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Er Gallo canta quanno spunta er sole.
Trilussa, "Chiaroscuro"
SOCRATES' FINAL WORDS according to the Phaedo 118a were,...we owe a rooster to Asclepius: pay what is due and don't neglect it").1 These words have unsurprisingly attracted much comment beginning with ancient authors,2 on the assumption that they do mean something, and are not just a joke3 or the result of Socrates hallucinating under the influence of the lethal drug.4 They have even been the inspiration for a novel.5
Discussion has centred on four questions. First, why do Socrates, Crito, and others owe anything at all to the god of healing?6 This is inextricably interwoven with a second and a third question. Who has been sick? And why are several people (plural) obliged to give thanks?
If the patient is Socrates, what was his illness? Perhaps it was the guilty verdict he is now expiating by the supreme penalty.7 Or it could be a philosophical infirmity, namely, as White (1989: 280) proposes, "the uncertainties caused by the inadequacies of his prior discussions of soul's nature and immortality." Or again, in a typical philosophers' paradox,8 it may be an allegory: the illness of his life is now about to be cured by the фарраκоу of hemlock {Phd. 57a, 115a), understood as "remedy" rather than "poison,"9 or in a variation of this idea Socrates is about to be reborn. Or perhaps, with shades of Solon's "count no man happy till he is dead" (Hdt. 1.32.7), the point is that there has been no illness at all, and that Socrates, at the end of a long, healthy Ufe, has been shown always to have Uved under Asclepius' care.10 McPherran (2003: 85), and Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith (2004: 268-269) have even diagnosed the illness from which Socrates never suffered. They suggest the great plague of Athens spared him, and has indeed prolonged his life, for, as Diodorus of Sicily (12.58.6-7) says, it occasioned the renewal of the Oeropia ("theorie delegation") to Delphi that has delayed Socrates' execution {Phd. 58a-b). Even so, the plague happened more than thirty years before, and neither the narrator, Phaedo, nor the author, Plato, connect Socrates' reprieve to the plague. Other suggestions are less compelüng. Can Socrates reaUy be...