Entity

Socrates

The Athenian who left no writings and was executed for impiety, yet became the founding image of the philosopher — the questioner who claimed to know only that he knew nothing.

Socrates was an Athenian of the fifth century BCE who wrote nothing, founded no school, and was tried and put to death by his own city for impiety and for corrupting the young — and who nonetheless became the founding image of the philosopher in the West. Almost everything attributed to him comes from others. He stands at the hinge of Greek thought less as a body of doctrine than as a way of proceeding: relentless questioning in pursuit of how a life should be lived.

The difficulty is that he is known only at second hand, and the witnesses do not agree. Plato made him the speaker of nearly every dialogue, and the Socrates of those works grows steadily into a vehicle for Plato’s own metaphysics; Xenophon drew a plainer, more conventional moralist; the comic poet Aristophanes mocked him onstage as a sophist with his head in the clouds. Scholarship calls this the Socratic problem — the question of how much of any portrait is the man and how much the author. Most historians now grant that a real Socrates is recoverable in outline, while doubting that his exact teaching can be lifted clean from the texts that preserve him.

What the early dialogues consistently show is a method rather than a system. He approached others claiming no wisdom of his own, asked them to define what they took themselves to understand — courage, piety, justice — and by patient questioning exposed the confusion beneath their confidence. This is the elenchus: refutation that clears the ground rather than building on it. He is reported to have held that he was wise only in knowing the extent of his own ignorance, and that no one does wrong willingly, since to see the good truly is to choose it. Virtue, on this account, is a kind of knowledge.

His trial in 399 BCE, after Athens had lost a long war and turned on its own, ended in a death sentence carried out by hemlock. Plato’s Apology gives the defense, and the Phaedo the death scene; both are written, and how far either records what was said cannot be settled. What is not in doubt is the effect. The refusal to flee, the insistence that the unexamined life is not worth living, the calm before execution — these fixed a pattern that later antiquity treated as the philosopher’s own.

Almost every subsequent school claimed him. The Platonists made him the herald of an eternal order glimpsed beyond the senses; the Stoics took him as the model of the sage indifferent to fortune; the Cynics and Skeptics each found their own Socrates in his poverty or his professed not-knowing. Later esoteric and mystical readers absorbed him chiefly through the Platonic and Neoplatonic line, where his turning of the soul toward the good was read as the first step of an ascent. The figure proved endlessly adaptable precisely because he left no text to fix him. He asked the questions, and let others write the answers down.

The documentary record

The dates 470/469–399 BCE are the convention; Plato’s Apology places Socrates at seventy years old at the time of the trial. His father Sophroniscus was a stoneworker; his mother Phaenarete was said to have worked as a midwife, and Socrates in the Theaetetus famously claimed that his own practice — drawing out what was already latent in a mind — was a kind of midwifery of thought. He married Xanthippe and had three sons. He served as a hoplite at Potidaea in 432 BCE, at Delium in 424, and at Amphipolis in 422; the Symposium reports that he endured the Potidaean campaign with a fortitude that astonished those beside him, and saved the life of Alcibiades under arms.

Beyond these outlines the sources sharply diverge, and the divergence is itself the principal problem. Plato and Xenophon were both in Socrates’ circle; each wrote at length after his death; each produced a figure tailored to different rhetorical purposes. Aristophanes staged him in the Clouds in 423 BCE as a comic natural philosopher who taught young men to argue their way out of paying debts. Aristotle, writing a generation later, drew on the early Platonic dialogues for what he took to be Socrates’ actual positions — but Aristotle’s Socrates has passed through Plato’s. Scholarship designates this the Socratic problem: the question whether any strand of the surviving record gives access to Socrates himself, independent of his portraitists’ purposes. The dominant scholarly response, associated in modern form with Gregory Vlastos, holds that the early dialogues of Plato — the elenctic group, ending typically in aporia — reflect something recognizable as the historical Socrates, while the middle and late dialogues are increasingly Plato’s own.

The daimonion

The daimonion is the most distinctive feature of the Socratic testimony, and the one that cost him most at trial. Socrates described it in the Apology as a kind of sign or voice that came to him from childhood: “This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do.” The prohibition was specific: the sign had turned him back from entering politics, from various courses of action that might have ended badly, and — most strikingly — it did not oppose him at any point during the trial itself. From its silence before and during the proceedings Socrates drew a conclusion about his situation: the sign’s failure to intervene was, as he told the jurors, an intimation that what had happened to him was a good, and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error.”

