Socrates: Living the Good Life
Virtue Starts with Questioning Beliefs
“This was the end of our friend, the best, wisest and most upright man of any that I have ever known.”
This was said of Socrates by a witness at his death. A cheerful Socrates was surrounded by his weeping followers. He was condemned to drink a cup of hemlock poison by the Athenian authorities, which he drank without protest.
Socrates had been condemned to death not for his beliefs, but for his insistent questioning of others’ beliefs.
Before Socrates, philosophy was largely concerned with questions that we now associate with science: what is the world? And how do we experience it? But Socrates lived in Athens at a troubled time. He was a veteran of the Pelopenisian War, a war that Athens had lost to the rival state of Sparta.
Unlike democratic and artistic Athens, Sparta was an oppressive militaristic state. The Spartans imposed the rule of the “Thirty Tyrants”, a pro-Spartan oligarchy that would attempt to wipe out Athenian democracy. It’s estimated that the Thirty Tyrants murdered up to 5% of the Athenian population before being deposed. Athens regained its sovereignty but the once mighty state was scarred by its humiliating defeat.
