Socrates wrote nothing. Everything we know of him comes through the eyes of others—through the comic distortions of Aristophanes, the practical memoirs of Xenophon, and above all the literary dialogues of Plato, in which Socrates appears as the central figure, the tireless questioner who makes everyone around him feel both intellectually stimulated and vaguely humiliated.
He was born in Athens around 470 BC, the son of a stonemason and a midwife. He fought with distinction in several campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, displaying a physical courage and endurance that his strange outward appearance—snub nose, protruding eyes, a stocky body he covered always with the same old cloak—did nothing to predict. But military service was about the only conventional civic activity he reliably performed. He held no public office by choice, charged no fee for his conversations, and spent most of his adult life doing what he regarded as the most urgent possible work: asking his fellow Athenians what they actually meant when they used words like “justice,” “courage,” “piety,” and “virtue.”
The Elenchus
The method he employed is known as the elenchus—from the Greek for examination or cross-examination. Socrates would approach someone reputed to be wise or expert in a particular domain and would ask them to define the thing they claimed to understand. The general, asked what courage was, would offer a definition. Socrates would then draw out a consequence of that definition that the person would find unacceptable, forcing them to revise it. The revised definition would generate a new difficulty. The process would continue until the interlocutor—typically a prominent Athenian who had begun the conversation quite confident of his wisdom—was reduced to a state of aporia, puzzlement, unable to say what he had supposed himself to know.
The philosophical seriousness of the elenchus rested on several interlocking convictions. First, that the words we use in ethics are not merely conventional labels but attempts to describe something real—that there is a genuine nature to justice or courage that a correct definition must capture. Second, that most people, including most of those with social authority and political power, have never examined whether their beliefs about these matters are coherent. And third—most radically—that this unexamined complacency is not merely an intellectual failing but a practical catastrophe, because how one lives depends on what one believes the good life to be.
“The unexamined life,” Socrates declared in his own defence at his trial, “is not worth living.” This was not a casual epigram but the statement of a complete philosophy: the care of the soul—its orientation toward truth, its avoidance of moral self-deception—was the only pursuit worthy of a human being’s full energies.
The Trial and Death
The trial of 399 BC brought these convictions to their sharpest point. Athens, recently restored to democracy after the oligarchic terror of the Thirty Tyrants, was in no mood for the kind of questioning that associated its practitioners with those who had collaborated in the city’s humiliation. Socrates was charged with impiety—failing to honour the city’s gods, introducing new divine beings—and with corrupting the youth.
He was found guilty by a narrow majority of the jury of five hundred. When he declined to propose the substantial fine that might have satisfied his accusers—offering instead a derisory counter-penalty—he was sentenced to death.
The manner of his death, drinking hemlock in a prison cell surrounded by weeping friends, discoursing on the immortality of the soul with the same equanimity he brought to every other philosophical question, became the defining image of the philosophical life in antiquity. He died in full consistency with everything he had taught: that death is not an evil for a just man, that the soul is more important than the body, that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it.