Ancient Philosophy · Part 11 · Athens · B2–C1
Socrates and the Problem of the Sources
Part 11 of Ancient Philosophy: Socrates wrote nothing, yet he is the most famous philosopher in history. We know him from three very different portraits: a comic poet who mocked him, a soldier who admired him, and a genius who made him the hero of his own philosophy. Indirect questions (he asked what courage was, whether they knew…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the man who asked questions until Athens killed him: Socrates.
We met him in the history of Greece. Is there more to say?
Much more. Tonight we ask which Socrates is real: the one in Plato, the one in Xenophon, or the one in Aristophanes.
Socrates was born in Athens in 469 BCE, the son of a stonemason and a midwife. He served as a hoplite in several battles of the Peloponnesian War. He was famously ugly, with a snub nose and bulging eyes, walked barefoot, and spent his days in the agora and the gymnasia, talking to anyone who would listen.
He wrote nothing. We know him through three main sources: the comic poet Aristophanes, who mocked him in The Clouds while he was alive; the soldier and writer Xenophon, who described a practical, pious, sensible Socrates; and Plato, whose dialogues show a brilliant questioner, and gradually make him speak Plato’s own ideas. Scholars call the difficulty of finding the real Socrates the Socratic problem.
In 399 BCE, Socrates was tried for impiety and corrupting the young, found guilty by a jury of 501 citizens, and executed by poison.
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