# Socrates (Σωκράτης)
**Socrates** (Σωκράτης; c. 469–399 BC) was an Athenian philosopher who wrote nothing himself but changed the practice of philosophy through conversation, questioning the people of Athens about courage, justice, reverence, and the state of their souls. He was tried by an Athenian jury in 399, convicted of impiety and corrupting the young, and executed by drinking hemlock; his trial and death became the founding episode of the philosophical tradition in the West[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) • [2](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG60399).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dates | 469–399 BC, spent his life in Athens; executed at about age seventy[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) • [3](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/) |
| Family and origins | Son of the stoneworker Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete; born in the deme of Alopecē and practiced his father's trade for a time[4](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/2336/Istoria-tis-Archaias-Ellinikis-Grammateias_A-B-G-Gymnasiou_html-apli/index2c_1.html) |
| Written work | None; he wrote nothing, and versions of his conversations survive only through his associates[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) • [2](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG60399) |
| Primary sources | Aristophanes (Clouds, 423 BC), Xenophon, and Plato, whose portraits differ in crucial respects[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) • [5](https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/phi/83/) |
| Method | The elenchus, a form of refutation: he cross-examined people with reputations for wisdom and showed their lack of it[6](https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/socrates-469-399-bc/v-1/sections/socratic-elenchus-or-refutation) |
| Trial and death | 399 BC, charged with not respecting the gods of the city and corrupting the young; death by hemlock[7](https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/ancient_greek/tools/corpora/anthology/content.html?m=3&t=488) • [2](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG60399) |
| Appearance | Sources agree he was profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man, with wide-set bulging eyes, a flat upturned nose, and large fleshy lips[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) |
## Life and appearance
The Greek school history of literature records that Socrates, son of the stoneworker Sophroniscus and the midwife Phaenarete, was born in the deme of Alopecē, received the ordinary education of his time (reading and writing, the Homeric epics, music, gymnastics), and practiced his father's trade for a while; Pausanias even claimed that a statue of the three Graces at the entrance to the Athenian Acropolis was his work[4](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/2336/Istoria-tis-Archaias-Ellinikis-Grammateias_A-B-G-Gymnasiou_html-apli/index2c_1.html) • [8](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/d/8547/2534/22-0161-02_Archaia-Ellinika_Filosofikos-Logos_G-Lykeiou-AnthrSp_Vivlio-Mathiti.pdf). As a young man he attended lectures on natural philosophy, chiefly the theory of [Anaxagoras](https://www.edgepedia.org/anaxagoras) about Mind, before his interests turned elsewhere[8](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/d/8547/2534/22-0161-02_Archaia-Ellinika_Filosofikos-Logos_G-Lykeiou-AnthrSp_Vivlio-Mathiti.pdf).
All surviving sources describe his appearance as strikingly odd by Athenian standards, where beauty and goodness were linked in the popular imagination and good looks bore on political prospects: bulging eyes that could see sideways like a crab, a flat upturned nose, and large fleshy lips. He wore his hair long in the Spartan style even while Athens and Sparta were at war, went barefoot and unwashed, carried a stick, and wore the same clothes day and night[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/).
**Lifestyle.** He worked neither for a living nor in the city's affairs, embraced poverty, refused to take money for what he did, and insisted he was not a teacher (Plato, *Apology* 33a–b)[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). He was to be found in the marketplace and other public places, conversing with virtually anyone willing to join him: young and old, slave and free, rich and poor, citizen and visitor[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). He also reported an inner voice, a *daimonion*, that prohibited him from doing certain things, sometimes trivial and often unrelated to right and wrong; to his fellow Athenians the suggestion that he was guided by something divine was one more reason for suspicion[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/).
## Method
Socrates examined people's lives because, as he says at his trial, "the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being" (Plato, *Apology* 38a)[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). In cross-examining those with reputations for wisdom about human affairs and showing their lack of it, he employed a method of dialectical argument known as the elenchus, Greek for "putting to the test" or "refutation"[6](https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/socrates-469-399-bc/v-1/sections/socratic-elenchus-or-refutation). Its general rules, as reconstructed from the dialogues, require that his partner answer every question according to his own beliefs, and that the partner, not the audience, judge the outcome[9](https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/).
