Do you remember Socrates from school? He probably came up in a philosophy class or maybe also a world history class, something like that. Maybe you just heard about him along the way. He's a pretty famous philosopher. He used to live in Athens a long time ago and then he died. He was also featured heavily in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,

but they didn't call him Socrates. They called him Socrates the whole time. So it could be

confusing. He died a bummer of a death, but I think the people of Athens at the time that he

died considered it an honorable death because he got convicted by the elders of Athens of corrupting

the youth of Athens with pernicious ideas that got inside their heads. And probably honestly,

it was very destabilizing. I don't know. I've never tried to govern an ancient Greek city state.

I don't know what I would have done if I'd been there. But Socrates seems real smart in the rearview mirror. I mean, his student was Plato, and Plato's

prize student was Aristotle. And Aristotle's prize student was Alexander the Great. And heck, I mean,

in a way, several generations later, the prize student of Alexander the Great was Octavian, who went on to be known as Caesar Augustus.

They didn't know each other, but Octavian read the heck out of everything that had to do with Alexander the Great.

So, you know, Socrates is brilliant, long, long legacy.

I guess he did succeed in corrupting the youth of Athens, if indeed that was corrupting.

But there's a cave. You can still go to it in Athens, I think. I don't know if it's real or not, but it's very old. And they say, this is the cell of Socrates. This is where he died. Because they gave him the option for this honorable death. I don't remember what poison. Oh, I do remember. It was hemlock. He drank hemlock. He chose

suicide for his means of death because I guess it was a more honorable, a more dignified death that

surely had to go into his calculation. That death scene has been romantically portrayed in a bunch of

classical art and things like that. It's

very tragic, but I guess honorable. Then you contrast that with the death of Jesus of Nazareth,

some 400-ish years later. And there is no way to put lipstick on that death, as we were talking

about yesterday. It's an ugly death, a brutal death, a shameful

death, a humiliating death. That was the point of what the Romans were trying to accomplish.

I mean, there's no way they were going to give someone who was receiving an execution for

undermining the stability of an occupied territory. There's no way they were going to give a destabilizer

...