Socrates' Last Words

By George Theodoridis

The Plato-Socrates pair fascinated me from a very young age, thanks to an uncle of mine who lived with my family in Thessaloniki during his University days. Uncle Alex was studying Theology at the Aristotelian University at the time so he would often come home with his textbooks and the ritual would begin. We'd read those textbooks together, then discuss his projects and together we would wonder about virtue and evil, tossing all sorts of questions to each other. "Is an act good because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it is good?" The four dialogues I've translated and put together in this book deal, of course, with just this question; a question discussed by Socrates and Euthyphron outside the Athenian Assembly, the most important venue of the city where 501 men would later listen to the indictments against Socrates, listen to his apology, judge him and vote whether he was innocent or guilty. Socrates' "Apology" in particular, has gained quite some attention due mainly to the fact that within it the reader learns not only what sort of a man Socrates was but also what sort of a city the Athens of his day was. I have also included the dialogues Crito and Phaedon because they took place inside the philosopher's prison cell during the couple of days before Socrates was given the lethal poison, hemlock. These were the days when Socrates discussed why he wouldn't try to escape his fate, even though his students had organised it with the prison warden and the days, also when Socrates gave us the last morsels of his mind, his views regarding the human soul and death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F63SJS69
• ISBN13: 9798281086714
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 232 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"