Trial and execution of Socrates
- Date
- 399 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Greece (Attica)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
In 399 BCE an Athenian jury convicted the seventy-year-old philosopher Socrates on charges of impiety (failing to honour the city's gods) and corrupting the youth, brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.
After a defence preserved in Plato's Apology, the jurors voted for death, and Socrates was executed by drinking hemlock in his prison cell, refusing offers to flee out of principled obedience to the law. Socrates wrote nothing himself; his thought survives chiefly through the dialogues of his student Plato, who made the Socratic method of question-and-answer cross-examination central to philosophy. By turning inquiry toward ethics, definitions and the examined life, Socrates reoriented Greek thought away from natural philosophy and toward questions of virtue, knowledge and how one ought to live. His death — read variously as a martyrdom of free inquiry and as a verdict against a disruptive critic of the democracy — became one of the defining episodes in the history of philosophy and a lasting symbol of the tension between the thinker and the state.
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Empires active in 399 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE – 330 BCE
- Roman Republic509 BCE – 27 BCE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE – 146 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Odrysian Kingdom480 BCE – 46 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- Plato founds the Academy at Athensc. 387 BCE
- Panini composes the Ashtadhyayi, the first systematic grammarc. 400 BCE
- Herodotus completes the Histories, founding the writing of historyc. 430–425 BCE
- Life and teaching of Confucius in China551–479 BCE
- Construction of the Parthenon in Periclean Athens447–432 BCE
- Compilation of the Daodejing and the rise of Daoismc. 4th century BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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