In 1845, a Scottish tailor named Gow sent his children to gather wild parsley, which he used to make a sandwich, Emily Wilson writes in “The Death of Socrates” (Harvard University Press, 256 pages, $19.95). Soon after eating it, his body started to go numb, starting with his legs and spreading up his torso. He never lost consciousness, but after a few hours he was dead. Gow’s children had killed their father, whom they had unwittingly served wild hemlock. But at the same time, they had proved that the story of Socrates’s death by hemlock, told by Plato in the “Phaedo,” was not a legend. With the right dose, it was possible for a man to die the good death Socrates had chosen — a death peculiarly befitting a philosopher, in which the spirit painlessly emancipates itself from the body.

Such a death, Socrates insisted, was no reason for mourning, but the consummation of a life spent in pursuit of the spirit. He told his disciples,

The truth rather is that the soul which is pure at departing draws after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily had connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered into herself (for such abstraction has been the study of her life). And what does this mean but that she has been a true disciple of philosophy and has practised how to die easily? And is not philosophy the practice of death?

There is something sublime about Socrates’s formula, but also something uncomfortable. It is not just today, when we have grown estranged from death and see every death as a kind of accident, that it is hard to imagine the practice of death as a worthy way to spend a life. Plato, whose dialogues offer our primary, but not exclusive, window onto Socrates’s life and teachings, makes very clear in the “Phaedo” that even Socrates’s disciples found his resignation hard to fathom, and impossible to share. Phaedo himself, the narrator of the dialogue, remembers “the strange feeling which came over me” at the sight of Socrates in his prison cell, just hours away from death. “I was pleased, and I was also pained, because I knew that he was soon to die, and this strange mixture of feeling was shared by us all; we were laughing and weeping by turns,” he recalls.

By that time, the philosopher had already thrown away several chances to escape his doom. At his trial before the citizens of Athens, on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city, Socrates refused to mount a vigorous defense. In particular, he would not weep, parade his wife and children before the jury, or get his friends to beg for his life — all standard techniques for winning the sympathy of the fickle Athenians. In Plato’s “Apology,” his version of Socrates’s defense speech, we find the aged philosopher reproaching his judges:

I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger.

After he was convicted, Socrates was challenged, according to the usual trial procedure, to suggest an alternative punishment to death. It was another chance to save himself, and again he refused to seize it. Instead of proposing exile or a large fine, he once again enraged the jury, by insisting that what he really deserved was to get his meals for free at the town hall for the rest of his life. Even after the death sentence came down, Socrates had a chance to escape. By a quirk of Athenian custom, no executions could be carried out while the annual pilgrimage to Delos was underway, and the ship had been launched the day before Socrates’ trial began. His followers, who included many rich and noble Athenians, offered to arrange to get him out of jail before the ship returned; but once more he refused, and went willingly to his execution.

There is something in every reader which resists this Socratic passivity. Certainly Ms. Wilson, in her introduction to the famous story, resists it, even to the point of insensibility. A classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Wilson has evidently designed this short book as an introduction to Socrates for students and general readers. She offers a brief survey of his life and times, an account of his major ideas, and a description of the sources — which include dialogues by Xenophon and a play by Aristophanes, as well as Plato’s work. Yet reading “The Death of Socrates” gives one very little sense of why Socrates has been, and should be, the most revered figure in Western culture, only Jesus excepted.

Instead, Ms. Wilson, perhaps seeking to humanize her book and her subject, approaches Socrates with unremitting skepticism. In her introduction, she blames Socrates for superstitiously obeying his daimonion, the “god” who, he claimed, always warned him when he was about to commit a bad action; for putting on a façade of false modesty, and for being an ineffective teacher. “The real test of any moral teacher is how well his students behave,” she writes later on, and “by this criterion, Socrates failed miserably.” She suggests, with a certain counterintuitive frisson, that Socrates deserved to be condemned, since he was “guilty as charged” of failing to respect Athenian religion.

Above all, Ms. Wilson demands justice for Xanthippe, Socrates’s wife, whom Xenophon portrayed as a shrew, and whom the philosopher banished from his deathbed. She considers that dismissal a “shocking moment” in the “Phaedo,” and she admires modern retellings of the story — like “Xanthippe” by Fritz Mauthner — which elevate the wife’s moral stature at the expense of her husband. On a related point, she blames Socrates for his indifference to the children he left behind: “Socrates pays little heed to his parental duties,” she chides.

All of this criticism could serve a useful educative purpose, by challenging the reader to encounter Socrates as a real man with moral choices to make, rather than an ideal figure out of myth. But those criticisms cannot be either the first or the last word on Socrates: not the first, because it is unwise to encourage students in our age’s habit of irreverence, and not the last, because this kind of censure vanishes in the radiance of Socrates’s moral presence. Because she does not capture that presence in anything like its real dimensions, Ms. Wilson is unable to explain why Socrates matters. Even her survey of the way Socrates’s death has been portrayed in later literature and art fails to communicate his true stature — in part because it is so senselessly rushed.

In an odd but telling way, Ms. Wilson’s view of Socrates as a bad parent perfectly recapitulates, for our own time, the moralistic condemnation of his contemporaries. For the Athenians, the gods were above criticism; for us, family values are above criticism. But the essence of Socrates is that he criticized everything, even and especially the sacred cows. And he did this, not in the malicious spirit of a nihilistic relativism, but in the name of the very virtues his enemies accused him of blaspheming.

The logic of Socrates’s death — the reason why he refused every chance to escape — was that he insisted on living as though he really believed in the principles which most of us only claim to believe in. Especially in ancient Athens, but in contemporary America too, everyone agrees that doing good is better than doing evil; that the gods protect the good man; that there is no real reason to fear dying, since death is either an absence or an unknown. But Socrates insisted on living these ideas, at any price. If it makes no sense to fear death, he asked, why flee it? If doing evil is always wrong, why lie or debase oneself for the sake of survival?

Jesus offered promises; if he was right, there is no risk in doing good, because the afterlife is a certainty and God is always watching. But Socrates, even on his deathbed, spoke of the afterlife only in the conditional tense of irony. “I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true,” he said, after elaborating a lovely myth of the afterlife, “a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true.”

Socrates, in other words, offers no promises, only an existential challenge. That is what makes the story of his death, even 2,400 years later, so moving and so unsettling. Any reader who wants to learn about the death of Socrates should skip “The Death of Socrates” and go straight to Plato. After all, what Ms. Wilson writes about 18th-century readers is still true today: “A return to Socrates seemed to promise a fresh beginning for philosophy and intellectual life.”

akirsch@nysun.com