The Whore's Revenge

'The Death of Socrates'

Nigel Bruce

• 1 min read
'The Death of Socrates'
Russian sculptor Mark Antokolsky: "Death of Socrates" (1875), in Ciani Park in Lugano.

Casanova was fascinated by the Elixir of Life. Did Socrates get there first? Did he drink the hemlock not to die but to achieve immortality and he had failed?

It seems to be a sufficient proof that the souls of the dead must be somewhere whence they can come back again.

Apparently not. Here he is, reaching for the hemlock, in Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates (1787).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York