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c. 470 – 399 BCE
Socrates was born around 470 BCE in Athens, the son of Sophroniscus, said to be a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife — a trade he would later borrow as a metaphor for his own method. He married Xanthippe, served as a hoplite in the campaigns at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, and was known for physical toughness and indifference to comfort. He wrote nothing, so all knowledge of him is refracted through others: the dialogues of Plato, the memoirs of Xenophon, the mocking caricature in Aristophanes' Clouds, and the reports of Aristotle. Reconciling these portraits is the famous 'Socratic problem', and the historical man can never be cleanly separated from Plato's literary creation.
Socrates spent his days in the marketplace and gymnasia questioning those who claimed to know what justice, courage, or piety were, and exposing the confusion beneath their confidence. This cross-examination, the elenchus, proceeds by drawing out a definition and then testing it against the speaker's other beliefs until a contradiction shows. He claimed no wisdom of his own beyond awareness of his own ignorance — the Delphic oracle had called no man wiser — and compared himself to a midwife who delivers others of their ideas, and to a stinging gadfly rousing a sluggish city.
Though he professed ignorance, certain convictions recur. Virtue is a kind of knowledge, so that no one does wrong willingly but only through ignorance of the good; the care of one's soul matters more than wealth or reputation; and the unexamined life is not worth living. He spoke too of a divine sign, his daimonion, an inner voice that warned him away from wrong courses but never told him what to do.
In 399 BCE, in the bitter aftermath of Athens' defeat and the tyranny of the Thirty, Socrates was prosecuted by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. The Apology presents his unrepentant defense; the Crito has him refuse a chance to escape, on the ground that he must not break the city's laws even to save his life; and the Phaedo recounts his serene death by hemlock, discoursing on the soul's immortality to the last. That death became the tradition's enduring image of the philosopher who lives and dies by reason.
Socrates is the hinge of ancient philosophy. Beyond Plato and the Academy, his followers founded a spread of rival schools — the Cynics through Antisthenes, the Cyrenaics through Aristippus, the Megarians through Euclides — and every later Platonist read his life as the model of philosophy as a way of living, not merely a body of opinions.
PLATO SCROLL