He stood trial for impiety and corrupting the young, before a jury of five hundred Athenians. His friends had explained how it worked: you show remorse, you bring your wife and children out weeping, you propose a fine the jurors find reasonable. He did none of it. When asked to propose a penalty himself, he suggested that the city actually owed him free meals. The jury sentenced him to death. Later, when his friends had arranged his escape and bribed the guards, he refused to go. They could kill him, he said, but they could not harm him.
The trial took place in 399 BC, in an Athens still shaking from defeat by Sparta and from the terror of the Thirty Tyrants, some of whom had belonged to his circle. The conviction was narrow: roughly two hundred and eighty to two hundred and twenty-one. His proposal to be fed at public expense instead of punished cost him votes he might still have had at sentencing. For the Stoics he became the measure: Epictetus quotes him more than anyone, and Marcus Aurelius names him among the few who were not acting a part. He wrote nothing himself; everything comes through Plato and Xenophon.
You can buy your freedom by becoming, just once, what they are asking you to be, or you can remain who you are and leave the outcome to itself.
The verdict lay with five hundred strangers, and so did his life. Not his. What was his: whether he would become a man who begs, and whether his last act would match everything he had argued before it. His line about harm is therefore not bravado but a sorting: killing reaches the body, harming reaches the character, and only you can do the second to yourself.
Where would you stop bending? And do you know that, or do you hope it?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions