There is a kind of deep symbolism that occurred with the death of Socrates on the 6th of the month of Thargelion.[23] On this very day, the first day of the Thargelia festival, two scapegoats (pharmakoi) were ritually prepared. These were men who were fed at public expense, then hung with necklaces of figs, one man with black figs to represent the men of the city, one with white figs to represent the women. They were taken around the city in a procession, then beaten with fig branches and pelted with vegetables. They were then banished from the city, carrying with them the sins of the people. Perhaps most significantly, unlike most other participants in Greek rituals, they were chosen not for their wealth and beauty, but for their poverty and ugliness.[24]
The rituals may look back to a darker time when human sacrifice purified the city, but in classical Athens the punishment was only feigned and the celebration playful. The rites are strangely reminiscent of the Day of Atonement festival of the Hebrews, in which two goats were chosen, one to be sacrificed, the other to be bear the sins of the community. The high priest laid his hands on the head of the second goat and conveyed to it the sins of the congregation. Then it was driven into the wilderness as the eponymous scapegoat. Indeed, the 6th of Thargelion was the Athenian Day of Atonement.[25]
For Socrates’ part, he was the symbolic scapegoat of Athens. He seems to have taken the symbolic blame for the political excesses of previous years, and to have been vilified for his intellectual ideas and constant challenges to the status quo of Athenian life. Curiously, the human scapegoats of Athens were feasted in the Prytaneion, the city hall—receiving just that recompense that Socrates had suggested for himself at the trial—before they were escorted around the city and then driven out.[26]
There are hints in the Phaedo that Socrates himself was honored as the virtuous man who transcended death. Greek religion honored great figures, including many legendary warriors from the Trojan War, as heroes, that is, subjects of hero cults. They were thought to have gained the exalted status of demi-gods and to have been sent, after their deaths, to dwell in the Isles of the Blessed at the edge of the earth.[27] Mortals honored them in an annual ceremony in which they made a sacrifice and libations commemorating a given hero at a shrine.[28]
Socrates seems to have been honored by his followers as a hero.[29] As the canon of heroes was in principle open (like that of Catholic saints), it was not ipso facto sacrilegious to introduce a new hero, though the choice of Socrates was not at first politically prudent, and his cult may have remained private in Plato’s Academy.[30] The cock Socrates vowed to Asclepius would be eaten as a modest offering at a ritual meal by his followers.[31] His death date was memorialized by generations of followers. It appears that the verses he wrote in obedience to the dream were preserved and read at his memorials.[32]
One scholar describes Plato’s Phaedo as a “passion play, strangely moving yet sublimely dispassionate, [which] presents Socrates as the founding father or hērōs ktistēs, not of an educational institution, but of a new way of life devoted to the pursuit and cultivation of wisdom and virtue.”[33] Socrates was dead, but he was now recognized as a martyr to virtue and philosophy, and his cult was destined to spread throughout the world.
[23].The eleventh lunar month in the Athenian year, which year started in mid-summer. It fell in about May to June of our year.
[24].Parke 1978: 146-147; Harpocration, s.v. pharmakos; White 2000: 157. On the festival, see Deubner 1966: 179-198; on Greek scapegoat rituals, see Bremmer 1983.
[25].For the Hebrew Day of Atonement, see Leviticus 16; a similar rite was practiced among the Hittites with a ram: see Bremmer 1983: 305-306.
[26]. Bremmer 1983: 313, with Plato Apology 36d.
[27].Hesiod Works and Days 156-173.
[28].Burkert 1985: 203-208.
[29].White 2000.
[30].Burkert 1985: 206;
[31].White 2000: 158-159.
[32].Diogenes Laertius 2.42; Plato Phaedo 60c-61b; Dio Chrysostom Orations 43:10; White 2000: 161.
[33].White 2000: 168.