Socrates

Socrates was born around 470 BCE in Alopeke, a deme (district) of Athens lying just outside the city walls. His father, Sophroniscus, is traditionally described as a stonemason or sculptor, and his mother, Phaenarete, worked as a midwife ^[1]. The family belonged to the middling ranks of Athenian society, prosperous enough for Socrates to receive the standard education of an Athenian boy and to serve later as a hoplite, the armored infantryman who supplied his own equipment ^[2].

Almost nothing certain survives about his childhood. Later sources suggest he may have trained for a time in his father's craft, and ancient writers connected him with the intellectual currents of mid-fifth-century Athens, when natural philosophers such as Anaxagoras were active in the city. In Plato's dialogue Phaedo, Socrates recalls an early enthusiasm for the study of nature that he eventually abandoned in favor of ethical questions ^[3]. Whether this account is biography or literary invention remains debated, a difficulty that runs through every attempt to reconstruct his life.

Anyone asking who was Socrates has to confront this evidential puzzle first. He wrote nothing himself, so historians rely on four principal witnesses: the philosopher Plato, the soldier and historian Xenophon, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and, at one remove, Aristotle. These sources disagree with one another, and scholars call the resulting difficulty the Socratic problem ^[1].

Socrates came of age during the golden decades of Athenian democracy, the era of Pericles, the building of the Parthenon, and the long conflict with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War. He fulfilled his military obligations with distinction, fighting as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis between 432 BCE and 422 BCE. Plato has the general Alcibiades praise his endurance on campaign, describing him marching barefoot over ice and rescuing Alcibiades himself during the fighting at Potidaea ^[2].

At home, Socrates became a fixture of Athenian public space. He held no school, charged no fees, and claimed no doctrine to teach. Instead he engaged anyone willing to talk, from generals to shoemakers, in conversations that probed the definitions of moral terms: what is piety, what is courage, what is justice ^[4]. His questioning frequently exposed the confusion of confident men, which won him devoted young followers and resentful enemies in roughly equal measure.

By 423 BCE he was famous enough for Aristophanes to caricature him in the comedy Clouds, which portrays a Socrates suspended in a basket, studying the heavens and teaching students to make weak arguments defeat strong ones ^[5]. The portrait blends Socrates with the sophists, the paid teachers of rhetoric he pointedly resembled and pointedly differed from, and Plato later claimed the play planted prejudices that resurfaced at his trial. According to Plato's Apology, the oracle at Delphi told Socrates' friend Chaerephon that no one was wiser than Socrates, a pronouncement Socrates said he tested by interviewing reputed experts, concluding that his only advantage was awareness of his own ignorance ^[4].

The list of Socrates achievements contains no books, no offices, and no monuments, yet few figures in intellectual history have accomplished more. His central innovation was a method: the practice of examining beliefs through structured question and answer, now called the Socratic method or elenchus. Rather than lecturing, he would ask an interlocutor to define a concept, then draw out the consequences of the definition until contradictions appeared, forcing a revision or an admission of perplexity ^[6]. Teachers of law, medicine, and philosophy still use versions of this technique.

Socrates also redirected the subject matter of philosophy itself. Earlier Greek thinkers had asked chiefly about the composition of the cosmos. Socrates turned inquiry toward human conduct, asking how a person should live. Cicero later wrote that Socrates called philosophy down from the heavens and placed it in the cities and homes of men, a judgment that captures the shift even if the phrasing is Cicero's own ^[7]. Aristotle credited him with two specific contributions: inductive arguments and the pursuit of universal definitions in ethics ^[6].

Several positions associated with him proved enormously influential. He held that virtue is a kind of knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly, and that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it ^[3]. He professed to know nothing of importance, a stance of disciplined humility that shaped the later skeptical schools. His insistence that the unexamined life is not worth living, recorded in Plato's Apology, remains among the most quoted sentences in philosophy ^[4]. Every major Greek philosophical school of the following centuries, from Plato's Academy to the Stoics and Cynics, traced its lineage to his example.

Contemporaries agreed that Socrates was strikingly ugly by Greek standards, with a snub nose, bulging eyes, and a thick belly, features his friends joked about and he cheerfully acknowledged ^[2]. He wore a plain cloak in all seasons, usually went barefoot, and was famous for his indifference to money and comfort. Xenophon presents him as a model of self-control who could drink without drunkenness and endure hunger and cold without complaint ^[8].

He married Xanthippe, who bore him three sons: Lamprocles, Sophroniscus, and Menexenus. The youngest two were still small children at the time of his death in 399 BCE, which indicates the marriage came relatively late in his life ^[1]. Later tradition made Xanthippe a byword for the sharp-tongued wife, though the earliest sources give only thin support for the caricature, and Plato's Phaedo shows her grieving at the prison on the day of his death ^[3].

Socrates spoke of a private divine sign, a daimonion, an inner voice that warned him against certain courses of action but never told him what to do ^[4]. He treated it with complete seriousness, and his accusers may have had it in mind when they charged him with introducing new divinities. Among the facts about his civic life, one episode stands out: in 406 BCE, serving on the council that presided over the assembly, he alone refused to allow an illegal collective trial of the generals who commanded at the battle of Arginusae, holding to the law against the fury of the crowd ^[4].

The final decade of Socrates' life coincided with catastrophe for Athens. The city surrendered to Sparta in 404 BCE, ending the Peloponnesian War, and a Spartan-backed junta known as the Thirty Tyrants briefly ruled through terror. Socrates remained in the city and, by his own account in Plato's Apology, defied the regime by refusing an order to help arrest Leon of Salamis, an innocent man marked for death. Only the fall of the Thirty saved him from punishment ^[4].

The restored democracy did not view him kindly. Several of his known associates had disgraced themselves: Alcibiades had defected to Sparta during the war, and Critias, a former companion, had led the Thirty. An amnesty barred prosecutions for political crimes, but in 399 BCE three citizens, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon, indicted Socrates on charges of impiety (failing to acknowledge the city's gods and introducing new ones) and corrupting the young ^[1]. Many historians read the religious charges as a legally permissible vehicle for political resentment ^[6].

The trial took place before a jury of roughly 500 citizens. Plato and Xenophon each wrote an account of the defense speech, and in Plato's version Socrates refuses to plead for pity, defends his life of questioning as a service commanded by the god, and suggests he deserves free meals in the public dining hall rather than punishment ^[4]. The jury convicted him by a fairly narrow margin and then, offered a choice between the prosecution's proposal of death and his own counterproposal, voted for death. A sacred embassy to Delos delayed executions for about a month, during which his friends arranged an escape he refused, arguing (as Plato dramatizes in the Crito) that he owed obedience to the laws of the city that had raised him. In the spring of 399 BCE he drank the prescribed cup of poison hemlock in prison, talking philosophy with his companions until the end ^[3].

The execution turned Socrates into philosophy's defining martyr. Within a generation, former companions produced a whole literary genre of Socratic dialogues, of which Plato's roughly two dozen works and Xenophon's four Socratic writings survive complete ^[1]. Plato made his teacher the protagonist of nearly all his dialogues, and through Plato the Socratic demand for definitions and reasoned examination passed to Aristotle and onward into the entire Western tradition. The philosophers who came before him are still grouped together, by convention, as the Presocratics.

Hellenistic schools competed to claim his mantle. The Cynics took his austerity to an extreme, the Cyrenaics developed one reading of his views on pleasure, the Stoics revered him as the nearest human approach to the sage, and the skeptics of the later Academy invoked his profession of ignorance ^[6]. Roman writers, medieval scholars, and Renaissance humanists kept the image alive, and Enlightenment thinkers treated his trial as the archetypal case of conscience against state power. Modern philosophers as different as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Karl Popper defined their projects partly through arguments with him ^[7].

Interest in the man has never faded. Any Socrates biography must be assembled from other people's testimony, which keeps scholarly debate active more than two millennia later, and books re-examining his trial continue to appear, including journalist I. F. Stone's widely read 1988 study ^[9]. Painters returned to his death scene for centuries, most famously Jacques-Louis David, whose 1787 canvas The Death of Socrates hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ^[10]. The questioning gadfly of Athens remains what he was for Plato: the starting point of ethical philosophy and a standing challenge to examine how one lives.