Book Detective

A revisionist account of the most famous trial and execution in Western civilization-- one with great resonance for American society today.

In the spring of 399 BCE, Socrates stood trial in his native Athens. The court was packed, and after being found guilty by his peers, Socrates died by drinking a cup of the poison hemlock, a defining moment in ancient civilization. Yet time has transmuted the facts into a fable. Aware of these myths, Robin Waterfield has examined the actual Greek sources and presents a new Socrates, not an atheist or the guru of a weird sect, but a deeply moral thinker whose convictions stood in stark relief to those of his former disciple, Alcibiades, the hawkish and self-serving military leader. Refusing to surrender his beliefs even in the face of death, Socrates, as Waterfield reveals, was determined to save a country that was tearing itself apart, one in moral decline. Why Socrates Died is not only a powerful revisionist book but also a work whose insights translate clearly from ancient Athens to modern America.

The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes

The Rise Of The Greeks by Michael Grant

The Story of the Greeks by H. A. Guerber

The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green

Ancient Greece by Sarah B. Pomeroy

The Greeks by H. D. F. Kitto

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea by Thomas Cahill

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by Frances Cress Welsing

The Life of Greece by Will Durant

The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee

The Renaissance by Will Durant

Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant

The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison

The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson

The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch

The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern