The Uses and Misuses of Socrates

Dennis Sansom says we shouldn't be too quick to pluck philosophers out of their own historical contexts in order to put them into ours.

- Dennis Sansom

I want to emphasise the value of caution when using ancient philosophers and texts for contemporary causes. Let us examine how Socrates has been interpreted over the centuries, how he has been used and abused by admirers and critics. We will learn an important lesson: we must be careful in reaching conclusions about ancient and complicated authors - especially ones from whom we do not have any direct authorial sources, such as Socrates, whose words were all written down by others.

Histories of Socrates

Socrates was born in Athens in 469 BC, to a stonemason and a midwife. He fought with distinction in the Peloponnesian war against the Spartans, and served on the Athenian boule or council. He married Xanthippe (who was said to be 'shrewd'), and had three sons late in life. He was not particularly handsome being bald, fat, squat, and pug-nosed - and his walk was more of a shuffle that an athletic gait; but he was convivial and loquacious, and knew many people with whom he loved to talk about serious intellectual matters. He lived in a suspicious and demoralized city which had suffered defeat in the war, followed by a short-lived Spartan-imposed regime called the Thirty Tyrants, a period marked by collaborators, spies and mutual mistrust, and had become cynical about itself. It was a dangerous time to be asking questions. We have nothing Socrates wrote, and indeed he didn't trust written philosophy because you could not interrogate it. We mainly know him from the writings of his student Plato. Plato's early dialogues, Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro are probably close to verbatim accounts of his debates, and several others, such as Meno and Phaedo, are also thought to be close to Socrates' actual words. Socrates died in 399 BC, at the age of seventy, drinking a court-ordered draught of poison after a controversial trial convicted him of being a threat to Athenian society.