Apology
unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his
sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the
other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many
days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more
pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a
private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or
nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a
nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single
night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men
say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be
greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world
below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world,
and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos
and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who
were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making.
What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus
and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.
I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and
conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other
ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and
there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own
sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my
search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the
next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise,
and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine
the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or
numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there
be in conversing with them and asking them questions! In another world
they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For
besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is
said is true.
Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a
certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or
after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own
approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that the
time had arrived when it was better for me to die and be released from
trouble; wherefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason, also, I
am not angry with my condemners, or with my accusers; they have done me
no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and for this I
may gently blame them.
Still I have a favour to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I
would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you
trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about
riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be
something when they are really nothing,—then reprove them, as I have
reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care,
and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And
if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your
hands.
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you
to live. Which is better God only knows.