Socrates: Method, Irony, and Trial

Socrates (c. 470-399 BCE) left no writings of his own; everything known about him comes from other authors, chiefly his student Plato, the historian and soldier Xenophon, and, more satirically, the comic playwright Aristophanes, whose play Clouds (423 BCE) mocked Socrates as a fraudulent Sophist running a "Thinkery." He was the son of Sophroniscus, said to have been a stonemason or sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife, a profession Socrates later used as a metaphor for his own philosophical method of "delivering" ideas already latent in his interlocutors. He married Xanthippe, served with distinction as a hoplite in several campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, including Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, and claimed to be guided by an inner divine sign, a daimonion, that warned him against wrong courses of action but never told him what to do.