La muerte de Sócrates

Cuando leí por primera vez la Apología de Sócrates, lo que se me vino a la cabeza es que de haber estado yo en ese tribunal, también le habría condenado a muerte, aunque sólo fuese para que se callase de una vez. Lo segundo que pensé es que estaba leyendo el relato de un suicidio cuidadosamente planeado. Sócrates odiaba de tal forma a sus conciudadanos y a la ciudad que tanto decía respetar que se hizo matar para dejarles mal. No le bastaba con el odio, debía disfrutar del placer de convertirlos en inferiores. De esa forma, en cuanto una posibilidad de salir de esa situación levantaba la cabeza, Sócrates no dudaba en estrangularla y luego patearla hasta matarla. En cierto forma, hay que admirar una iniquidad de semejante calibre.

Y por otra parte, ¿por qué no concederle lo que pide?

Pero bueno, yo realmente venía a hablar de otro libro. Me lo acabo de encontrar en 3quarksdaily (bitácora que te interesa si todavía respiras) y se llama The Death of Socrates de Emily Wilson. Aparentemente, es un repaso a la muerte del personaje y a las distintas imágenes que ha generado a lo largo de la historia, llegando incluso a la imagen popular de nuestro día.

Sobre el libro:

Plato’s is the accepted account; what we didn’t learn about in school was Xenophon’s version of Socrates, a dullish wiseacre who gives banal advice about moderation, diet, exercise and self-control to a receptive populace. Only his wife, Xanthippe, is unappreciative of his common-sense views. Wilson engages too with the Socrates of Aristophanes, a fraudulent, word-chopping boffin, whose satirical depiction in The Clouds provides an excellent introduction to Socratic philosophy. Under the headings “Knowledge and Ignorance”, “Socratic Irony”, “Wisdom Is Not For Sale”, “Happiness, Choice and Being Good”, Wilson explains the essentials of Socrates’ credo. At the same time, she shows how Plato’s account of them dovetails with the charges laid against Socrates by the Athenian state: charges of failing to worship the city’s gods, introducing new deities and corrupting the young. Wilson deftly lays bare the political tensions in Athens in the aftermath of the unsuccessful war against Sparta when its democracy was in a precarious state. Anxiety was sparked by Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades, the playboy who had profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries and thus had probably incurred the wrath of the gods. Wilson shows very clearly how Socrates’ strangeness, his notorious ugliness, and his practice of a profession normally associated with foreigners, all combined to make him a troubling figure for the ordinary Athenian.

Otra reseña:

This is a superb book. I picked it up by chance and have been gripped. Socrates, ‘the Jesus Christ of Greece’ as Shelley dubbed him, comes to most philosophers via Plato. Emily Wilson, a classicist, provides a lively overview of the numerous Socrates that have existed for different thinkers at different times. These include the hen-pecked master of self-help platitudes described by his pupil Xenophon, the  absurd figure that appears in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, the tyrant-loving chatterbox despised by Plutarch, the man of integrity admired by Voltaire and Diderot, the drunken reveller in the Monty Python song who was ‘a bugger when he’s pissed,’ and the unthreatening and decidedly un-socratic  Socrates of Phillip’s Socrates’ Café (less gadfly, more nice bloke – see my previous post on this). Along the way she makes astute interpretations of images of Socrates’ death including the famous painting by David and even analyses the medical effects of different types of hemlock to determine whether Plato’s description of Socrates’ progressive loss of feeling in the Phaedo is a santised version of what must have happened (the answer is probably not).

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