Malista anthropoi chresmoidousin, hotan mellosin apothaneisthav. Plato, Apology 39c; J. Bussanich in The Bloomsbury companion to Socrates, ed. Bussanich and N.D. Smith (London 2013) 290-1. Divinare morientes: Posidonius fr. 108 Edelstein-Kidd = Cicero, On divination 1.64. For the importance attached, throughout the history of western culture, to the prophetic words and visions of a dying person note also Aristotle fr. 10 Rose = Aristotele: della filosofia, ed. M. Untersteiner (Rome 1963) 22-3 §12a; Cicero, On divination 1.63-5 with A.S. Pease’s comments in M. Tulli Ciceronis de divinatione liber primus (Urbana 1920) 204-9 on the persistence of this idea from Homer through to modern rural traditions as well as D. Wardle, Cicero: on divination, book 1 (Oxford 2006) 66, 264-9; Diodorus Siculus, Historical library 18.1.1 (Pythagorean tradition); J.D.P. Bolton, Aristeas of Proconnesus (Oxford 1962) 154-5, 202 n.16; E.R. Dodds, The ancient concept of progress (Oxford 1973) 180 with n.5; K.S. Guthke, Last words (Princeton 1992) 38-42, 157, 165, 184, 193 n.21, 220 n.6; T. Döring, Performances of mourning [793] in Shakespearean theatre and early modern culture (Basingstoke 2006) 44-6; and in Judaism, S.L. Drob, Kabbalistic visions (New Orleans 2010) 219. As for the particular case of Socrates: aside from his famous words in Plato’s Apology about the tradition of prophesying at the point of death, we also have his even more famous final words which he speaks to a friend just before dying at the very end of Plato’s Phaedo·. “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius so do make sure to pay him and don’t forget” (118a). Although Plato was a notorious fiction-writer, Socrates had been far too well known a figure in Athens for him simply to invent such a statement. And as for what it means: while Jung’s final attempt to communicate before dying has been virtually ignored, the opposite fate has been reserved for Socrates’ last words. Scholars themselves have obsessively counted up over twenty-five different interpretations of this reference by Socrates to the healing god Asclepius, each new one even more ridiculous and far-fetched than the one that came before (for some recent listings see S. Peterson in Desire, identity and existence, ed. N. Reshotko, Kelowna 2003, 33-5; M.L. McPherran, Ancient philosophy 23, 2003, 73-5 with n.8). Still the only remotely plausible interpretation is the one often attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, even though in fact it goes back one and a half thousand years before Nietzsche to the philosopher Damascius—who has a remarkably good record for being spot on in his explanations of passages from Plato’s Phaedo (APMM120-6, 181-2, 193-4). That interpretation is as simple, and meaningful, as it’s elegant: a cock is traditionally offered to Asclepius when someone has just been healed and Socrates, on the point of dying, is asking his friend to offer a cock to the god because he sees his own death as the ultimate healing (Damascius, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo’, ed. L.G. Westerink, Amsterdam 1977, 284-5 §561, 370-1 §157; [794] for Socrates’ use of the plural “we” in referring primarily to himself compare e.g. Phaedo 116d and A. Nehamas, The art of living, Berkeley 1998, 247). But to most modern philosophers and thinkers this obvious explanation is far too gloomy, not to mention too mystical, as if being mystical or gloomy automatically makes something untrue. Angrily they protest that Socrates would never have endorsed the view of physical existence as a sickness, and in the process they miss what he actually says throughout the course of Plato’s Phaedo·, that philosophy, real philosophy, is a process of purification from the contaminating physical world which ends in complete separation of soul from body (114c; M. Anderson, Plato and Nietzsche, London 2014, 131-3). Add to this what we happen to know about the historical thinker called Phaedo, which is that he too understood philosophical purification and healing as being one and the same (Julian, Letters 82, 445a Bidez, ouden aniaton einai tei philosophiai, pantas de ekpanton hyp’ antes kathairesthai bion; G. Boys-Stones, Phronesis 49, 2004, 22 n.36), and the picture could hardly be more complete. Throughout this entire Platonic dialogue Socrates has been insisting that the soul has to be purified by being separated from the body and, at the very end, he offers thanks for the ultimate healing or purification which is physical death. That leaves the only other real objection to this “Nietzschean” way of interpreting Socrates’ final words which critics have been able to raise: that it would have been unacceptably presumptuous, sacrilegious, downright inconceivable even to think about owing thanks to the god Asclepius for an act of healing which hasn’t yet taken place. “To utter thanks beforehand would be impertinent, if not impious” (G.W. Most, Classical quarterly 43, 1993, 104); “Socrates cannot owe a past debt for something that has not yet happened” and “cannot be at all sure that he is about to [795] take a vacation in the Isles of the Blest” (McPherran 76). And here we encounter the utter foolishness of scholars who, aside from being the murderers Jung accused them of being, can never quite manage to see the obvious. These are Socrates’ last words at the moment of dying; Socrates himself states in Plato’s Apology that the last words spoken at the moment of dying are traditionally visionary, prophetic; and through the visionary grace of prophecy he is now being allowed to see how, after his life of purificatory efforts to die before he dies, the final healing is what lies just ahead. In fact even the smallest of descriptive details at the end of Plato’s Phaedo confirm this. In lying down after drinking the poison to die, he is lying down to incubate just like people lying down for ritual incubation at the temples of Asclepius because they are hoping to be healed (117e, cf. Reality 31-46). In requesting hesychia, silence and stillness, of everyone present (117d-e, cf. IDPW82-3, 162,176-82) he is invoking the ritual stillness and silence needed for the healing to take place. And even in covering himself with his cloak, he is hiding himself from this world just as people used to do during the practice of incubation while waiting to be healed (118a, cf. Elizabeth Belfiore in Peterson 50 n.44; Anderson 133-7). As always in the tradition of iatromanteia, or prophetic healing, the healing and the prophecy go hand in hand. But to anyone unwilling to die before dying, that will always be a complete mystery.
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