WORLD CIVILIZATION

Detailed explanation-1: -The death sentence of Socrates was the legal consequence of asking politico-philosophic questions of his students, which resulted in the two accusations of moral corruption and impiety.

Detailed explanation-2: -He was found guilty of “impiety” and “corrupting the young”, sentenced to death, and then required to carry out his own execution by consuming a deadly potion of the poisonous plant hemlock. Politicians and historians have often used the trial to show how democracy can go rotten by descending into mob rule.

Detailed explanation-3: -The trial and execution of Socrates in Athens in 399 B.C.E. puzzles historians. Why, in a society enjoying more freedom and democracy than any the world had ever seen, would a seventy-year-old philosopher be put to death for what he was teaching?

Detailed explanation-4: -The impact of his life was all the greater because of the way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock) by a jury of his fellow citizens.

Detailed explanation-5: -Capital punishment is a necessary symbolic sanction needed to express society’s abhorrence for heinous crimes. Socrates, even on the eve of his execution, argued that the state is correct when, in its best judgment and within the bounds of measured justice it declares on principle, ‘We think right to destroy you.