The friends crowded into the prison cell were already weeping. Socrates was the calm one. Athens had condemned him to die that day, 399 BC, for impiety and for the young men who trailed him through the city asking questions, and a man in the next room was grinding the hemlock into a cup. His companions wept. He told them to get hold of themselves, that he had sent the women away to spare them all a scene like this one.

Crito, practical to the end, asked how they should bury him. Socrates laughed. Any way you like, he said, if you can catch me and I do not slip through your fingers. He could not get Crito to believe that the Socrates reasoning with them would outlast the body that would soon lie still. Say only that you are burying my body, he told him. The man who has been talking with you all day goes elsewhere.