Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
BIG IDEAS: SOCRATES, PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The Golden Age of Athens under Pericles, and the city-state rivalry after the Peloponnesian War,
saw the birth of Western philosophy under the towering figures of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
SOCRATES c.470 399 BC
The son of an Athenian sculptor, Socrates was for a time a sculptor himself. Though he fought
bravely for Athens as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, much earlier, in his twenties, he had
turned to philosophy, which he practised in his own peculiar style. Promoting no philosophical
position of his own, he asserted, ceaselessly, the supremacy of reason. Often this was done in
the streets of Athens, buttonholing some self-regarding Athenian of the older generation,
asking him questions, picking his answers to pieces, until he came up with a definition that
held water or, more likely, the spluttering victim was reduced to confess his own ignorance
before crowds of Socrates' mirthful young supporters.
By this “Socratic method” he asked for definitions of familiar concepts such as piety and
justice; his technique was to expose the ignorance that hid behind people's use of such terms,
while acknowledging his own similar ignorance. Indeed when the Delphic oracle proclaimed
that no man was wiser than Socrates, he explained this by saying wisdom lies in knowing how
little one really knows. Because he valued this question-and-answer process over settling on
fixed conclusions, Socrates never wrote anything down. Yet his influence was pivotal; before
his time philosophical inquiry concerned itself with speculations on how the natural world
was formed and how it operates; afterwards it looked to the analysis of concepts and to ethics.
Socrates' method could be irritating, especially when he questioned conventional morality,
and this, coupled with powerful friendships with unpopular oligarchs, led to a backlash.
Having tried him for impiety and corrupting the young, and sentenced him to death, the city
gave him the option of naming another penalty, probably expecting him to choose exile.
Instead Socrates answered that if he was to get what he deserved, he should be maintained
for life at public expense. At this the death penalty was confirmed, but even then it was not to
be imposed for two months, with the tacit understanding that Socrates would escape. Instead
Socrates argued that it was wrong for a citizen to disobey even an unjust law, and in the
company of his friends he drank the cup of hemlock. “Such was the end,” wrote Plato, “of our
friend; of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.”
PLATO c.427 c.347 BC
As a young man, Plato painted, composed music and wrote a tragedy, as well as being a
student of Socrates. He intended a career in politics, where his connections would have
ensured success, but Socrates' death made Plato decide that he could not serve a government
that had committed such a crime, and instead his mission became to exalt the memory of his
teacher. In Plato's writings, many of them dialogues, Socrates is frequently the leading
participant, while at the Academy in Athens, which Plato founded, the Socratic question-and-
answer method was the means of instruction.
he found Darius in the dust, murdered by his own supporters. Alexander wrapped the
corpse in his Macedonian cloak, and assumed the lordship of Asia.
Hellenistic Greece
No sooner had Alexander died, at Babylon in 323 BC, aged thirty-three, than Athens
led an alliance of Greeks in a war of liberation against Macedonian rule. But the
c.287 BC
215-213 BC
200-197 BC
146 BC
Mathematician, inventor
and scientist Archimedes
is born on the Greek
colony of Sicily.
First Macedonian
War extends Roman
influence in Greece.
Second Macedonian
War, culminating in
the Roman victory at
Cynoscephalae.
Greece divided into
Roman provinces.
 
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