Teleporio™ — Greek Island Travel Intelligence
Who was Socrates — and why does he still matter?
He wrote nothing. He charged no fee. He was put to death by the city he loved. And he changed how the world thinks.
Teleporio™ travel intelligence — Updated 2026-07-24
He left no writings. Everything we know about Socrates comes from what others wrote about him — mainly Plato, who was his student and who may have put his own ideas into his teacher's mouth. That ambiguity is itself very Socratic.
A man who walked the city
Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) was not a professor in a lecture hall. He was a figure of the streets — of the agora, the marketplace, the gymnasiums and the doorsteps of Athens. He was known, by all accounts, as an ungainly man: broad, stocky, with a famously snub nose and bulging eyes, nothing like the classical ideal of physical beauty. He wore simple clothing. He owned little. He charged no money for conversation. And yet the most brilliant young men in Athens were drawn to him, because he had a gift for asking questions that made it impossible to pretend you understood something you didn't.
The Socratic method
The approach we associate with Socrates — known as the Socratic method, or elenchus — was not a teaching system in the conventional sense. It was a form of inquiry through conversation. Socrates would engage someone who claimed expertise in a subject — courage, justice, piety, virtue — and ask them to define their terms. When they offered a definition, he would find the exception that broke it. Then he would ask again. The process rarely ended with an answer. It usually ended with his interlocutor realising they did not actually know what they thought they knew. This was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes deeply uncomfortable, and occasionally infuriating. It was also, Socrates believed, the beginning of genuine knowledge.
The trial and the hemlock
In 399 BC, at the age of around seventy, Socrates was tried before an Athenian jury on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. He was offered the opportunity to escape, via friends who had arranged it, and he refused — because to run would have been to repudiate everything he had argued about living in accordance with the law and with one's own principles. His conduct during the trial and his final hours are recorded in Plato's Apology and Phaedo: a man who accepted death with complete equanimity because his conscience was clear, and who continued to argue philosophy with his friends until the poison took hold. Whatever the historical imprecision in Plato's account, the image has shaped two and a half millennia of thinking about conscience and the examined life.
What Socrates actually believed
Because Socrates left no writings, what he believed is genuinely debated. Through the Platonic dialogues, certain ideas are consistently associated with him: that virtue is knowledge; that wrongdoing is always a form of ignorance; that the soul is more important than the body; that the unexamined life is not worth living. His famous claim to wisdom was negative: he knew that he knew nothing, while others believed they knew things they did not. This 'Socratic irony' — appearing ignorant while exposing the ignorance of others — made him both beloved and resented. It eventually made him dangerous enough, in the eyes of some, to be killed.
Why a traveller should care
Visit Athens and walk the area of the ancient Agora — the open marketplace below the Acropolis where Socrates spent his public life. The Stoa of Attalos (reconstructed) and the Temple of Hephaistos remain, along with the ground where he walked, argued and asked. For a traveller, knowing who Socrates was changes the entire texture of Athens: it transforms the ancient stones from impressive ruins into the setting of one of the world's most consequential intellectual biographies. He didn't just live here. He invented, or at least radically extended, a way of thinking that ran forward into Plato, Aristotle, and ultimately into every tradition of rational inquiry we still practise.
What is certain — and what is interpretation
Socrates is a historical figure: his life, trial and execution in Athens in 399 BC are attested by multiple ancient sources. However, his philosophical ideas reach us primarily through Plato's dialogues, which are literary works that may or may not reproduce Socrates's actual views faithfully. This distinction — between the historical Socrates and the 'Platonic Socrates' — is noted by scholars and is observed here.
Go See It
Ancient Agora of Athens, Adrianou Street, Thissio
The Ancient Agora — the public marketplace where Socrates spent most of his public life — is one of Athens's most important and often overlooked sites. The Stoa of Attalos contains an excellent museum of agora finds. The Temple of Hephaistos on the hill above is among the best-preserved ancient temples in Greece.