The sign is not described in the Apology as a divine being. It is a voice, a prohibition, a check. Elsewhere in Plato — in the Euthyphro, the Phaedrus, the Republic — the term daimonion appears, but Socrates never elaborates its nature beyond its function: something turns him back. The charge in the indictment was that he introduced new divine things (kaina daimonia) — a formulation that named the sign as the evidence of his impiety.

What Socrates left undescribed, later readers supplied. The Apology’s account describes the sign at Delphi’s functional level: an oracle that constrains rather than commands, a counter-weight to human intention. The Middle Platonists built on this foundation a systematic demonology. In De genio Socratis (On the Sign of Socrates), Plutarch interpreted the daimonion as an intermediate being assigned to Socrates as a personal guardian — a daemon in the technical Middle Platonic sense, occupying the ontological tier between the fully divine and the human. Such beings were, in Plutarch’s framework, “by nature on the boundary between gods and humans,” mediating divine providence to particular souls. Socrates could hear his daemon, Plutarch argued, because he had purified himself of the passions that ordinarily drown out the daimonic voice. Apuleius developed an analogous architecture in De deo Socratis (On the God of Socrates), placing personal guardian daemons at the second level of a three-tier hierarchy — immortal gods, intermediate daemons, mortal humans — and treating Socrates’ sign as the most celebrated instance of a daimon in its guarding function. Both works belong to the second century CE; both shaped how Neoplatonism thereafter understood the daimonion, and through that line they shaped every subsequent reading of Socrates as a figure of spiritual ascent.

The Delphic oracle and the elenchus

The story of Chaerephon’s question frames the entire Apology. Chaerephon, an enthusiastic friend of Socrates, went to Delphi and asked the Pythian prophetess whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The answer was that no one was. Socrates treated this as a puzzle — he knew he possessed no wisdom worth speaking of — and set out to test it by cross-examining those with a reputation for knowledge: politicians, poets, craftsmen. In each case he found that the reputation outpaced the reality, and in each case the subject resented having been shown this. The elenchus — the method of refutation — was thus, in Socrates’ own account of himself, not a philosophical technique adopted freely but a service to the god: his mission was to demonstrate the oracle correct by revealing that no one else possessed genuine wisdom either. So he went about the city, as the Apology has it, obedient to the god — searching out anyone, citizen or stranger, who appeared wise, and showing, in vindication of the oracle, that he was not.

This framing matters for what follows. The oracle’s vindication required continuous, public, irritating activity. It accumulated enemies. It is the context in which the charges of 399 make sense: not only the daimonion, but the entire project of the elenchus, was a standing affront to those who thought themselves wise in civic, poetic, or craft knowledge.

Diotima and the ascent

One of the most arresting moments in the Platonic Socrates is his claim to have been taught about love by a woman. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates reports the teaching he received from Diotima of Mantinea — a priestess, he says, who had once delayed a plague from Athens for ten years by ritual means. The teaching Diotima gave Socrates was not merely erotic doctrine but a complete account of ascent: from love of a single beautiful body, to love of all beautiful bodies, to the beauty of souls, of pursuits, of knowledge, until the final ascent reaches beauty itself — not a particular beautiful thing but “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting.” Diotima describes this ascent in the language of the mysteries, distinguishing lower preparatory rites from the final and culminating rites of the ascent — the summit Diotima doubts her pupil can reach. The vision at the top comes suddenly, exaiphnēs.

The boundary question here belongs to Plato: the Symposium is Plato’s dialogue and Diotima’s ascent is its centerpiece. Socrates is the vehicle through which Diotima speaks; whether this teaching is Socratic, Platonic, or a deliberate staging of Socrates-as-recipient remains one of the interpretive problems the Socratic problem generates. What is unambiguous is that Socrates, in Plato’s Symposium, presents himself not as the origin of this teaching but as its student — a move that fits his own disclaimer of wisdom.

The Potidaea trance

Alcibiades’ speech at the end of the Symposium is the most intimate portrait of Socrates outside the trial and death narratives. Among the episodes Alcibiades reports from the Potidaean campaign is an event of a different order: one morning Socrates began working on a problem and, unable to resolve it, stood fixed in thought from early dawn through noon. By evening the rumor had spread through the camp; Ionians brought out their bedding and slept in the open to watch whether he would stand all night. “There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way.” Alcibiades reports this without explanation, as one of several demonstrations of a strangeness that set Socrates apart from every other man Alcibiades had known. The episode has been read as evidence of a contemplative or ecstatic disposition; it has also been read as simply the extreme end of Socratic concentration. The text records the fact and does not adjudicate.

