The Apology of Socrates (Closing)

¹The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

²Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things — either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

³Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.

⁴For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.

⁵Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

⁶But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

⁷If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there — what would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?

⁸Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment.

⁹What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions!

¹⁰In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.

¹¹Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

¹²The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.