The method was paired with a declared ignorance: he claimed to have no wisdom of his own to share, described his work as midwifery, and helped others recognize for themselves what is real, true, and good[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/) • [10](https://iep.utm.edu/plato/). He was known for stinging and stunning conversation partners into the unpleasant experience of realizing their own ignorance, sometimes followed by genuine intellectual curiosity[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). Modern scholarship on the elenchus, especially since Gregory Vlastos's paper "The Socratic Elenchus" in the early 1980s, has debated whether the method can be a general technique or only one strand of Socratic practice[11](https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02173-X.html).
## Sources and the Socratic problem
Because Socrates wrote nothing, everything known of him is second-hand, and much of it is disputed. The **Socratic problem** is the attempt to discover the historical individual behind the ancient accounts and their philosophy[5](https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/phi/83/).
The earliest extant source is the comic poet **Aristophanes** (c. 450–c. 386 BC), whose *Clouds* was produced within a year of the battle of Delium (423 BC), at which Socrates fought as a hoplite, and when both Xenophon and Plato were infants. In the play the character called Socrates runs a research house where young men study the natural world and slick argumentative techniques, mocks the traditional gods, gives naturalistic explanations of phenomena Athenians regarded as divinely directed, teaches dishonest ways of avoiding debt repayment, and encourages young men to beat their parents into submission[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). In *Apology* 18a–b and 19c, Plato's Socrates says most of his jurors had grown up believing these falsehoods, and he calls [Aristophanes](https://www.edgepedia.org/aristophanes) more dangerous than the three men who charged him, because he had poisoned the jurors' minds while they were young[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). A reason to treat the portrait with care is Kenneth Dover's view that *Clouds* amalgamates into one character features now known to belong to other specific fifth-century intellectuals[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/).
**Xenophon** (c. 425–c. 386 BC), the soldier-historian, presents a Socrates who is a practical and helpful advisor, dispensing advice on moneymaking and estate management, subjects Xenophon knew but Socrates did not, which suggests the character may serve as a mouthpiece for Xenophon's own views. His standing as a historian of 411–362 BC strengthened his prima facie claim as a source, but his Socratic memoirs have been shown, using comparisons of ancient persons compiled from disparate sources, to fail to correspond to what archaeology, history, the courts, and literature independently establish[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/).
**Plato** (424/3–347 BC), about twenty-five at the trial and probably acquainted with Socrates much of his life, is the weightiest source. Philosophers have usually privileged his account, and his depictions of individual Athenians have proved to correspond remarkably well to archaeological and literary evidence. Yet the sources disagree among themselves on Socrates's views, and the dialogues themselves are inconsistent: in the *Gorgias* Socrates opposes hedonism while in the *Protagoras* he supports it, and in the *Crito* he honors Athenian law while vowing in the *Apology* to disobey a lawful jury that ordered him to stop philosophizing[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/).
Modern responses divide broadly. Twentieth-century interpretation split into two camps that long barely read one another: literary contextualists, tracing to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, who read each dialogue whole and see the ambiguities as intentional; and analysts in the Anglo-American tradition, exemplified by Gregory Vlastos, who study the arguments across the texts[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). More recently, many scholars have abandoned the search for the original Socrates, emphasizing the differences among the sources and treating Aristophanes's Socrates, Plato's Socratic dialogues, and Xenophon's Socratic works as worth studying in their own right[12](https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/57485/excerpt/9780521757485_excerpt.pdf).
## Public life and the trial
Socrates held public office in wartime Athens. By lot he was serving on the Prytanes, the presiding committee of the Council, when the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae came before the whole Assembly rather than a jury in 406[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). A later tradition, preserved mainly by Plutarch, holds that Socrates warned against the [Sicilian Expedition](https://www.edgepedia.org/sicilian-expedition); a 1994 study of the story found that most modern writers who repeat it cite only Plutarch, and it questions whether his account descends from any source independent of the Socratic writings, so its value for the historical Socrates remains debated[13](https://www.persee.fr/doc/antiq_0770-2817_1994_num_63_1_1180?pageId=T1_22).
