Socrates wrote nothing, so which Socrates do we actually know?
Everything known about Socrates comes secondhand, from students, a comic playwright and a philosopher born after he died. Plato's Socrates is witty and ironic; Xenophon's is duller and preaches self-control; Aristophanes mocks him as an absurd atheist. Untangling them is so hard that scholars simply call it the Socratic problem.
The basic facts are fairly firm. He was born in 470 or 469 BC in the Athenian district of Alopece to a stoneworker father and a midwife mother, inherited enough to live without money worries, and served with distinction in three campaigns of the Peloponnesian War. He married Xanthippe in his fifties and had three sons with her. Friends joked about his flat, upturned nose, bulging eyes and big belly, and he went barefoot in a single ragged coat.
His independence could be dangerous. When agents of the Thirty Tyrants, in power from 404 BC, ordered him and four others to arrest Leon of Salamis for execution, he alone refused. He criticised democrats and oligarchs alike. In 399 BC he was charged with impiety and corrupting the young, convicted after a one-day trial, and, by Plato's account, died by poison after turning down friends' offers to smuggle him away.
Plato outlived him by five decades, and many scholars suspect his later dialogues put Plato's own ideas into his teacher's mouth, though the dating behind that view is shaky. Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1818 attack dismissed Xenophon as a soldier too partisan to grasp Socratic thought, and by the early 20th century Xenophon's portrait was largely set aside. Gregory Vlastos later argued that Plato's early dialogues fit other evidence best; some thinkers went further and treated all the dialogues as largely fiction.
What survived regardless is a method: short questions that lead a conversation partner, usually trying to define a virtue, into an impasse, while Socrates insists he knows only that he does not know. That style of questioning, and the irony that goes with it, shaped Renaissance humanists, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Source: Socrates
