at all. Let us far rather assume that we ourselves are not yet in healthy condition . . . for I fear that I am not just now philosophōs (seeking to know) as regards this particular question, but philonikōs (seeking to win a war of words), like uncultured persons.

90d9-91a
He is right to worry. As quoted above, only a few minutes earlier he expressed the militant Argive desire to “win” against objections to his reasoning (89c3-4).

Plato uses the structure of the Phaedo to draw dramatic attention to misology as a dreadful psychic disease. The first two pages of the Phaedo are a conversation between Phaedo and Echecrates (57a-59c), but the remaining sixty pages consist of Phaedo’s narration of the story of Socrates’ death day (59c-118a) - with a dramatic exception. As Phaedo narrates it, after Socrates’ first arguments for the immortality of the soul, Simmias and Cebes raise devastating objections. Phaedo narrates the psychological effect that these objections had upon the people present with Socrates on his last day: “We all felt ill after hearing them speak (as we later told each other). We had been quite convinced by the earlier reasoning [that the soul is immortal]. Now they seemed to have upset and cast into doubt not only the conclusion we had just reached, but also the conclusions we might reach later, whether we were worthless to judge or the subject matter was itself unreliable” (88c1-6). It is at this precise moment - and by page count we are at the very center

of the dialogue - that Echecrates breaks into the story, dramatically redoubling the onset of misology: ${ }^{4}$

By the gods, Phaedo, I feel the same way you all did! Hearing this now from you, a thought is coming over me: “What reasoning will we ever trust again? Socrates’ reasoning was quite compelling - now it has fallen into disrepute.”

88c8-d3

Such misgivings are symptoms of the onset of misology, as Socrates has described it.

Echecrates at this moment “wants more than anything” to have the soul’s immortality established by reasoning (88d6-8): instead of a philosophical desire to know, he desires that Socrates win the argument. He is on the edge of his seat to find out what happens next in the story: “So tell me, by Zeus, how Socrates continued with his reasoning!” (88d8-9).

Phaedo in reply assures Echecrates that Socrates proceeded to heal those present from the dreadful misology. “I have often marveled at Socrates, but never did I admire him more than then. That he had an answer ready was perhaps to be expected; but what astonished me more about him was . . . how well he healed us” (88e4-89a5).

I leave aside discussion of the details of that final reasoning whereby Socrates heals himself and his companions. The point I wish to make is that there is no question that Socrates dramatically restores in at least some of his friends their loving trust in reasoning in general as a human activity and their confidence in the particular conclusion that each of us has an immortal soul. Moreover, his friends seem to develop a healthier, more critical attitude towards arguments. Judging from Socrates’ account of the cause of misology (90b6-7, quoted above), I take this to be a further sign of good health.

For example, Cebes loves and trusts Socrates’ final reasoning. “For my part, Socrates, I have no further objections to state, and I have no doubts about your reasoning” (107a2-3). Cebes does recognize the possibility that, although he cannot think of an objection, others might. “If Simmias here or anyone else has something to say, this is a good time to speak up” (107a3-5). His developing critical attitude is the best way to ward off a relapse of misology in the future.

Likewise Simmias has a healthy reaction, saying, “Nor do I find anything to doubt in the reasoning. However, the vastness of the subject and my recognition of human frailty compel me still to have doubts, for my own part, about what has been said” (107a8-b3).

Socrates, too, has the proper critical attitude along with his trust in reasoning. He endorses Simmias’s two points about the subject’s magnitude and human frailty and adds another reason for a critical attitude

towards the provisionally accepted result: “Not only are you right to make those points, Simmias, but the premises of the reasoning need to be examined more clearly, too, even if you and the others find them trustworthy. And I suppose that, if you go through the premises enough, you will follow the train of reasoning, so far as it is possible for a human being to follow it up. Your inquiry will be over when the reasoning becomes positively clear” (107b4-9). The last sentence does not predict that the reasoning will ever become positively clear. Given that Socrates accepts human frailty in respect to such a large subject and the fallibility of his argument’s assumptions, I interpret the last sentence to suggest that human inquiry will never be over in this or any other vast subject.

But it seems that, with respect to misology, Crito at any rate has not been healed, at least not in Socrates’ eyes. For when Crito near the end asks Socrates how to bury him (instead of asking how to bury the body that remains after death), Socrates takes the question to show that Crito does not “trust” (115c6) Socrates’ reasoning. Instead of seeing reasoning that compels a provisional rational assent, Socrates says that Crito sees mere “storytelling that reassures one’s feelings” (115d5).

Crito’s continuing misology makes me want to ask Phaedo about his statement that Socrates “healed” them (89a5). Did Socrates heal others but not Crito from misology? If not Crito, why does Socrates ask Crito and not the others to sacrifice the cock to Asclepius? I conjecture that Phaedo would reply that, although Socrates astonished Phaedo at how well he healed the group, Phaedo never claimed that Socrates had a cure rate of one hundred percent. Socrates’ philosophical healing of - if not Crito - at least himself, Simmias, and Cebes is sufficient to incur the obligation of a sacrifice to Asclepius, an obligation that Socrates would want to take care of above all and not forget. And since Crito was in effect the executor of Socrates’ wishes, it was ritually proper for Socrates to give to Crito and no one else the request to make a sacrifice in thanks for the group’s astonishing recovery, even if Crito himself continues to suffer from misology.

Conclusion

As with the other Socratic dialogues, I take it that Plato’s overriding goal in the Phaedo is not biography as such but the conversion of the souls of his readers to philosophy as a way of life. But such an overriding goal does not mean that the seeming biography cannot be accurate in detail. Crito’s failure to be compelled by Socrates’ reasoning is a meticulous detail in Phaedo’s account. Such details, like the hemlock poisoning and even the swan song, move me to trust the text as a meticulous portrait, not merely a literary invention.

The call in the Phaedo to live a life of inquiry and the thesis that misology is the worst thing that can happen to a human being are both Socratic theses, essential to his divine mission. On the other hand, the argument in the Phaedo from the existence of separate Forms to the immortality of the soul has nothing to do with the Socratic dialogues. It is possible that Socrates expanded his philosophical repertoire from ethical concerns and took a metaphysical turn in the last thirty days of life, as the Phaedo portrays him. Or it is possible that Plato took Socrates’ death day as inspiration for a new, distinctly Platonic, form of dialogue. The choice between these and other possibilities is the topic of my last chapter.

notes

1 W. Geoffrey Arnott, “Swan Songs,” Greece of Rome 24 (1977) 149-153. Arnott provides references for the testimony he cites. Charles Young told me about this article.
2 Enid Bloch, “Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?” in Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., The Trial and Execution of Socrates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Also online in the Journal of the International Plato Society.
3 Whenever it makes for a natural translation, I translate the Greek noun logos in this chapter as “reasoning”. But the Greek noun can also mean “speech,” and the verb “to speak” as well as “to reason.”
4 The only other place where Echecrates breaks into Phaedo’s narration is to affirm the existence of Forms such as Tallness separate from and explaining the tallness in us (102a). On separate Forms see the epilogue.

further reading

Sandra Peterson, “An Authentically Socratic Conclusion in Plato’s Phaedo: Socrates’ Debt to Asclepius,” in Naomi Reshotko, ed., Desire, Identity and Existence. Kelowna: Academic, 2003. The chapter lists 21 different interpretations of Socrates’ last words, adding a twenty-second. My interpretation in this chapter is not original; it is the nineteenth option she lists.