Questa immagine potrebbe avere delle imperfezioni perché è storica o di reportage.
The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David, oil on canvas, 1787. Accused by the Athenian government of denying the gods and corrupting the young through his teachings, Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) was offered the choice of renouncing his beliefs or dying by drinking a cup of hemlock. David shows him prepared to die and discoursing on the immortality of the soul with his grief-stricken disciples. Painted in 1787 the picture, with its stoic theme, is perhaps David's most perfect Neoclassical statement. The printmaker and publisher John Boydell wrote to Sir Joshua Reynolds that it was "the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the stanze of Raphael." Socrates (469-399 BC) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Socrates is renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics and the concept of Socratic method (a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas, dialectical). Socrates made important and lasting contributions to the fields of epistemology and logic. In 399 BC Socrates was tried on the basis of two notoriously ambiguous charges: corrupting the youth and impiety. He was accused of "failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges" and "introducing new deities." Socrates was declared guilty and sentenced to death by drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock.
