He was philosophy’s first martyr. After his trial, his fate sealed, he gathered with a few of his followers. They were heartbroken, but not Socrates; he remained sanguine, and coyly opaque, until the end. “And now it is time to go, I to die, and you to live, but which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God,” he said. Those are excellent last words, and indeed that is how many a biography of Socrates ends. There’s only one problem. They were not the philosopher’s last words. Plato, in a dialogue called Phaedo, tells us what transpired during Socrates’s final minutes.
