Socrates: Where's That Fly-Swatter?

Reviewing The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint by Emily Wilson, Duncan Fallowell (Telegraph) complains of the author's flippancy and failure to take Socrates and his legacy seriously.

She has chosen to front her book with a fatuous remark of Macaulay's which he wrote in a private letter in 1835: "The more I read about Socrates, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."

In her introduction, Wilson comes up with this inanity: "I sometimes feel that Nietzsche was right when he blamed the decadent dying Socrates for the later decline of Western civilisation. We still live in the shadow of what Nietzsche called Socrates' 'naïve rationalism'. Perhaps Socrates has held sway over our culture for far too long."
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So what are we dealing with here? It doesn't take long to realise that this is a kind of teaching aid, an introduction to the circumstances surrounding the death sentence, followed by a checklist of responses down the ages.

But where does this leave Socrates? Neutered for some universal classroom by authorial chastisement, he becomes just another brand with no intrinsic value. Does this matter? Yes, it most certainly does, because his real importance - why you should be reading the book at all - is never presented.

Fallowell goes on to offer his own view, including a nice suggestion that Socrates = Buddha + Falstaff + Oscar Wilde...