Sweet Surrender

When Socrates was waiting for his sentence to be carried out, which had been delayed by the Delian envoy, he did a curious thing, one that has ironically spilt quite a bit of its own ink over the years. He supposedly wrote something down, more precisely, he composed music.

This in itself would not be significant, nor even noteworthy, except for the fact that, as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything during his lifetime, or at least nothing that ever came down through the ages. All of the words of Socrates, as with Jesus and the Buddha, were written by disciples, students, chroniclers, or scholars. These three men, however, did not put pen to paper, so to speak, and write down their thoughts, ideas or teachings. They spoke, using the oral transmission wisdom as their only instrument of instruction.

However, when Socrates was in his jail cell in Athens, this may have changed. In the prologue of the Phaedo, which is Plato's chronicle of the final day of Socrates' life, Echecrates asks the eponymous Phaedo if he knows the story of the final days of Socrates and if he could relate it. Phaedo answers that he was actually there in person and the bulk of the dialogue is the fictional "memory" of Phaedo's account of the conversation in the jail cell.

When asked if he would relate the story, for Echechrates says that "sweetly" he would like to hear it, Phaedo answers that he will do his best, and the motif of bittersweet becomes rather prominent. Phaedo felt a mixture of pleasure and pain that final day with Socrates in that he was happy to have been there and to have known him, but deeply sad in that it was in fact the last day on the planet. He relates the conceit of Aesop that pleasure and pain are really one entity and that "a very curious mixture of pleasure and pain was present" while Socrates and his friends were discussing the nature of the Soul, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, in short, a very human affair.

When Phaedo begins his re-telling of the story, he describes what Socrates was doing. Apparently, during the final month of his life, while waiting in his jail cell and after the daily visits were over, Socrates' daimon had spoken quite distinctly to him, yet in a manner even more distinct in its aberration from the norm, than in its message. For the first time, his daimon had told him to do something, rather than the accustomed message of dissuading him from doing something. His daimon had told him to "make music."

For seventy years, Socrates had not composed anything, yet upon his imminent death, his inner voice, his daimon, or his hotline to the divinity, asked him to compose hymns to Apollo, the God who figures so prominently in Socrates' life-long quest to "Know Thyself."

Socrates obliges, and since he does not know how to compose his own, he choses to set some of the words and fables of Aesop to music as his paean to the God. For all his life, he listened to this voice tell him not to act, until Time was truly of the essence. The final directive, his soul's will and testament, was to compose hymns of praise to God.

He obeyed, and in his final act, he showed gratitude to this God and he composed. He made music. He acted. He was grateful.