The trial of 399

The year 399 BCE came four years after Athens’ defeat by Sparta and the subsequent rule of the Thirty Tyrants — an oligarchic junta that governed through violence for eight months in 404–403 BCE before a democratic counter- revolution. Critias, one of the Thirty, had been part of the Socratic circle, and Charicles is remembered as Socrates’ interrogator under their decree; the military adventurer Alcibiades, whose catastrophic career contributed to Athens’ defeat, had been the most prominent of Socrates’ younger associates. The amnesty of 403 BCE legally prevented prosecution for conduct under the oligarchy, which forced Socrates’ accusers — Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon — to frame their case in religious terms.

The formal charges were two: impiety (asebeia), meaning failure to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledged and introduction of new divine things; and corruption of the young. These were legally distinct but rhetorically linked. The daimonion was the evidence of the first charge; the association with Critias and Alcibiades provided the political coloring of the second, though the amnesty meant neither could be named directly. Anytus, the most politically powerful of the accusers, represented the craftsmen and democratic politicians; Meletus spoke for the poets; Lycon for the rhetoricians. The jury was large — five hundred and one Athenians, by the usual reckoning — and voted to convict, then in the penalty phase chose death over the fine Socrates proposed.

He had spent the months after sentencing in prison while the sacred ship completed its voyage to Delos, a religious stay on executions. His friends, including Crito, proposed escape; the Crito records his refusal, framed as compliance with the city’s laws even when those laws operated unjustly. He drank the hemlock at the end of the day.

The Phaedo’s close

Plato’s Phaedo ends with the death scene witnessed by Phaedo and a group of friends; Plato is noted as absent, ill. Socrates spent the last hours discussing the soul’s immortality, then bathed, spoke with his children, and accepted the cup from the jailer at his own request — overriding Crito’s wish to delay until the sun was lower in the sky. As the hemlock’s numbness moved upward from his feet, he uncovered his face for the last time. His final recorded words were addressed to Crito: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Crito promised to pay it; Socrates asked if there was anything else; there was no answer; and shortly afterward it was over.

The cock to Asclepius — the god of healing — has generated interpretive traditions from antiquity onward. The conventional reading in antiquity took it as a thank-offering for recovery: death as the cure of the body’s sickness, the soul released into health. Nietzsche read it as pessimism — life itself as the illness healed by death. Others have read it as piety, or as a quiet demonstration that Socrates died in the same spirit of scrupulous obligation in which he had lived. Plato’s text offers no explanation, and the restraint of the moment — two sentences, a silence, and the end — has ensured that the interpretive traditions keep reading.

The Socratic schools

The generation after Socrates’ death saw his circle fracture into several independent directions, each claiming some part of the inheritance. Antisthenes, who emphasized Socrates’ practice of self-sufficiency and indifference to conventional goods, became the root from which the Cynic tradition grew; Diogenes of Sinope would later press this into its most provocative form. Aristippus of Cyrene took a different thread — the claim that pleasure is the good, which he derived partly from Socratic discussions of what makes life worth living — and founded the Cyrenaic school. The Megarians, associated with Euclid of Megara (who was present at Socrates’ death and to whose house the circle withdrew afterward), combined Socratic ethics with puzzles about identity and predication that fed into later logical tradition. Each of these schools was both continuous with and a selective distortion of what Socrates had practiced; none inherited the whole.

The esoteric reception

The line that mattered most for the site’s tradition ran through Plato and then through the Neoplatonists. Within that line, the daimonion was the pivot. Plutarch and Apuleius had established the daimonion as an intermediate being; Plotinus and his successors absorbed this into a full metaphysics of descent and ascent in which each soul moves through intermediate daimonic levels. The specific Socratic contribution to this architecture was the model of philosophical life as responsiveness to a higher signal — the sign that always turns back, never compels, but quietly redirects.

Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin translations made the Platonic corpus available to the Renaissance, read the daimonion through the Platonic-Neoplatonic line and gave his readers a Socrates who was above all a figure of the spiritually attentive soul, guided by something that could not be fully named in the vocabulary of either religion or philosophy. This reading was possible because Socrates had not named it fully either. The silence in the text was, in this tradition, its most productive feature.

Sources

Vlastos 1991
Guthrie 1969
Nails & Monoson, SEP 2022
Ambury, IEP