But while Socrates' speech would go on to shape thousands of years of Western thought, a jury of his peers remained unconvinced; at the age of 70, he was found guilty of impiety .
Said the Pontiff: "Favored by marvelous gifts from God for ingenuity and creative fantasy, it is rare that he has not left in his work some traces of impiety and immorality.
But the easygoing realism that accepts wife-swapping or any impiety of evaded obligation with a sociological shrug enrages him, for at bottom he is a New England moralist.
Jean-Paul Sartre in New York Times In The New York Review of Books, the critic Daniel Mendelsohn argued that Littell is attempting to achieve what Jean-Paul Sartre called "impiety against real piety," in this case the piety being "our own conventional pruderies and...
Edmund Blunden in New Statesman The writer and poet Edmund Blunden said afterwards that it "seemed a horrid impiety" to open his Homer.