Socrates
Socrates (469–399 BCE) walked the Athenian Agora barefoot, taking citizens and statesmen alike through relentless questions that exposed shaky assumptions and demanded clarity. A decorated hoplite and the son of a stonecutter and a midwife, he forged a new civic practice—elenchus, the testing-by-question—that treated conversation as a public good. Tried and executed in 399 BCE, he refused both exile and escape, choosing hemlock over silence. His death forced Athens to rethink how the examined life could survive democracy’s tempers, igniting the institutional turn: Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and, later, the Garden and the Stoa—all answers to the challenge Socrates posed in the sun: what life is worth living, and how do we protect it?
Biography
In mid-5th century Athens, Socrates turned conversation into a civic instrument. In the Agora’s dust and glare, he drew craftsmen, politicians, and poets into elenchus—rapid-fire questions that probed definitions of courage, justice, and piety. The city both tolerated and resented this public scrutiny. By 399 BCE he was indicted at the Royal Stoa on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. The trial that followed, shaped by Athenian procedures refined in the preceding decades, became a reckoning with the examined life. Socrates refused to flatter the jury, proposed no acceptable penalty, and finally declined escape when friends arranged it. He drank hemlock calmly, converting his inquiry into an act. That execution sent a shock through Athens. It pressed his students to seek durable shelter for public reasoning, setting in motion the Academy, the Lyceum, and, later, the Garden and the Stoa.
Socrates's Timeline
Key events involving Socrates in chronological order
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