<p>SOCRATES PASSAGE: it’s actually a little longer than the one on the test</p>
<p>A few years ago, during a bitter New York winter, with an afternoon to spare before catching a flight to London, I found myself in a deserted gallery on the upper level of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was brightly lit, and aside from the soothing hum of an under-floor heating system, entirely silent. Having reached a surfeit of paintings in the Impressionist galleries, I was looking for a sign for the cafeteria - where I hoped to buy a glass of a certain variety of American chocolate milk of which I was at that time extremely fond - when my eye was caught by a canvas which a caption explained had been painted in Paris in the autumn of 1786 by the thirty-eight-year-old Jacques-Louis David.</p>
<p>Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends. In the spring of 399 BC, three Athenian citizens had brought legal proceedings against the philosopher. They had accused him of failing to worship the city’s gods, of introducing religious novelties and of corrupting the young men of Athens - and such was the severity of their charges, they had called for the death penalty.</p>
<p>Socrates had responded with legendary equanimity. Though afforded an opportunity to renounce his philosophy in court, he had sided with what he believed to be true rather than what he knew would be popular. In Plato’s account he had defiantly told the jury:</p>
<p>So long as I draw breath and have my faculties, I shall never stop practising philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating the truth for everyone that I meet . . . And so gentlemen . . . whether you acquit me or not, you know that I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths. And so he had been led to meet his end in an Athenian jail, his death marking a defining moment in the history of philosophy.</p>
<p>An indication of its significance may be the frequency with which it has been painted. In 1650 the French painter Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy produced a Death of Socrates, now hanging in the Galleria Palatina in Florence (which has no cafeteria).</p>
<p>The eighteenth century witnessed the zenith of interest in Socrates’ death, particularly after Diderot drew attention to its painterly potential in a passage in his Treatise on Dramatic Poetry.</p>
<p>Jacques-Louis David received his commission in the spring of 1786 from Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sabli</p>