A brief orientation
Socrates was an Athenian who lived through most of the fifth century BCE and was tried and executed by the city in 399. He served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War and held one set of brief public offices, but spent most of his life — by the accounts that come down to us — in conversation in the public spaces of Athens. He wrote nothing.
We know him through three sources, none of which is a transcript: the dialogues of his student Plato, the Socratic works of his other student Xenophon (the Memorabilia, the Apology, the Symposium, the Oeconomicus), and the comedies of his contemporary Aristophanes, chiefly the Clouds (423 BCE), in which Socrates appears as a caricatured sophist.
The Socratic problem
Reconstructing the historical Socrates from these three witnesses is the classical scholarly problem that bears his name. Plato and Xenophon present recognisably different figures, and both wrote with philosophical purposes of their own; Aristophanes wrote for the comic stage. We treat the Socrates of any one source as that source's Socrates and are cautious about claims that depend on settling the problem.
What survives as the Socratic legacy
The questioning method (often called elenchus), the concentration of philosophy on how one ought to live, the priority of the soul, the linking of virtue to knowledge, and the bare refusal to commit injustice even to save one's own life — these are the elements that Plato develops into a systematic philosophy and that the Hellenistic schools (Stoics, Cynics, Skeptics) all trace back, in different ways, to Socrates.
Why he matters for Virtue & Power
The dialogues that organise so much of the platform's reading begin with him. The figure who appears at the centre of the Republic and at the foundation of the later Greek philosophical schools is Socratic before he is Platonic, and the question of what a well-lived life would look like — the question this site is built around — is the question he is shown asking again and again.
For the editions and reference works behind the entries that touch this figure, see our Sources page.