The Student Who Refused Hemlock: What Socrates Never Said And Why It Had to Be Buried

Everyone knows how Socrates died. No one asks why he chose to.

Athens, 399 BC. The philosopher who spent forty years teaching the city to question everything is on trial for impiety and corrupting the young. The jury is five hundred and one citizens. The verdict is two hundred and eighty to two hundred and twenty-one. The margin is thirty votes.

Thirty votes stood between the execution that changed Western civilization and an old man living out his days in philosophical exile in Corinth.

Nikia...