by Blake Kilgore
I teach my students the Socratic
Method – questions on questions, the
pickaxe, the shovel, the digging down, down
to the truth. An honorable path, one
that can lead to some light.
I also introduce Mithridates, the Pontic King
who drank poisons, day after day,
against fear of lovers, assassins,
anyone who might harm him,
but especially his mother.
After he’d asked his questions, and the
cowards could no longer hide, Socrates
was given the fatal cup of false judgment,
and he readily obliged, in defiance of lies, in
self-sacrifice for the enlightenment of others.
Mithridates’s imbibing of pain could not
forestall his fate. His wives and daughters
drowned in its wave, and his bitter son marched to kill him.
He’d spent thousands on thousands of his kinsmen’s lives,
raging against flesh and blood; he failed, and Pontus is all but forgotten.