Socrates

Life

Socrates was the son of a stonemason and a midwife, and he served bravely as a hoplite soldier in the Peloponnesian War. Short, snub-nosed and famously scruffy, he spent his days in the agora and the gymnasia of Athens, talking with anyone who would listen. When the oracle at Delphi declared that no one was wiser than Socrates, he concluded that his only wisdom lay in knowing how little he knew.

Ideas

Socrates turned philosophy away from speculation about the physical world and toward ethics: how we should live, what justice and virtue are, and how we can know anything at all. His method was to question people who claimed to know, exposing contradictions in their views and leading them toward clearer thinking. Because he left no writings, we know him mainly through the dialogues of his student Plato and the memoirs of Xenophon.

Trial and death

In 399 BC Socrates was put on trial for impiety and corrupting the young. He refused to beg for mercy and was sentenced to death. Turning down a chance to escape, he spent his last hours discussing the immortality of the soul with his friends before drinking a cup of poison hemlock. Plato’s account of these final days, in the Phaedo, is one of the most moving works of ancient literature.