Since the demise of Socrates in 399 BC, killed by the hemlock he was forced to drink on sentence from the state for corrupting the minds of Athenian teenagers, the Good Death has been deemed possible. According to Plato, his pupil, Socrates died with his senses intact, surrounded by those he loved and who loved him, and in control until the last moment, his body numbed but not distorted by that toxic drug. It’s a myth, of course. We know, as must Plato have known, that hemlock produces dreadful cramps, vomiting, convulsions; it would not have been possible for Socrates to remain calm, thoughtful, prescient while in such agony. But he wanted his death, his passage out of life, to be seen as a very public spectacle of control, of a man in charge of his destiny until the end, untroubled by pain or the terror of infinite obliteration.
In A Good Death, this week’s late-night essay on Radio Three (Monday to Friday), academics, writers and Rabbi Julia Neuberger each gave us a short meditation on what that phrase ‘to die well’ means to them. No mention was made of the most public death of recent times. Radio Three’s timing of this sequence of talks was, it seems, pure happenstance.
There was nothing gentle about this good night. Without fanfare or stagey performance, we heard reflections on that most bleak and painful truth; Socrates, and his followers, were indulging in wishful thinking. When, centuries later, Seneca tried to replicate Socrates’ passage out of life, he failed miserably.
A scholar of the classics, Professor Mary Beard is well versed in the idea of the Good Death as created by the pagan philosophers of the ancient world.
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