Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, I'm McDaniel professor Tom Falkner
I teach courses in classics,
in Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history
and i'm working up a new course for the First Year Seminar
program next fall. And I'm Abby Richardson.
I'm an Art minor and a Writing and Arabic minor
and I'll be assisting the course as a Peer Mentor.
and we're here to invite you to join us as we try to solve one of the great
unanswered questions from the ancient past,
because in 399 BC,
a man named Socrates was charged
was charged, tried, convicted, and executed
leaving the rest of the world ever since to wonder
what had happened
and why has it happened.
You can think of it as a homicide, an ancient
Greek *** mystery.
And here's the thing to him,
Socrates, the world's first philosopher, Socrates invented philosophy as we know it.
Although he never wrote a word, he spent his life in conversation with his fellow
citizens, making him one of the most important
and unique thinkers in history. Here's the scene of the crime,
the prison at Athens.
Professor Falkner and I were there last January with a group of students,
and this is where he was held for a month before he was made to drink a cup of hemlock poison.
His friends and students were with him
as the poison slowly rendered him numb, and then silent. There's the famous painting, by Jacques-Louis David.
And here's the suspect:
The city of Athens.
This is the Acropolis, the religious center of Athens,
and here's the Agora, the political, the nerve center of ancient Athens.
This is not a whodunit. We know whodunit-
The citizens of Athens,
the world's first democracy.
What we just don't know is
why they tried Socrates.
Something just doesn't add up.
Socrates was, by all accounts, a
wise man and a good man
who spent his life exhorting his fellow citizens to do good
and to pursue virtue,
to think about their immortal souls.
Athens was the epitome of
all that we admire about classical Greece,
an open society that valued democracy, individual freedom,
and reason.
Athens regarded the kind of environment
where someone like Socrates could habit,
so why would they put him to death?
To answer this question, we're all going to have to become detectives.
We're gonna look at all the evidence.
We're gonna look at the material evidence, the archaeological sites, the
monuments, the art of ancient athens. We're gonna look at Socrates in his
cultural context. We're going
to look at the literature of Athens, the poetry, the politics, their religion.
We'll read the dialogues of Plato.
We'll look at the speeches of the orators and the politicians.
We'll read Greek tragedy and comedy
all to try to answer this question.
After we've gathered up all of the evidence, we'll see if history really does repeat itself.
We'll put Socrates on trial again; we'll have a retrial.
Students in the class will present a case for and against Socrates,
and ask a jury of McDaniel students and faculty
to find him guilty or innocent.
As you can see we are very excited about this course. We hope that you'll be too.
We'll look forward to seeing some of you next fall in
"Why was Socrates tired?"