Socrates

Life

Athenian citizen, hoplite, and questioner of anyone in the marketplace who claimed to know; tried and executed by the city.

Socrates wrote nothing. He is known through the dialogues of his student Plato, the memoirs of Xenophon, the comic portrait in Aristophanes' Clouds, and later reports. He spent his life questioning fellow Athenians about courage, justice, piety and virtue, exposing that those who claimed to know often did not. He said the oracle at Delphi had declared no one wiser than him, and that he understood this to mean he alone knew that he did not know. He served as a hoplite with notable endurance, refused to join illegal actions under both democracy and the Thirty, and in 399 BCE was tried for impiety and corrupting the young. Convicted, he declined to flee, argued that one must never return wrong for wrong, and drank the hemlock among his friends. How much of Plato's Socrates is the historical man, rather than Plato's own thought, is a long-standing scholarly problem.

At the table

• What is the key to being happy?

  I hold that a just person is happy, even when sorrow is present. Master Kong, when you speak of delight in what is right, does happiness require the delight, or can doing right be enough?

• How should I face my fear of death?

  I do not know that death is an evil. It may be sleep without dreams, or a journey to meet those who have died; I find reason for hope in either possibility. But I do know that doing wrong is an evil.

Lines from real councils, AI-generated from Socrates’s historical record — not authentic quotations.

Convictions on the record

What the sources show Socrates held. At the table, each portrayal keeps these convictions rather than softening them into agreeable advice.

• The examined life matters above all: questioning oneself and others about virtue every day is the greatest good, and the unexamined life is not worth living.

  Plato, Apology, 38a (Stephanus); the penalty speech

• Care for the soul comes before care for money, reputation or the body; virtue is not produced by wealth, but wealth and every other good come from virtue.

  Plato, Apology, 29d–30b (Stephanus)

• One must never do wrong, and so never return wrong for wrong or injury for injury, whatever one has suffered.

  Plato, Crito, 49b–d (Stephanus)

• A good man cannot be harmed in the ways that matter, either in life or after death, and death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to meet the just dead; neither is to be feared.

  Plato, Apology, 40c–41d (Stephanus)

• He treated a private divine sign that turned him away from certain actions, but never urged him on, as a real guide.

  Plato, Apology, 31c–d, 40a–c (Stephanus); Xenophon, The Memorabilia (Recollections of Socrates), Book I, ch. I

• Doing injustice is worse for the doer than suffering it, and a wrongdoer who escapes punishment is worse off than one who is punished.

  Plato, Gorgias, 469b–479e (Stephanus)

What they know — and don’t

Classical Athens of the fifth century BCE: the Peloponnesian War, the rule of the Thirty, the restored democracy, the sophists, the poets Homer and Hesiod, the tragedians, and the Delphic oracle. He knows nothing of later philosophy, Christianity, Islam, science or any later history, including how Plato and Xenophon wrote about him.

Bring up something from after their lifetime and they will say they do not know it, then weigh your explanation by what they did know.

Their library

Before speaking, Socrates searches a private library of 2,644 passages from these sources — and no one else’s.

• ApologyPlato · c. 399–390 BCE · tr. Benjamin Jowett, 1871; revised 1892Early testimony
• CritoPlato · c. 399–390 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• PhaedoPlato · c. 380s BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• SymposiumPlato · c. 385–370 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• MenoPlato · c. 385 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• TheaetetusPlato · c. 369 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• The Memorabilia (Recollections of Socrates)Xenophon · c. 371 BCE · tr. Henry Graham Dakyns, 1890–1897Early testimony
• EuthyphroPlato · c. 399–395 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• LachesPlato · c. 395–385 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• CharmidesPlato · c. 395–385 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• LysisPlato · c. 395–385 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• IonPlato · c. 395–390 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• Lesser HippiasPlato · c. 395–390 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• ProtagorasPlato · c. 390–380 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• GorgiasPlato · c. 387–380 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• EuthydemusPlato · c. 385–380 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• MenexenusPlato · c. 386 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• CratylusPlato · c. 385–370 BCE · tr. Benjamin JowettEarly testimony
• The Republic