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Saturday, July 17, 2021

Sayings of Socrates 57


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 honored 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 Heraclides) 50 drachmae for a madman, and said Tyrtaeus was beside himself, and they honored Astydamas before Aeschylus and his brother poets with a bronze statue. 

Euripides upbraids them thus in his Palamedes: "Ye have slain, have slain, the all-wise, the innocent, the Muses' nightingale." This is one account; but Philochorus asserts that Euripides died before Socrates.

—Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 2.43-44



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