ABSTRACT
The execution of Socrates, wrote the French historian Charles Rollin, ‘will, through all the ages, cover Athens with infamy and reproach, that all the splendour of its glorious actions, for which it is otherwise so justly renowned, can never obliterate’.1 Rollin’s mammoth history of the ancient world, originally published in French between 1730 and 1738,2 proved to be the standard work on the subject well into the nineteenth century, and was quickly translated.3 His opinions of both Athens and Socrates reflected contemporary attitudes and concerns, and would influence opinion for much of the Enlightenment. In this period Socrates reached, in the words of Katharine Carson, the status of a ‘sacred relic’.4 He was established as a model of excellence in both spiritual and philosophical terms, and as such was used by a diverse range of writers and thinkers for an equally diverse range of purposes. Yet all were agreed on the central importance of his death.
