Socrates
c. 470 BCE–c. 399 BCE · Athens
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 rejected exile and offered only a fine (finally 30 minae, guaranteed by Plato, Crito and others), but 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 ←/→
AthensAttica (Greece)
What they did here
Born c. 470 BCE in the Athenian deme of Alopece, son of the stonemason Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete (Plato, Laches 180d; Theaetetus 149a).
About Athens
Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.
In Athens at the same time
Aeschylus, Themistocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini
Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time
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, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus, 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.