Questions to ask Socrates

Who Socrates was, as far as anyone can tell

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 or 469 BC. His father Sophroniscus is said to have been a stonemason and his mother Phaenarete a midwife; Plato has him call himself a midwife of ideas. He married Xanthippe and had three sons. He fought as a heavy infantryman at Potidaea, at Delium in 424 BC and at Amphipolis in 422 BC. He spent his days in the agora and the gymnasia questioning anyone who would talk to him, took no fees, and was famously poor and ugly. In 399 BC a jury of about 500 Athenians convicted him of impiety and corrupting the young, and he was put to death by drinking hemlock.

The Socrates problem: who is actually speaking

Historians call it the Socratic problem. Our four sources each give a different Socrates, and none of them is a recording.

This changes how you write and answer. When your Socrates speaks, say which source the idea comes from, with its line reference: Plato's works are cited by Stephanus numbers, such as Apology 38a. And include at least one question that asks him whether Plato or Xenophon got him right. Our guide to primary and secondary sources explains why this matters.

How to interview a man who answers with questions

In Plato's dialogues Socrates rarely answers. He asks you to define a word (courage, justice, piety), then shows with more questions that your definition does not hold. So prepare. Give your interviewer a definition ready to be tested, and let the Socrates character push back once or twice before the next question. Short questions work best, and so does a confident interviewer who says, “I think justice is paying your debts”, because that is exactly how Republic Book I begins.

For a wax museum, set him around 416 BC: in his mid-fifties, a veteran, barefoot in the agora, before the trial. For a philosophy class, set the interview in prison in 399 BC, in the days before his death, as Plato does in Crito and Phaedo.

Questions about his life and Athens

What a good answer contains: Plato's Symposium (220d to 221c) has Alcibiades describe Socrates saving his life at Potidaea and walking calmly in the retreat from Delium. Plato and Xenophon both say he walked barefoot in winter and could go without sleep.

1. What was it like to fight at Potidaea and in the retreat from Delium?
2. Why do you take no money for teaching, when the sophists charge high fees?
3. What did your mother's work as a midwife teach you about how you teach?
4. What does Xanthippe think of the way you spend your days?
5. Why did you never leave Athens, except to go to war?
6. Aristophanes made you a fraud in The Clouds in 423 BC. Did that comedy do you harm?

Questions about wisdom and the oracle

What a good answer contains: in Plato's Apology (21a to 23b) Socrates says his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates and was told no one was. Puzzled, Socrates questioned politicians, poets and craftsmen, and concluded he was wiser only in that he did not think he knew what he did not know. Xenophon's Apology (14) gives a different version of the oracle. Note that the slogan “I know that I know nothing” does not appear in these words in Plato.

1. What exactly did the oracle say, and why did it puzzle you?
2. What happened when you questioned the politicians and the poets?
3. Is it wiser to know you are ignorant than to know a lot?
4. What is the voice, the daimonion, that you say warns you?

Questions about right and wrong

What a good answer contains: in Plato's Crito (49b to c) he says one must never do wrong, not even in return for a wrong. In the Gorgias (469b to 479e) he argues that a wrongdoer who escapes punishment is worse off than his victim. In the Phaedrus (274c to 277a) Plato has him argue that writing weakens memory and cannot answer back, which may explain why he wrote nothing.

1. If someone wrongs me, may I pay them back?
2. Is it worse to do wrong or to suffer it?
3. Is it ever right to lie?
4. Can goodness be taught, like shoemaking, or not? (Plato makes this the question of the Meno.)
5. Why do you never write your ideas down?

Questions about politics, the trial and death

What a good answer contains: in 406 BC he was on the presiding committee of the Council and opposed the illegal mass trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae. In 404 BC, under the oligarchy of the Thirty, he refused their order to arrest Leon of Salamis and went home (Apology 32b to d). Two of his associates, Critias and Alcibiades, had harmed Athens, which probably fed the prosecution. At his trial he was convicted by about 280 votes to 220 and, asked to propose a penalty, first suggested free meals at public expense. The execution was delayed about a month while a sacred ship was away at Delos. His friend Crito offered to pay for his escape; Socrates refused.

1. Why did you refuse to arrest Leon of Salamis, knowing what the Thirty might do?
2. Do you think Athens' democracy is a good way to run a city?
3. Why did you suggest free meals as your penalty, when you knew it would anger the jury?
4. Why not escape when Crito had the money ready?

Discuss the execution as a state punishment and his reasons for accepting it. Do not make poison glamorous.

A question to test the sources

• Plato says you believed the soul is immortal and remembers what it knew before birth. Did you, or is that Plato speaking through you?

This is the best question in the list for a philosophy class, because there is no single right answer. Many scholars think the early dialogues (Apology, Crito, Euthyphro) are closest to the historical Socrates and that middle dialogues such as the Phaedo and Republic carry Plato's own ideas, but this is debated. A good answer says so.

Sample answers from the sources

Question: Where does philosophy start?

Question: Why not stop questioning people and live quietly? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in Plato's Apology (38a) he tells the jury that discussing virtue every day is the greatest good for a person, and that a life without such examination is not worth living.

Question: Why didn't you take revenge on your accusers? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in the Crito (49b to c) he holds that one must never do wrong, even in return for a wrong done to oneself.

Question: Were you really the wisest man in Athens? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in Plato's Apology (21a to 23b) he takes the oracle to mean only that he alone recognised his ignorance. Xenophon's Apology tells it differently, so point out both.

What Socrates could not know

• Plato's dialogues as books, or that he became their main character.
• Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Rome or Christianity.
• Elections as modern democracies use them. Athens chose most officials by lot; ask him why a city should pick its ship's captain by lot and see what happens.
• The phrase “Socratic method”, or philosophy as a university subject.

Where to read the sources

Project Gutenberg has Benjamin Jowett's translations of the Apology, Crito and Phaedo, the three dialogues about the trial and death, and Xenophon's Memorabilia. The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University has the Greek texts with English translations and Stephanus numbers, plus Aristophanes' Clouds. Read the Apology first: it is short and it is the closest thing to Socrates' own defence.

Yuga's Socrates is an AI recreation drawn from Plato, Xenophon and the record. It will question you back, which makes it good practice for an interview, but it is not Socrates and it can be wrong; cite the dialogues, not the app. To follow the story on, see questions to ask Plato, Plato and Aristotle compared and ancient Greece's key figures.