Ancient Fact File: Socrates

By Sofia Lambis, Second Year English

Claimed by Cynics and Stoics, disregarded by Epicureans and celebrated by Martin Luther King Jr, Socrates has had an undeniable influence on Western philosophical thought.
But finding out the truth behind the philosopher who paradoxically claimed ‘all I know is that I know nothing’ is not as simple as it seems.

A marble depiction of the head of Socrates, currently in the Louvre.

Since he never wrote anything down, most of what we know about the ancient Greek philosopher is from the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon. This has given rise to an issue known as the Socratic Problem - contradicting accounts of Socrates’ personality and life make it difficult to ascertain who he really was.

It’s important to consider the difference between the historical Socrates and the Socrates depicted by Plato - a figure serving as an example of moral and intellectual excellence. In many of these accounts, Socrates is depicted as someone who asks questions and challenges others’ beliefs. The Oracle of Delphi allegedly proclaimed him to be the wisest man alive. Athenian comedy writers such as Aristophanes also depicted Socrates in their works. By then a public figure who was yet uninterested in glory, his simple lifestyle and habits were often caricatured.

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 BCE. His father is thought to have been a stonemason and his mother a midwife. Little is known about his early life. According to Plato, the young Socrates was taught rhetoric by Aspasia, a widely-known figure in Athenian society and Pericles’ mistress. 

Socrates became known during the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE - 404 BCE)  where he served in the Athenian army as a hoplite, a heavily armed soldier. He married a woman named Xanthippe and had three sons with her. Some sources claim he had a second wife called Myrto. Serving in the Athens’ assembly, Socrates was the only member opposed to illegally trying a group of generals for being unable to return their dead from a battle with Sparta. Later, he also refused to participate in the government-ordered arrest and execution of Leon of Salamis. 

Famously, in 399 BCE Socrates was tried on charges of corrupting the youth and for not worshipping the city’s gods. Although there is no surviving record of this trial, writings from Plato and Xenophon on defence and prosecution speeches exist. This is where Socrates is said to have proclaimed the oft-quoted phrase ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Socrates was condemned for this charge of impiety and sentenced to death by poison. At the time, this would have meant self-administering a dose of hemlock. According to Plato in Phaedo the 70-year old Socrates waited in his cell, refusing to escape. Plato describes Socrates’ demise as the philosopher’s ideal death, his last words were reportedly ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget’.

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, which depicts Socrates moments before taking a cup of hemlock, as he discusses the immortality of the soul. Plato is depicted at the foot of the bed, not because he was present, but because his writings preserved this story.

Socrates features in every Platonic dialogue except the Laws. Generally, Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates do not claim to be accurate depictions of real conversations. Rather, they focus on asking what is the correct way to live. For example, in Protagoras Socrates claims that virtue is knowledge, and that virtue is needed to achieve eudaimonia (a good life), a doctrine that would become integral to Socratic ethics. In Phaedo, Plato also uses Socrates to introduce his influential Theory of the Forms. Yet this focus on imagined dialogues instead of historical accounts makes it difficult to get a portrait of who Socrates really was. Even within Plato’s works there is variation over how Socrates is depicted. Earlier texts such as The Symposium focus more on his character, but eventually this fades into the background as Socrates becomes a mouthpiece for Plato’s own philosophical ideas. Overall, he is presented as an inquirer seeking to critically examine others’ beliefs and arguments. 

After his death the ‘Socratic Conversations’ literary genre emerged, where writers depicted Socrates in a series of imaginary dialogues, often to get across something the writer wanted to say. A key characteristic of Plato’s Socrates is the Socratic Method, a form of argumentation that involved Socrates positioning himself as an ignorant enquirer, asking his subject questions that ultimately expose the latter’s contradictory and inadequate answers.  

Socratic ethics continued to influence philosophical thinkers throughout the ages. His pupil  Antisthenes linked Socrates with the Cynics, which then led to a connection with Stoicism. Regarding themselves as successors to both Socrates and the Cynics, the Stoics took on Socrates’ view that knowledge is virtue, and virtue is enough for eudaimonia. His unwillingness to escape death also hugely influenced their belief that death should be accepted as a natural part of existence instead of heavily resisted. 

Edited by Ben Bryant