We cannot otherwise suppose than that he did not wish to be acquitted.  He wished to die.  The time had come; he had fulfilled his mission; he was old and poor; his condemnation would bring his truths before the world in a more impressive form.  He knew the moral greatness of a martyr’s death.  He reposed in the calm consciousness of having rendered great services, of having made important revelations.  He never had an ignoble love of life; death had no terrors to him at any time.  So he was perfectly resigned to his fate.  Most willingly he accepted the penalty of plain speaking, and presented no serious remonstrances and no indignant denials.  Had he pleaded eloquently for his life, he would not have fulfilled his mission.  He acted with amazing foresight; he took the only course which would secure a lasting influence.  He knew that his death would evoke a new spirit of inquiry, which would spread over the civilized world.  It was a public disappointment that he did not defend himself with more earnestness.  But he was not seeking applause for his genius,—­simply the final triumph of his cause, best secured by martyrdom.

So he received his sentence with evident satisfaction; and in the interval between it and his execution he spent his time in cheerful but lofty conversations with his disciples.  He unhesitatingly refused to escape from his prison when the means would have been provided.  His last hours were of immortal beauty.  His friends were dissolved in tears, but he was calm, composed, triumphant; and when he lay down to die he prayed that his migration to the unknown land might be propitious.  He died without pain, as the hemlock produced only torpor.

His death, as may well be supposed, created a profound impression.  It was one of the most memorable events of the pagan world, whose greatest light was extinguished,—­no, not extinguished, since it has been shining ever since in the “Memorabilia” of Xenophon and the “Dialogues” of Plato.  Too late the Athenians repented of their injustice and cruelty.  They erected to his memory a brazen statue, executed by Lysippus.  His character and his ideas are alike immortal.  The schools of Athens properly date from his death, about the year 400 B.C., and these schools redeemed the shame of her loss of political power.  The Socratic philosophy, as expounded by Plato, survived the wrecks of material greatness.  It entered even into the Christian schools, especially at Alexandria; it has ever assisted and animated the earnest searchers after the certitudes of life; it has permeated the intellectual world, and found admirers and expounders in all the universities of Europe and America.  “No man has ever been found,” says Grote, “strong enough to bend the bow of Socrates, the father of philosophy, the most original thinker of antiquity.”  His teachings gave an immense impulse to civilization, but they could not reform or save the world; it was too deeply sunk in the infamies and immoralities of an Epicurean life.  Nor was his philosophy ever popular in any age of our world.  It never will be popular until the light which men hate shall expel the darkness which they love.  But it has been the comfort and the joy of an esoteric few,—­the witnesses of truth whom God chooses, to keep alive the virtues and the ideas which shall ultimately triumph over all the forces of evil.