Socrates’ final moments remain one of the most profound meditations on death in the history of philosophy. In Plato’s Apology, delivered as his defense before the Athenian jury, Socrates declared that fearing death is a kind of ignorance. To fear it, he said, is to claim knowledge of what no human being can know. For him, death was not an evil, but an unknown, a mystery that lay beyond human judgment. He offered two possibilities: that death may be a peaceful, dreamless sleep, or that it may be