Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode, Socrates without Plato, the

portrayals of Aristophanes and Xenophon.

Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything.

With no book to his name, Socrates owes his renown to the impression he made on the people he

met face to face, and above all, to the fact that one of those people was Plato.

It is mostly through the dialogues of Plato that Socrates lives on today.

In those dialogues Socrates appears as one of the great literary characters of the ancient world, humorous, ironic, thoughtful,

courageous, seductive, outrageous, and remarkably ugly.

His personality stays relatively consistent through the many dialogues in which he appears, but there are also shifts of emphasis and doctrine.

It is clear that Plato admired Socrates greatly, yet this did not stop him from using Socrates for his own purposes, and in my opinion at least, we should

never take Plato as a straightforward witness as regards the historical Socrates.

That's one reason why, before I get into the platonic depiction of Socrates, I want to devote an episode to Socrates without Plato.

In particular, I want to talk about the way Socrates was portrayed by two very different authors from Athens, who like Plato, couldn't resist

using him in their literary productions.

Most of us start by picturing Socrates at his end, the philosopher sitting calmly in his jail cell cheerfully draining a poisonous

brew of Hemlock after being sentenced to death by a jury of his peers.

The trial may have been politically motivated.

It happened in 399 BC, several years after Athens

had capitulated to Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War. In 404 BC, the same year

that the war ended, Athens was taken over by a group of 30 oligarchs or tyrants.

One of these tyrants was Critias, an associate of Socrates.

...