Socrates: The Way Of Life

The year of birth of Socrates stated is an assumed date, or estimate, given the fact of the dating of anything in ancient history in part being sometimes reliant on argument stemming from the inexact period floruit of individuals. Diogenes Laërtius stated Socrates’ birth date was ‘the sixth day of Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city’. Contemporaneous sources state he was born not very much later than sometime after the year 471, his date of birth is within the period of years ranging 470 to 469 BC, or within a range 469 to 468 BC. His mother was a midwife named Phaenarete. In his 50s Socrates married Xanthippe, who is especially remembered for having an undesirable temperament. She bore for him three sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus; though Aristotle claimed that the latter two were his sons by another wife, Myrto, daughter of Lysimachus.

Socrates is likely to have been trained as a stonemason, and there was a tradition in antiquity, not credited by modern scholarship, that Socrates crafted the statues of the Charites, which stood near the Acropolis until the 2nd century AD.

Xenophon reports that because youths were not allowed to enter the Agora, they used to gather in workshops surrounding it. Socrates frequented these shops in order to converse with the merchants. Most notable among them was Simon the Shoemaker.

Military service

For a time, Socrates fulfilled the role of the hoplite, participating in the Peloponnesian War—a conflict which stretched intermittently over a period spanning 431 to 404 BC. Several of Plato’s dialogues refer to Socrates’s military service.

In the monologue of the Apology, Socrates states he was active for Athens in the battles of Amphipolis, Delium, and Potidaea. In the Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates’s valour in the battles of Potidaea and Delium, recounting how Socrates saved his life in the former battle. Socrates’s exceptional service at Delium is also mentioned in the Laches by the General after whom the dialogue is named. In the Apology, Socrates compares his military service to his courtroom troubles and says anyone on the jury who thinks he ought to retreat from philosophy must also think soldiers should retreat when it seems likely that they will be killed in battle.

Estates at the trial of the six commanders

During 406, he participated as a member of the Boule. His tribe the Antiochus held the Prytany on the day it was debated what fate should befall the generals of the Battle of Arginusae, who abandoned the slain and the survivors of foundered ships to pursue the defeated Spartan navy.

According to Xenophon, Socrates was the Epistates for the debate, but Delebecque and Hatzfeld think this is an embellishment because Xenophon composed the information after Socrates’s death.

The generals were seen by some to have failed to uphold the most basic of duties, and the people decided upon capital punishment. However, when the prytany responded by refusing to vote on the issue, the people reacted with threats of death directed at the prytany itself. They relented, at which point Socrates alone as Epistates blocked the vote, which had been proposed by Callixeinus. The reason he gave was that ‘in no case would he act except in accordance with the law’.

The outcome of the trial was ultimately judged to be a miscarriage of justice, or illegal, but, actually, Socrates’s decision had no support from written statutory law, instead of being reliant on favouring a continuation of less strict and less formal nomos law. One of the generals executed was Pericles the Younger, son of Pericles by Aspasia of Miletus.

Arrest of Leon

Plato’s Apology, parts 32c to 32d, describes how Socrates and four others were summoned to the Tholos, and told by representatives of the oligarchy of the Thirty to go to Salamis, and from there, to return to them with Leon the Salaminian. He was to be brought back to be subsequently executed. However, Socrates returned home and did not go to Salamis as he was expected to.

Trial and death

Causes

Socrates lived during the time of the transition from the height of the Athenian hegemony to its decline with the defeat by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. At a time when Athens sought to stabilize and recover from its defeat, the Athenian public may have been entertaining doubts about democracy as an efficient form of government. Socrates appears to have been a critic of democracy, and some scholars interpret his trial as an expression of political infighting.

Claiming loyalty to his city, Socrates clashed with the current course of Athenian politics and society. He praised Sparta, archrival to Athens, directly and indirectly in various dialogues. One of Socrates’s purported offenses to the city was his position as a social and moral critic. Rather than upholding a status quo and accepting the development of what he perceived as immorality within his region, Socrates questioned the collective notion of ‘might makes right’ that he felt was common in Greece during this period. Plato refers to Socrates as the ‘gadfly’ of the state, insofar as he irritated some people with considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness.

According to Plato’s Apology, Socrates’s life as the ‘gadfly’ of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone were wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded that no one was wiser. Socrates believed the Oracle’s response was not correct, because he believed he possessed no wisdom whatsoever. He proceeded to test the riddle by approaching men considered wise by the people of Athens—statesmen, poets, and artisans—in order to refute the Oracle’s pronouncement. Questioning them, however, Socrates concluded: while each man thought he knew a great deal and was wise, in fact they knew very little and were not wise at all. So Socrates interpreted the meaning of the Oracle thus: while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance. Socrates’s paradoxical wisdom made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial, when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life instead, to finance the time he spent as Athens’s benefactor.

Robin Waterfield suggests that Socrates was a voluntary scapegoat; his death was the purifying remedy for Athens’s misfortunes. In this view, the token of appreciation for Asclepius – the cockerel that he speaks of to Crito – would represent a cure for Athens’s ailments. and was subsequently found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety, and as a punishment sentenced to death, caused by the drinking of a mixture containing poison hemlock.

Death

Socrates’s death is described at the end of Plato’s Phaedo, although Plato was not himself present at the execution. As to the veracity of Plato’s account, it seems possible he made the choice of a number of certain factors perhaps omitting others in the description of the death, as the Phaedo description does not describe the progress of the action of the poison in concurrence with modern descriptions. Phaedo states, after drinking the poison, he was instructed to walk around until his legs felt numb. After he lay down, the man who administered the poison pinched his foot; Socrates could no longer feel his legs. The numbness slowly crept up his body until it reached his heart.

Socrates chose to cover his face during the execution.

According to Phaedo, Socrates stated that the’ll of philosophy is training for death.