Socrates
c. 470 BCE–c. 399 BCE · Amphipolis
Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was born in the Athenian deme of Alopece to Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife — modest origins by Athenian aristocratic standards. He received the standard education of an Athenian citizen and served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, distinguishing himself at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis. He wrote nothing. Everything we know of him comes from contemporaries — principally his pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the comic poet Aristophanes, who satirized him in the Clouds — together with later reports going back ultimately to Aristotle.
Socrates transformed philosophy from speculation about nature to the investigation of how a human being should live. His characteristic method, the elenchus, was a rigorous cross-examination that exposed contradictions in his interlocutors' beliefs about virtue, justice, courage, and piety. He claimed to know nothing and to be merely a midwife of others' ideas, yet his questioning carried strong substantive commitments: that virtue is a kind of knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly, that the care of the soul is more important than the care of the body or possessions, and that "the unexamined life is not worth living."
In 399 BCE, in the political aftermath of the rule of the Thirty Tyrants and the restoration of the democracy, Socrates was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. The proceedings are dramatized in Plato's Apology. Convicted by a narrow majority, he refused the alternative penalties of fine or exile, was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, and (according to Plato's Crito and Phaedo) declined offers of escape on principle. His composure facing death became, for the philosophic tradition, the paradigm of the philosophical life.
The "Socratic problem" — the difficulty of reconstructing the historical Socrates from incompatible portraits in Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes — has occupied scholars since antiquity. What is uncontested is his founding role. His immediate circle generated the Cynics (through Antisthenes), the Cyrenaics (through Aristippus), and the Megarians (through Euclides). Through Plato's Academy and its successors he is the ancestor of nearly every later school: Stoics, Skeptics, and ultimately the entire tradition of Western moral philosophy that takes the soul's well-being to be the central ethical question.
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.”
Did you know?
Socrates and the Buddha walked the earth at the same time
While Socrates questioned his fellow Athenians in the marketplace, the Buddha was teaching across northern India. On the dating most scholars now favor — Socrates c. 470–399 BCE and the Buddha c. 480–400 BCE — their lives overlapped almost entirely, and the two died within about a year of each other. Strikingly, neither wrote down a word of his own teaching; both survive only through their students.
Meet the Buddha →How we know
Socrates c. 470–399 BCE; the Buddha c. 480–400 BCE (modern short chronology; the older 563–483 BCE dating is no longer the consensus). Overlap ≈ 70 years; deaths ≈ 1 year apart.
Socrates was a war veteran who saved a comrade in battle
Before he became Athens' most famous philosopher, Socrates served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, fighting at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis. In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades credits Socrates with standing over him and saving his life on the battlefield at Potidaea.
How we know
Socrates 470–399 BCE; campaigns named in Plato, Apology 28e (Potidaea 432, Delium 424, Amphipolis 422 BCE); the rescue of Alcibiades is in Symposium 220d–e.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→
Amphipolis
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Amphipolis
Amphipolis was a strategically important Greek city on the Strymon river in Macedonia/Thrace, in northern Greece. It was the site of a battle in 422 BC during the Peloponnesian War. Ancient tradition lists Amphipolis among the campaigns in which Socrates saw military service.
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Socrates’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Aeschylus, Themistocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Herodotus, Gorgias of Leontini, Euripides, Antiphon, Prodicus, Democritus, Thucydides, Critias, Antisthenes, Aristophanes, Lysias, Andocides, Isocrates
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Socrates’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.