The eerily beautiful wreck discovered in the Black Sea takes us right back to Homer’s Greece In 399BC, Socrates drank hemlock to fulfil the orders of the Athenian law court, which had sentenced him to death for impiety and corrupting the young. His friends begged him to leave Athens instead, accompanying them into banishment. He refused and died as he had lived for 70 years, arguing the ethical superiority of his own decision. The scene was immortalised by Plato in his dialogue _Phaedo_ and later by artists such as Jacques Louis David, whose painting hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Continue reading...
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