the skies to the common problems of mankind (Tusculan Disputations, 5, 4, 10). This
may be taken to mean that philosophy moved from physics to ethics. This change,
though associated with Socrates, may be seen as a consequence of a greater shift
gradually taking place in Greek culture as a whole. Between the earliest speculations
of the Pre-Socratics and the time when Socrates had come of age in about 450 came
the full flowering of Attic tragedy, in which practical human problems and questions
of a philosophic, religious and ethical nature are raised and debated in dramatic form.
Some time before Socrates’ maturity, Herodotus had published his Histories, a work
symptomatic of an adventurous pioneering spirit of enquiry into the human world
and one that extended beyond the Greek horizon. Developments in philosophy may
be seen as a natural accompaniment or consequence of other imaginative and
empirical explorations; together they are complementary aspects of the growing
Greek enlightenment.
Socrates (469–399) and the sophists
Socrates did not write anything, so that our knowledge of him comes principally from
two sources, from the historian Xenophon (c. 428–c. 354) who wrote personal
recollections of him in his Memoirs of Socrates, and chiefly from the philosopher Plato
(c. 427–347) who made Socrates his chief spokesman in his dialogues, all written
some time after Socrates’ death in 399. How far the historical Socrates is accurately
represented by the Platonic Socrates has long been a matter of debate. When even
historians like Thucydides put words into the mouths of leading figures (see pp. 41–42),
there is no reason to suppose that Plato felt constrained by the need to preserve
historical accuracy in the portrayal of his master. Most scholars believe that Socrates
did not develop any system of beliefs and that what the world has come to know as
Platonism, although expressed through the Platonic Socrates, is an extension by Plato
of tendencies in Socrates’ thought.
The historical Socrates, the son of an Athenian stonemason in whose trade
he was trained, is above all associated with the method to which he has given his
name, the origin of which is given in the Apology, an early dialogue in which Plato
has Socrates tell how his friend Chaerophon had consulted the oracle at Delphi to
ask whether there was any one wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied ‘No’.
Dumbfounded at this, Socrates set out to refute the oracle by seeking out those with
reputations for wisdom, the philosophers, poets and artists, only to find that they knew
nothing at all, but, unlike Socrates, did not recognize their own ignorance. Thereafter
he considered it his duty to disabuse all sorts and conditions of men of their own self-
conceit and their own self-ignorance, and so put them on the road to truth. His
favourite method involved cross-questioning; for this he pretended to be ignorant in
PHILOSOPHY 189