Socrates was the son of a stonemason and a midwife, born in Athens around 470 BCE. He fought as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, then for the rest of his life made the agora his classroom — questioning the city's most powerful men in public, exposing their pretensions to knowledge, and accepting no payment for it. He wrote nothing himself; we know him entirely through the dialogues of Plato, the memoirs of Xenophon, and the satirical caricature of Aristophanes. His method — pose a question, follow the answer through with relentless cross-examination, demonstrate that the interlocutor doesn't know what he claimed to know — gave Western philosophy its definition of inquiry. In 399 BCE, in the bitter aftermath of Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War, he was tried for impiety and 'corrupting the young' and sentenced to death by a jury of 501 citizens. He refused his friends' offers to bribe the guards and escape, and on the appointed day drank a cup of hemlock. He was seventy. Plato's Apology and Phaedo record his trial and his last day; they are the foundation of philosophy's self-image of itself.
All Figures
Athenian Philosopher · The Gadfly of Athens
Socrates
c. 470 BCE – 399 BCE
The Athenian who wrote nothing, taught for free in the agora, was condemned by his own city for impiety and corrupting the young, and drank hemlock at seventy rather than escape.
Lifetime
Date source not yet attached to this catalogue record.