Famous last words: which ones were really said
Most famous last words were written down by someone else, often years later and sometimes centuries later. A few were witnessed and recorded at the time. Many were tidied up in the retelling, and some were never said at all. Here is what the sources actually say for the best known.
Julius Caesar: probably nothing
“Et tu, Brute?” is Shakespeare’s line, from Julius Caesar in 1599, and it had already appeared in an earlier play in 1595. Neither ancient biographer gives Caesar a famous line. Suetonius says he died without a word, adding that some people claimed he said “You too, child?” in Greek as Brutus came at him. Plutarch says that when Caesar saw Brutus among the attackers, he pulled his toga over his head.
Archimedes: close, but not quite
Archimedes was killed when the Romans took Syracuse, and “Do not disturb my circles” is the line everyone knows. It appears in no ancient source. Plutarch tells the death more than one way: a soldier ordered him to come along and killed him when he refused to leave a problem unfinished, or a soldier killed him for the instruments he was carrying. The Roman writer Valerius Maximus comes nearest to the famous version. In his telling Archimedes covered his diagram in the dust with his hands and said, “I beg of you, do not disturb this.”
Socrates: a debt to Asclepius
Socrates’ last words come from Plato’s Phaedo: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and do not forget.” Plato was not in the room. The dialogue is narrated by Phaedo, who says Plato was ill that day. What the line means is still argued over. A cock was the offering to the god of healing after a recovery, and one reading is that Socrates saw death as the cure.
Augustus: a performance, then a goodbye
Suetonius says that on his last day Augustus asked his friends whether he had played the comedy of life well, and quoted the closing lines an actor used to ask for applause. Those are the words usually given as his last. They were not. Suetonius records that he died kissing his wife, saying: “Live mindful of our wedlock, Livia, and farewell.”
Goethe: more light
Goethe died in Weimar on 22 March 1832, and “Mehr Licht!”, “More light!”, was in print as his last words within two years. It has been read as a poet’s last wish for enlightenment. The plainer reading is that a dying man asked for the shutters to be opened.
Jefferson and Adams: the same day
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. Three people at Jefferson’s bedside left accounts, and they do not quite agree. The best known has him wake on the night of 3 July and ask, “This is the Fourth?” The last words anyone recorded came later, to his doctor, Robley Dunglison: “No, doctor, nothing more.”
Adams died that evening in Massachusetts. His last words are reported to have included “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was wrong: Jefferson had died some hours earlier.
Oscar Wilde: not his last
“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go” is real, but Wilde said it on one of his last trips out of his Paris hotel, not on his deathbed. By the end he had meningitis and was barely conscious. He died on 30 November 1900.
Steve Jobs: oh wow
Jobs’s last words come from the eulogy given by his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, at his memorial on 16 October 2011, and later printed in the New York Times. She said he looked at his family, then past them, and said: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
How to tell which ones to trust
Ask who was in the room and when they wrote it down. Jefferson’s doctor and Jobs’s sister were at the bedside. Suetonius wrote more than 160 years after Caesar’s death, and he flags his own doubt. The line most people quote for Archimedes has no source at all. Lines that sound like a summary of a whole life, or arrive with perfect timing, deserve the most suspicion.
Who Said It asks you to match famous lines to the people who said them, and its notes flag the ones that were reported second-hand or never said at all.