Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​When the judges raised an uproar, he said: "In view, then, he said, of what I have achieved, I assess my penalty at maintenance in the Prytaneum at public cost." And they condemned him to death, adding eighty more votes to the verdict. And having been bound, after not many days he drank the hemlock, having conversed on many noble and good themes, which Plato recounts in the Phaedo. Furthermore, according to some, he composed a paean, the beginning of which is: "Hail, Delian Apollo, and Artemis, renowned children." However, Dionysodorus says that the paean is not his. He also composed an Aesopic fable, not very felicitously, of which the opening is: "Aesop once said to those who inhabit the Corinthian town, not to judge virtue by the crowd-pleasing wisdom of tribunals."

​He, then, departed from among men; but the Athenians immediately repented, to the point of closing both wrestling-schools and gymnasia. They banished the other accusers and condemned Meletus to death; and they honored Socrates with a bronze statue, which they placed in the Pompeion, Lysippus having fashioned it. And when Anytus arrived in their town, the people of Heraclea banished him on that very day. Nor was it only in the case of Socrates that the Athenians acted in this way, but also in that of very many others. For they even fined Homer fifty drachmas as a madman, as Heraclides says, and they said that Tyrtaeus was out of his mind, and they honored Astydamas with a bronze statue before Aeschylus and his peers.

​Euripides also reproaches them in the Palamedes, saying: "Ye have slain, ye have slain the all-wise nightingale of the Muses, who caused no grief." So much, then, for this matter; though Philochorus says that Euripides died before Socrates. He was born, as Apollodorus says in his Chronicles, in the archonship of Apsephion, in the fourth year of the seventy-seventh Olympiad, on the sixth of Thargelion, when the Athenians purify the city and the Delians say Artemis was born. And he died in the first year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, having reached the age of seventy. Demetrius of Phalerum says the same thing; but some say that he died at sixty years of age.

​Both men attended the lectures of Anaxagoras—both he and Euripides, who was born in the first year of the seventy-fifth Olympiad, in the archonship of Calliades. It seems to me that Socrates also discoursed on natural philosophy; seeing that he even discusses certain matters concerning providence, as Xenophon also states, even though he said that Socrates made his discussions only about ethics. Moreover, Plato too, having mentioned Anaxagoras and certain other natural philosophers in the Apology, things which Socrates disclaims, himself speaks about these matters, although attributing everything to Socrates. Aristotle says that a certain magus, having come from Syria to Athens, not only found other fault with Socrates, but also foretold that his death would be violent.

​We too have an epigram upon him, which runs thus: "Drink now, being in the house of Zeus, O Socrates; for truly a god declared thee wise, and wisdom is a god. For from the Athenians thou didst simply receive the hemlock; but they themselves drained it through thy mouth." Against him, as Aristotle says in the third book of his Poetics, Antilochus of Lemnos and Antiphon the diviner contended, just as Cylon of Croton contended against Pythagoras; and Syagrus against Homer while alive, and Xenophanes of Colophon after his death; and Cercops against Hesiod while alive, and the aforementioned Xenophanes after his death; and Amphimenes of Cos against Pindar; and Pherecydes against Thales, and Salarus of Priene against Bias; and Antimenidas and Alcaeus against Pittacus, Sosibius against Anaxagoras, and Timocreon against Simonides.

​Among those who succeeded him, the so-called Socratics, the foremost leaders were Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes; and of the ten commonly mentioned, the four most distinguished were Aeschines, Phaedo, Euclides, and Aristippus. We must speak first about Xenophon, then about Antisthenes among the Cynics, next about the Socratics, and then in this way about Plato, since he founded the ten schools and himself established the first Academy. Let the sequence of narration, then, be after this manner. There was also another Socrates, a historian, who wrote a description of Argos; and another, a Peripatetic of Bithynia; and another, a writer of epigrams; and the Coan, who wrote on the invocations of the gods.