How and why did Socrates die?
Google it. I did. This is what I found. It is Plato’s Dialogues that provide most of what has come down to readers through history about the life and thought of his mentor. There are no books written by Socrates, only his appearance as the main character in Plato’s writings and, to a much lesser degree, in plays written during or after his life. There is no way of knowing for sure how much is “pure Socrates” and how much is Plato. The dialogues were not intended as fastidious reportage of actual events and conversations; they were imaginative riffs on ideas and people. Symposium, for example, takes readers to a banquet in which Socrates and his friends entertain and compete with each other to solve the mysteries of love. Plato’s Dialogues offer episodes and scenes through which his philosophical points could be made through the characters themselves. His first generation of readers could separate fact from fancy, but this has become much more difficult for the following generations who
Socrates was a philosopher who taught Plato (who himself taught Aristotle) Basically Socrates pissed off a LOT of people in ancient Athens. He kept on asking everyone questions and perpetuating the Socratic Method of Inquiry. They charged him with impiety and sentenced him to death. He drank hemlock and died a relatively peaceful death.
Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 BC for corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to believe in its gods, he drank hemlock which was the conventional method of execution for Athenian citizens. He “corrupted” the young people by basically going around showing important people that they actually didn’t know as much as they thought they did about things such as the nature of piety, justice and morality.
