Socratesthe question that will not stop

He was a stonemason's son who served as an infantryman at Potidaea and Delium, and by middle age had become a fixture of the Athenian agora — stopping people in the street to ask what exactly they meant by the words they had just used. Courage. Piety. Justice. The conversations rarely ended well for whoever had begun them confident.

The oracle at Delphi was said to have called him the wisest man in Athens. He treated this as a problem rather than a compliment and went looking for someone wiser, interviewing politicians, poets and craftsmen in turn. His conclusion was that all of them believed they knew things they did not, and that he at least knew he didn't. That is the entire advantage he ever claimed.

In 399 BC he was tried for impiety and for corrupting the young. He was seventy. Invited to propose his own punishment, he suggested the city owed him free meals for life, and the jury voted for hemlock by a wider margin than it had voted him guilty. Everything attributed to him since comes through Plato, Xenophon, and one hostile comic playwright — which means the most influential thinker in the Western tradition is also the least directly quotable.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates