As the poison numbed Socrates’s feet, legs, and then groin, the Western world’s most famous philosopher turned to his friend Crito and said, “We owe a cock to Asclepius,” referring to the Greek god of healing and medicine. “Pay the debt. Don’t forget.” His weeping friend agreed, and, moments later, when the potion reached his heart, Socrates expired. The last words of a condemned revolutionary thinker, who was praised by his famous student Plato as “the best and wisest and most righteous man,” were about a chicken... The classicist Eva Keuls argues that the optimistic and irreverent philosopher was telling a dirty joke to cheer up his grieving companions. Before he died, she contends, Socrates lifted his cloak and exposed his erection, which resulted either from the poison or the touch of the attendant who felt his body to check the drugs’ progress—or both. He was making a pun on the Greek word for becoming cold, which can also mean rigid or enlivened, while referring to a bird associated with an insatiable sexual appetite as well as healing.
