Arc One · The Unreliable Narrator
What It Cost
Four episodes of taking things away. So: what was that for? Socrates has the strongest answer there is, and he paid the maximum price for it. Whether the answer holds.
The arc ends where the show’s name comes from. Not the story of the trial, which you half-know, but whether the answer Socrates gave holds up when you put weight on it.
The facts: the charges, the defence that wasn’t a defence, the counter-penalty that talked a divided jury into killing him, the escape he declined. Then what the story has been made to mean, and why the comfortable version, philosophy against tyranny, may be one that people who like philosophy adapted into. Episode one’s concept, applied to the show’s own founding myth.
Then the case against him, given properly: he may have been finished rather than brave; he didn’t pay alone; and the examined life may simply not deliver. If this arc made you worse, I don’t have a good answer for you. I say so.
What’s left is thin, and I’ve tried to keep it that way. Arc Two begins in January.
Sections
- The pour
- What was that for?
- What happened in 399
- What the story was made to mean, and who it flatters
- The case against him
- What he wouldn’t give up
Reading
- Plato, Apology. Read two translations; Grube and Reeve are both standard.
- Plato, Crito and the last pages of Phaedo.
- Xenophon, Apology. The other contemporary portrait.
- I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (1988). The political reading.
- Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died (2009). The better-balanced version of it.
Transcript
Available on release.