Oil on canvas, 130 × 196 cm, which David showed at the Salon of 1787.
Socrates, condemned to death by Athens, reaches for the cup of hemlock
while he goes on talking to his disciples about the immortality of the
soul, as Plato tells it in the Phaedo. Plato himself sits at the foot of
the bed with his back to the scene; Crito, seated beside his master, grips
his knee; the man handing over the cup turns his face away. It hangs in
the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Painted two years before the Revolution, it was read at once as a civic
lesson: die for your ideas rather than betray them. Thomas Jefferson, then
ambassador in Paris, saw it at that Salon.
