I.F. Stone on Socrates and Why He Was Put To Death

Study carefully the article by I.F. Stone on Socrates.

(NOTE: You can see a scanned copy of the original here. It has illustrations, and of course the same layout that the original articles has in the New York Times Magazine of April 8, 1979. But the typed-out, text version above is easier to use, and we will use it in this class.

(NOTE 2: Select "Western" (ISO-8859-1)" as your Character encoding. If you don't, the accents will come out as question marks.)

Don't neglect to double-check his quotations -- the hyperlinks have some of them.

Then, write 300-350 words summarizing, in your own words, Stone's thesis:

• (a) why did the Athenians condemn Socrates to death? and
• (b) why did Socrates' defenders, Plato and Xenophon, obscure what the real reasons were?

Email to your group and to me.