![]() His execution was delayed for 30 days due to a religious festival, during which the philosopher’s distraught friends tried unsuccessfully to convince him to escape from Athens. Choosing not to flee, he spent his final days in the company of his friends before drinking the executioner’s cup of poisonous hemlock. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death. Socrates wrote nothing himself, so all that is known about him is filtered through the writings of a few contemporaries and followers, most notably his student Plato. His style of teaching-immortalized as the Socratic method-involved not conveying knowledge, but rather asking question after clarifying question until his students arrived at their own understanding. He grew up during the golden age of Pericles’ Athens, served with distinction as a soldier, but became best known as a questioner of everything and everyone. ![]() Viewed by many as the founding figure of Western philosophy, Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is at once the most exemplary and the strangest of the Greek philosophers.
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