Money follows

The story

In the spring of 399 BC a seventy-year-old stonemason's son stood before a jury of around 500 Athenian citizens. The charge was that he did not believe in the city's gods and that he corrupted the young. The penalty could be death. Socrates chose not to beg for mercy.

Instead he explained what he had actually been doing for thirty years. He had walked around Athens asking questions of anyone who would listen, and told them all the same thing: you care about money, reputation and honour, but not about reason, truth and the soul. Get the order right, he said, and the rest follows. Virtue does not come from money. But from virtue comes money and every other good a person can have.

It is easy to read that as a promise: be good and you will be rich. Socrates meant almost the opposite. He was poor himself, went barefoot and owned almost nothing, and that was part of the point. Those who chase money first get money that is good for nothing. Those who first work out what is worth having get something to use the money for. Money follows. It does not lead.

The jury found him guilty by a narrow margin. When he was then allowed to propose his own penalty, he replied that he deserved free meals at the city's expense, like a winner at the Olympic Games. More jurors then voted for death than had voted for guilt. A few weeks later he drank the hemlock, surrounded by friends, calm to the end.

He himself never wrote a word. Everything we know comes from his students, above all Plato, who sat in the courtroom and later wrote the defence down. How much is Socrates and how much is Plato, nobody knows.

The object on the poster is a simple clay cup of the kind used in Athens in his day. Not the poison cup, nothing dramatic. Just a cup that is enough to drink from, and worth exactly that.