Book 2
5.42
When this caused an uproar among the judges, he said, Considering my services, I assess the penalty at maintenance in the Prytaneum at the public expense.
5.42
Sentence of death was passed, with an accession of eighty fresh votes. He was put in prison, and a few days afterwards drank the hemlock, after much noble discourse which Plato records in the Phaedo. Further, according to some, he composed a paean beginning: All hail, Apollo, Delos’ lord! Hail Artemis, ye noble pair! Dionysodorus denies that he wrote the paean. He also composed a fable of Aesop, not very skilfully, beginningAnth. Plan. iv. 16.: Judge not, ye men of Corinth, Aesop cried, Of virtue as the jury-courts decide.
5.43
So he was taken from among men; and not long afterwards the Athenians felt such remorse that they shut up the training grounds and gymnasia. They banished the other accusers but put Meletus to death; they honoured Socrates with a bronze statue, the work of Lysippus, which they placed in the hall of processions. And no sooner did Anytus visit Heraclea than the people of that town expelled him on that very day. Not only in the case of Socrates but in very many others the Athenians repented in this way. For they fined Homer (so says HeraclidesMost probably Heraclides of Pontus. This remarkable assertion may have occurred in one of his dialogues, and was perhaps not meant to be taken seriously.) 50 drachmae for a madman, and said Tyrtaeus was beside himself, and they honoured Astydamas before Aeschylus and his brother poets with a bronze statue.
5.44
Euripides upbraids them thus in his Palamedes: Ye have slain, have slain, the all-wise, the innocent, the Muses’ nightingale.Nauck, T.G.F.2, Eur. 588. This is one account; but Philochorus asserts that Euripides died before Socrates.
