Word: hemlock
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...introducing new divinities, and, secondly, of corrupting the young." Socrates, with brilliant irony, pleaded guilty only to an open mind; a majority of the judges, 280, steeped in Babbittry, voted him guilty. Thirty days later, conversing with weeping friends, he carried out their sentence, drank the cup of hemlock, died...
...counting the author and beginning with a handsome, athletic Greek aristocrat who, because of his broad shoulders was called Plato (427-347 B. C.). During populist chaos in Athens, Plato joined the "thinking games" of a homely old idler, Socrates. After the latter had been obliged to swallow hemlock, the pupil proposed exchanging mob government for a Republic ruled by its best intellects. He conceived absolute values for Good, Justice and similar abstractions, a realm of ideals of which ordinary life was but the dim shadow. Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), son of a physician at the court of King...
...saying that he had taught the truth, which was, in his eyes, the highest form of reverence; and was (like Mr. Scopes) convicted. The parallel, they said, fell down in only one important point: Mr. Scopes was given a fine of $100; Socrates was given a cup of hemlock...
Fortunately, the Enquirer cannot persecute its discredited opponents; fortunately, the intellectual standard of the tolerant Enquirer is not to be imposed upon the professors; fortunately, the draught of hemlock is not to be administered to these "corrupters of youth". It is to be hoped that some charitable reader will present the editor with a ticket to "Saint Joan", if it visits Cincinnati. Perhaps he will recognize his cousin, the Curate, to whom "nothing that an Englishman thinks is heresy...
...make on this score. But how long has it been since a noted British scientist bitterly accused his government of casting its geniuses on the scrap-heap." His point is too fully confirmed by history; it is Turner who dies in poverty, not Wellington; Socrates who drinks the hemlock, not Pericles...