Socrates

Socrates of Athens (c. 470 – 399 BCE) stands as the hinge on which the
history of Western philosophy turns. He wrote nothing himself; what we know
of him survives almost entirely through the dialogues of his pupil Plato,
the recollections of Xenophon, and the caricature drawn by the comic poet
Aristophanes. This dependence on later witnesses gives rise to the so-called
"Socratic problem" — the difficulty of separating the historical man from
the literary character who speaks for the doctrines of others.

What is reliably attributed to Socrates is a method rather than a system. He
roamed the agora of Athens questioning craftsmen, generals, and politicians
about the meaning of the very virtues they claimed to possess: courage,
piety, justice, temperance. His procedure, the elenchus, proceeded by drawing
out a confident definition from his interlocutor and then exposing the
contradictions hidden within it. The aim was not humiliation but purgation:
to clear away false certainty so that genuine inquiry might begin. His
celebrated profession of ignorance — that he knew only that he knew nothing —
was the engine of this inquiry, not a pose of false modesty.

Socrates held that virtue is a form of knowledge, and that no one does wrong
willingly; wrongdoing is a kind of error, a failure to perceive where one's
true good lies. From this followed his conviction that the care of the soul
outranks every external good — wealth, reputation, even bodily safety. "The
unexamined life is not worth living," he is said to have declared at his
trial, a sentence that compresses his entire ethical outlook into a single
line.

That trial, in 399 BCE, ended in his condemnation on charges of impiety and
corrupting the youth of Athens. Offered opportunities to escape or to propose
a lenient counter-penalty, he refused, arguing that to flee the city's laws
would be to betray the principles by which he had lived. He drank the hemlock
with a composure that became, for later antiquity, the very image of the
philosopher's death.

His influence radiated outward through rival schools that each claimed his
inheritance: the Platonic Academy, the Cynics who exaggerated his asceticism,
the Cyrenaics who inverted his ethics toward pleasure, and ultimately the
Stoics, who took his self-mastery as their founding ideal. To study Socrates
is therefore to study the common root of nearly every ancient tradition that
followed him.