Meet Socrates: The Man Who Wrote Nothing

A record written by other people

Socrates wrote nothing. Everything we have comes from people who knew him — chiefly Plato, who made him the speaker in his dialogues, and Xenophon, who remembered a plainer man; Aristophanes put him on the comic stage while he was still alive. Where the historical Socrates ends and Plato's character begins is a real scholarly problem, not a technicality.

He was an Athenian, born around 470 BC, and served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War. He was, by every account including his own, spectacularly unimpressive to look at.

The method is a question

His practice was to ask. Someone would assert that they knew what courage was, or piety, or justice, and he would agree enthusiastically and then ask what exactly they meant — and the definition would come apart under a few careful follow-ups. He claimed no doctrine of his own; his advantage was knowing that he did not know, while the people he questioned had not noticed.

It is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to be on the receiving end of, which is worth remembering when we teach it as a technique. It made him admired and it made him hated.

The trial

In 399 BC he was tried in Athens, charged with impiety and corrupting the young. Plato's Apology is the account of his defence — and it is not a plea for mercy. He tells the jury he will not stop doing what he has been doing, because a life without this kind of examination is not worth living. He was convicted and executed by hemlock.

He could have proposed exile. He argued instead about what he deserved. The stubbornness is the point: the whole case for the examined life is worth nothing if its advocate abandons it the moment it becomes expensive.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you are certain. He is the least comfortable mentor at this table and the most valuable when your conviction has outrun your reasons — he will not tell you that you are wrong, he will ask what you mean until you can hear it yourself.