In 399 BC, at the age of seventy, he was arraigned, tried, and sentenced to death by an Athenian popular jury. His accusers Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon charged that he did not respect the gods of the city and that he corrupted the young through his teaching[3](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/) • [7](https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/ancient_greek/tools/corpora/anthology/content.html?m=3&t=488). The trial came a few years after the fall of the oligarchy of the Thirty, a regime led partly by his associates Critias and Charmides, which had been imposed after Athens's defeat by Sparta; scholars have suspected the trial served as a substitute for the political trials of oligarchic partisans generally barred by the amnesty of 403 BC[3](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/). At the penalty stage required by an impiety charge, Xenophon reports that Socrates offered no counter-penalty, while Plato's Socrates said he deserved to be fed at public expense in the Prytaneion[14](https://www.persee.fr/doc/dha_0755-7256_2018_num_44_2_4654?pageId=T5_66). In Plato's *Apology*, when he declared that he would keep philosophizing whatever the verdict, he provoked the judges' reaction[7](https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/ancient_greek/tools/corpora/anthology/content.html?m=3&t=488). Execution followed by enforced suicide with hemlock[2](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG60399).
## Legacy
After his death, nearly every ancient philosophical school, with the exception of the Epicureans, claimed him either as its actual founder or as the model to which its adherents should aspire[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/). The Socratic works written in the forty or so years after his death were numerous enough that later tradition credits him with turning philosophy toward ethics; [Aristotle](https://www.edgepedia.org/aristotle) represents him as the first to make that turn, though Plato and Xenophon show him inheriting elements of earlier Greek moral thought, particularly that of the Seven Sages[15](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/socrates-and-the-seven-sages/80F59885AE1702C1F78837076B616611). Through the question-and-answer practice that bears his name, the [Socratic method](https://www.edgepedia.org/socratic-method) remains a living pedagogical technique, and scholars now study it in settings from classroom questioning to prompting large language models[16](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08769).
## References
1. [Socrates, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/)
2. [Socrates, British Museum collection term](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG60399)
3. [Ancient Political Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/)
4. [Οι μεγάλοι φιλόσοφοι: Σωκράτης, Ιστορία της Αρχαίας Ελληνικής Γραμματείας](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/v/html/8547/2336/Istoria-tis-Archaias-Ellinikis-Grammateias_A-B-G-Gymnasiou_html-apli/index2c_1.html)
5. [William J. Prior, The Socratic Problem, Santa Clara University](https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/phi/83/)
6. [Socrates (469–399 BC), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/socrates-469-399-bc/v-1/sections/socratic-elenchus-or-refutation)
7. [Πλάτων, Απολογία Σωκράτους, Πύλη για την ελληνική γλώσσα](https://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/ancient_greek/tools/corpora/anthology/content.html?m=3&t=488)
8. [Αρχαίος Ελληνικός Φιλόσοφος Λόγος, Ελληνικό Παιδευτικό Ινστιτούτο (student textbook)](https://ebooks.edu.gr/ebooks/d/8547/2534/22-0161-02_Archaia-Ellinika_Filosofikos-Logos_G-Lykeiou-AnthrSp_Vivlio-Mathiti.pdf)
9. [Plato's Shorter Ethical Works, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022)](https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/)
10. [Plato, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://iep.utm.edu/plato/)
11. [Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus, Penn State University Press](https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02173-X.html)
12. [David M. Johnson, Socrates and Athens, Cambridge University Press excerpt](https://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/57485/excerpt/9780521757485_excerpt.pdf)
13. [Mark A. Joyal, Socrates and the Sicilian Expedition, L'Antiquité Classique 63 (1994)](https://www.persee.fr/doc/antiq_0770-2817_1994_num_63_1_1180?pageId=T1_22)
14. [Aristophanes in the Apology of Socrates, Dialogues d'histoire ancienne 44/2 (2018)](https://www.persee.fr/doc/dha_0755-7256_2018_num_44_2_4654?pageId=T5_66)
15. [Socrates and the Seven Sages, The Classical Quarterly](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/socrates-and-the-seven-sages/80F59885AE1702C1F78837076B616611)
16. [Prompting Large Language Models With the Socratic Method, arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08769)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Philosophy, religion, and mythology › Philosophy › Western philosophy by era and school › Ancient Greek and Presocratic philosophy › Socrates and the Socratic movement*
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