Socrates' Way

Humanitarianism can take root in the flintiest soil. Even killing ground. While the national debate about the death penalty goes on, the Texas Senate last week passed a bill to make the method of execution in Texas "injection of a substance in a quantity to cause death." Electric chairs now wait for the some 58 inmates on Texas' death row, and Representative Ben Grant, who sponsored the original assembly bill, explains: "We've gone from stoning to the cross to the guillotine and now we need a more modern method. The current ritual of burning a person to death is a horrible procedure." Even proponents of the death penalty could hardly quarrel with that assertion, but historians might fault Grant's chronology. It was more than 23 centuries ago that Plato recounted how the cold began in the feet, moved up the legs and finally enveloped Socrates, who had drunk the hemlock administered to him by fiat of the democracy of Athens.

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