we owe a cock to Asclepius. remember to pay the debt.
meaning sacrifice a cock to the god of medicine in payment of the cure
context is everything.
-Imp
Sounds like madness, with two lumps of sugar, shed blood and some creamy, sacrificial “retribution” towards unenlightened, nostalgic ideals of “justice”… hinted at, indirectly, through a joke about a religious insanity, which was also held up high as “the truth” – for the time being…
As the resident self proclaimed expert on all things Plato, I’d argue that Socrates believing life was a disease, is connotatively, a bit extreme. Given his arguments presented in the Crito and The Republic I do agree with Imp that it is clear Socrates regarded life here as a trial one must undergo in the hope that one might attain ultimate knowledge of the forms. I am fairly certain that Socrates says as much in the Crito (I believe) dialogue, it being part of his contention that Philosophers should not fear death, but welcome it instead.
Or at least, thats how Plato writes him.
And to add, yes, Socrates argued that should one choose to live in a society, one is bound to accept its rules at the cost of one’s life. St. Augustine incorportaes such thinking into his own arguments, provided that said laws do not violate the dictates of the Christian faith, at which point, one is bound to disobey them. Martin Luther King Jr. would cite this in his ‘Letters from the Montgomery Jail’ as a basis for nonviolent protests in the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties.