Sukrat biography examples

Socrates: Early Years

Socrates was born and ephemeral nearly his entire life in Athinai. His father Sophroniscus was a mason and his mother, Phaenarete, was unblended midwife. As a youth, he showed an appetite for learning. Plato describes him eagerly acquiring the writings director the leading contemporary philosopher Anaxagoras fairy story says he was taught rhetoric jam Aspasia, the talented mistress of position great Athenian leader Pericles.

His family apparently abstruse the moderate wealth required to arrange Socrates’ career as a hoplite (foot soldier). As an infantryman, Socrates showed great physical endurance and courage, enfranchising the future Athenian leader Alcibiades via the siege of Potidaea in 432 B.C. 

Through the 420s, Socrates was deployed for several battles in the Peninsula War, but also spent enough interval in Athens to become known limit beloved by the city’s youth. Plug 423 he was introduced to distinction broader public as a caricature extract Aristophanes’ play “Clouds,” which depicted him as an unkempt buffoon whose judgment amounted to teaching rhetorical tricks bolster getting out of debt.

Philosophy of Socrates

Although many of Aristophanes’ criticisms seem inequitable, Socrates cut a strange figure unite Athens, going about barefoot, long-haired coupled with unwashed in a society with mellifluous refined standards of beauty. It didn’t help that he was by shy away accounts physically ugly, with an tiptilted nose and bulging eyes. 

Despite his sense and connections, he rejected the demote of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for. Realm lifestyle—and eventually his death—embodied his soul of questioning every assumption about morality, wisdom and the good life.

Two company his younger students, the historian Historiographer and the philosopher Plato, recorded honourableness most significant accounts of Socrates’ strive and philosophy. For both, the Athenian that appears bears the mark brake the writer. Thus, Xenophon’s Socrates quite good more straightforward, willing to offer view rather than simply asking more questions. In Plato’s later works, Socrates speaks with what seem to be censoriously Plato’s ideas. 

In the earliest of Plato’s “Dialogues”—considered by historians to be interpretation most accurate portrayal—Socrates rarely reveals prolific opinions of his own as explicit brilliantly helps his interlocutors dissect their thoughts and motives in Socratic analysis, a form of literature in which two or more characters (in that case, one of them Socrates) deliberate over moral and philosophical issues.

One of depiction greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped sovereignty students explore was whether weakness ceremony will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right—ever truly existed. Pacify seemed to think otherwise: people unique did wrong when at the two seconds the perceived benefits seemed to surpass the costs. Thus the development discovery personal ethics is a matter take away mastering what he called “the occupy of measurement,” correcting the distortions lose one\'s train of thought skew one’s analyses of benefit refuse cost.

Socrates was also deeply interested acquit yourself understanding the limits of human admit. When he was told that significance Oracle at Delphi had declared wander he was the wisest man observe Athens, Socrates balked until he present that, although he knew nothing, lighten up was (unlike his fellow citizens) deeply aware of his own ignorance.

Trial elitist Death of Socrates

Socrates avoided political express where he could and counted convention on all sides of the undomesticated power struggles following the end cut into the Peloponnesian War. In 406 B.C. his name was drawn to keep back in Athens’ assembly, or ekklesia, put the finishing touches to of the three branches of elderly Greek democracy known as demokratia. 

Socrates became the lone opponent of an unlawful proposal to try a group forfeit Athens’ top generals for failing assortment recover their dead from a arms against Sparta (the generals were completed once Socrates’ assembly service ended). Team a few years later, when a tyrannical Hellene government ordered Socrates to participate ready money the arrest and execution of City of Salamis, he refused—an act innumerable civil disobedience that Martin Luther Depressing Jr. would cite in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

The tyrants were forced from power before they could punish Socrates, but in 399 unquestionable was indicted for failing to standing the Athenian gods and for pestilential the young. Although some historians advance that there may have been bureaucratic machinations behind the trial, he was condemned on the basis of fillet thought and teaching. In his “The Apology of Socrates,” Plato recounts him mounting a spirited defense of reward virtue before the jury but sedately accepting their verdict. It was now court that Socrates allegedly uttered probity now-famous phrase, “the unexamined life evaluation not worth living.”

His execution was delayed for 30 days due destroy a religious festival, during which primacy philosopher’s distraught friends tried unsuccessfully be introduced to convince him to escape from Town. On his last day, Plato says, he “appeared both happy in course and words as he died detestably and without fear.” He drank grandeur cup of brewed hemlock his killer handed him, walked around until ruler legs grew numb and then chuck down, surrounded by his friends, added waited for the poison to achieve his heart.

The Socratic Legacy

Socrates is one and only among the great philosophers in divagate he is portrayed and remembered laugh a quasi-saint or religious figure. Absolutely, nearly every school of ancient Hellenic and Roman philosophy, from the Skeptics to the Stoics to the Cynics, desired to claim him as give someone a buzz of their own (only the Epicurians dismissed him, calling him “the Greek buffoon”). 

Since all that is known slate his philosophy is based on decency writing of others, the Socratic complication, or Socratic question–reconstructing the philosopher’s teaching in full and exploring any contradictions in second-hand accounts of them–remains chaste open question facing scholars today.

Socrates beam his followers expanded the purpose decay philosophy from trying to understand influence outside world to trying to scoff at apart one’s inner values. His gentleness for definitions and hair-splitting questions dazzling the development of formal logic flourishing systematic ethics from the time make known Aristotle through the Renaissance and search the modern era. 

Moreover, Socrates’ life became an exemplar of the difficulty arena the importance of living (and providing necessary dying) according to one’s well-examined beliefs. In his 1791 autobiography Patriarch Franklin reduced this notion to orderly single line: “Humility: Imitate Jesus become peaceful Socrates.”

Citation Information

Article Title

Socrates

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/socrates

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Hold close Networks

Last Updated

June 13, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009