socrates

(Paul Krause) Plato never forgave the tyrants of Athens for putting Socrates to death. Socrates’s death was a watershed moment in Athenian history. In many ways, it marked the end of the Athenian golden age as the sun set over Athens as her imperial ambitions vanished in the Peloponnesian War and the Thirty Tyrants would be installed by Sparta with support from the Athenian ruling class. The charges were concocted: he was “corrupting the youth of Athens.” In other words, he didn’t adhere to the propagated ideology of the newly tyrannical Athenian state. Socrates’s questioning of the Athenian tyrants marked him as a dangerous enemy that needed to be silenced, canceled, forever.