When the ship had come back, and the time was come, he called all his friends together for a cheerful feast, during which he discoursed to them as usual.  All the words that fell from him were carefully stored up, and recorded by Plato in a dialogue, which is one of the most valuable things that have come down to us from Greek times.  It was not Socrates, said the philosopher, whom they would lay in the grave.  Socrates’ better part, and true self, would be elsewhere; and all of them felt sure that in that unknown world, as they told him, it must fare well with one like him.  He begged them, for their own sakes, never to forget the lessons he had taught them; and when the time had come, he drank the hemlock as if it had been a cup of wine: he then walked up and down the room for a little while, bade his pupils remember that this was the real deliverance from all disease and impurity, and then, as the fatal sleep benumbed him, he lay down, bidding Krito not forget a vow he had made to one of the gods; and so he slept into death.  “Thus,” said Plato, “died the man who, of all with whom we were acquainted, was in death the noblest, in life the wisest and the best.”