Four witnesses who do not agree
Scholars call it the Socratic problem. Plato's dialogues give us a relentless questioner who becomes, in the later works, a spokesman for Plato's own metaphysics. Xenophon offers a practical, rather conventional adviser on household management and piety. Aristophanes, writing while Socrates was alive, put him on stage in The Clouds of 423 BCE as a hovering crank who taught clever men to escape their debts. Aristotle, born after his death, reports him as the philosopher who sought general definitions in ethics.
The biographical outline is thinner than the influence. He was born in Athens around 470 BCE, son of Sophroniscus, described as a stonemason, and Phaenarete, said to have been a midwife, a trade he later borrowed as a metaphor for his own work. He served as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis. He married Xanthippe and had three sons. He was poor by choice, unlovely by the standards of a city that prized beauty, and constantly in public.
Questioning as a way of life
His method, the elenchus, was disarmingly simple. Ask a confident man to define courage or piety, accept his answer, then draw out its consequences until they contradict something else he believes. The conversation usually ends in aporia, a productive stuck place. Socrates claimed to teach nothing and to know nothing except the extent of his own ignorance, a claim he connected to a report from the Delphic oracle that no one was wiser than he. Unlike the sophists, he refused payment.
This was not harmless. He questioned generals, politicians and craftsmen in front of their sons, and Athens was a democracy that took public reputation seriously. He also kept difficult company: Alcibiades, who defected to Sparta, and Critias, who led the murderous oligarchy of the Thirty in 404 BCE, had both been in his circle. Yet he defied authority himself, resisting an illegal mass trial of generals and refusing an order from the Thirty to help arrest an innocent man on Salamis.
The trial, and the death scene
In 399 BCE, four years after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and its brief oligarchic terror, Meletus, Anytus and Lycon brought charges of impiety, introducing new divinities and corrupting the young. An amnesty barred explicit political prosecution, so the case was fought on religion and education instead. A jury of around five hundred convicted him narrowly. Invited to propose his own punishment, he suggested free meals at public expense before offering a modest fine, and the margin voting for death was larger than the margin that convicted him.
Plato's Phaedo describes a serene conversation about the soul, followed by hemlock and a cold numbness rising from the feet. It is philosophy rather than medical reporting, and the calm may be a composition. What the death produced is undisputed: the Academy of Plato, the austerity of the Cynics, the pleasure-seeking of the Cyrenaics and, later, Stoicism all claimed descent from him. He remains the most influential philosopher in the Western tradition whose own words no one has ever read.
