Socrates

Socrates was born about 470 BCE in Athens, the son of a stoneworker, and lived through the city’s golden age and its long war with Sparta. He wrote nothing himself; what we know of him comes through his students, above all Plato and Xenophon.

He turned philosophy away from the study of nature toward the question of how a human being ought to live. His method — the elenchus, a patient questioning that tested a belief until its contradictions showed — gave the world a new way to seek the truth, and gave his name to it: the Socratic method.

He claimed no wisdom but the knowledge of his own ignorance, and held that virtue is a kind of knowledge and that no one does wrong willingly. He examined the powerful as readily as the humble, and made enemies in the doing.

In 399 BCE he was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, and put to death by hemlock. Nearly every school of Western thought that followed traces some root to him. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.