Final words — to those who killed him, and to those who did not

The vote on the sentence comes back: death. Athenian procedure allows the condemned a final word, and Socrates uses it. He turns first to those who voted against him. The city's critics will say Athens killed Socrates — they will call him wise to spite the city — and the verdict will be remembered as a stain. He could have been acquitted, he says, if he had been willing to weep and beg and parade his children. He was not. The hard thing is not avoiding death; the hard thing is avoiding wrongdoing. He is old and slow, and death has caught him. His accusers are young and quick, and wickedness has caught them.

He prophesies that more questioners are coming, younger and less patient, and killing him will not stop them. Then he turns to those who voted to acquit, and his voice softens. He calls these men, and only these men, "judges." All his life, he tells them, he has been guided by a divine sign — an inner voice that has stopped him at every misstep since childhood. Today, walking to court, speaking through three speeches and two votes, the sign has not opposed him once. It would have stopped him if any of this were a mistake. Whatever has happened today is, despite appearances, good.

Death, he says, is one of two things. Either it is dreamless sleep — eternity reduced to a single untroubled night. Or it is a journey to where the dead gather, in which case he will spend forever questioning Homer and Odysseus and the heroes who suffered unjust deaths; and there at least no one is executed for asking questions. Both possibilities are gain. He asks one favor: when his sons are grown, if they care more about money or reputation than about virtue, his friends should give them the same trouble he has given Athens. Then both he and his sons will have been treated justly. The hour of departure has arrived, he says — I to die, and you to live. Which of us goes to the better fate, only god knows. A few weeks later he drinks the hemlock.