Who Was Socrates: the Socratic Method, the Trial, and the Search for Truth

What We Know About Socrates Comes from Others

Socrates never wrote a word of his own. Everything we know about him, then, reaches us secondhand, through other authors who knew him or passed down his memory.

We’re in Athens, in the fifth century BCE — the same city and century as the Sophists and the democratic life born in the polis. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three main ancient sources on Socrates are the comic playwright Aristophanes and his students Xenophon and Plato, and they offer portraits of Socrates that don’t always agree with each other. Plato is the source most of what is known about Socrates comes from, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Xenophon contributes on a smaller scale, and later Aristotle’s writings add still more, according to the World History Encyclopedia. Telling apart which ideas inside Plato’s dialogues were genuinely Socrates’s own, and which were the student’s elaboration, is what scholars commonly call the “Socratic problem,” a lively and unsettled dispute, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes.

The Method: Questions That Take Certainty Apart

How Socrates philosophized was, first of all, a recognizable behavior: he pressed his conversation partners in dialogue, often leading them, not always comfortably, to realize their own ignorance, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The method was a back-and-forth of questions and answers meant to examine important matters closely; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy also calls it elenchus, and describes how Socrates spent his life, lived simply, questioning the common beliefs of the people he met. The pre-Socratic philosophers had mostly asked about the nature of things, the arché; with Socrates, the center of inquiry shifts to human beings and how they live.

Socrates paired this with irony: he claimed to know nothing of importance and to want only to listen to others, while in practice keeping control of every discussion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes.

In the dialogue Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates describe himself as a kind of “midwife” of ideas — hence maieutics, from the Greek maieutikē, the midwife’s art, the name given to his method, because it helps the other person draw an idea out on their own, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Practical example: imagine asking a friend what courage is. He answers: “it’s not being afraid.” Socrates wouldn’t hand him the correct definition; he’d ask whether a soldier who keeps fighting despite being afraid counts as courageous, and whether someone who feels no fear and jumps into a fire for fun is just as courageous. Those questions would start to show the friend the limits of his own answer, and he’d begin correcting it himself: that back-and-forth is exactly what elenchus and maieutics describe.

The Oracle at Delphi and a Life Worth Examining

According to the story reported by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Socrates’s friend Chaerephon travelled to Delphi and put a question to the oracle: who was the wisest man alive? The answer that came back ranked nobody above Socrates. The same episode appears in the World History Encyclopedia, which places it at a point when Socrates was already middle-aged.

Socrates considered himself aware of his own ignorance, and it was from that awareness that he drew the meaning of the oracle’s answer, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Socrates is also credited with the idea that a life never put to critical examination isn’t worth living: the same habit of questioning everything, turned onto his own existence.

The Trial of 399 BCE

In Athens, Socrates was charged with the capital offense of impiety (asebeia): failing to show the proper devotion to the city’s gods, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The formal charges included not believing in the gods of Athens and introducing new deities; the World History Encyclopedia adds that he was also accused of corrupting the young.

The charge was put in writing by a young poet named Meletus; according to the World History Encyclopedia, he was joined by the tanner Anytus and the orator Lycon, three accusers for a single trial. One of them, Anytus, had been among the democratic exiles who returned to Athens, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The jury found Socrates guilty, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. According to the most common historical reconstruction — a secondary source, to be read with caution — there were probably 501 jurors, as Athenian legal practice called for in this kind of trial, and the guilty vote is said to have been 280 to 221; the death sentence then passed by an even wider margin. At age 70, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Socrates was put to death by his own fellow citizens.

The Crito: Why He Didn’t Flee

During his last days, recounted in the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo according to the World History Encyclopedia, Socrates had the chance to escape from prison, but didn’t take it. In the Crito, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Socrates argues that it’s never right to do wrong, not even to pay back a wrong suffered: fleeing the city illegally would have caused Athens a harm that no injury done to him personally could justify. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells the same refusal from a complementary angle: Socrates considered himself in debt to Athens for his entire life lived under its laws, and wanted to honor that debt even in his own condemnation.

The Phaedo, again according to the World History Encyclopedia, describes the day of Socrates’s death, which came by drinking hemlock.