men are gifted with prophetic power. And I prophesy to you, who are my murderers, that
immediately after my departure punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely
await you.... If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil
lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the
easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves.
He then turns to those of his judges who have voted for acquittal, and tells them that, in all that he
has done that day, his oracle has never opposed him, though on other occasions it has often
stopped him in the middle of a speech. This, he says, "is an intimation that what has happened to
me is a good, and that those of us who think death is an evil are in error." For either death is a
dreamless sleep-which is plainly good--or the soul migrates to another world. And "what would
not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if
this be true, let me die and die again." In the next world, he will converse with others who have
suffered death unjustly, and, above all, he will continue his search after knowledge. "In 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....
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you to live. Which is better
God only knows."
The Apology gives a clear picture of a man of a certain type: a man very sure of himself, high-
minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice, and
persuaded that clear thinking is the most important requisite for right living. Except in this last
point, he resembles a Christian martyr or a Puritan. In the final passage, where he considers what
happens after death, it is impossible not to feel that he firmly believes in immortality, and that his
professed uncertainty is only assumed. He is not troubled, like the Christians, by fears of eternal
torment: he has no doubt that his life in the next world will be a happy one. In the Phaedo, the
Platonic Socrates gives reasons for the belief in immortality; whether these were the reasons that
influenced the historical Socrates, it is impossible to say.