'The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy, War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates' by Matt Gatton
'The Shadows of Socrates: The Heresy, War, and Treachery Behind the Trial of Socrates' by Matt Gatton
Socrates was tried by a jury (ostensibly of his peers) for impiety and corrupting the youth and was executed by lethal libation. He was sentenced to drink hemlock. Remarkably, he took the cup without resistance from the jailor and died in good spirits.
Matt Gatton dives into the reasons Athens put the philosopher and one of its greatest citizens to death in The Shadow of Socrates. Gatton has done scholarly work in the field of optics and draws connection between Socrates’ Allegory of the Caves (as told to his pupil, Plato) and the illusionistic use of light in the Athens temple of the Mysteries of Eleusis, whose worshippers believed they were having a transcendent experience. Gatton theorizes that the temple priests were staging a light show to fool the public and imagines that Socrates’ Allegory on the limited perception of the average person concealed a critique of the mystery religion the authorities found threatening.
Perhaps and perhaps, plausible but unprovable at this late date. The Shadows of Socrates is a good refresher course on the life of a man who wrote nothing but whose ideas remain foundational. Supporting Gatton’s theory is Socrates’ perennial willingness to challenge the norms and beliefs of his time, always prodding his hearers to think more clearly about what they were doing—and why.
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