Victor Nuovo: The trial and death of Socrates

In 399 BCE a judicial assembly of the city of Athens found Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, and it sentenced him to death.

Why is Socrates so important? Socrates wrote nothing, so we can’t search a body of writing for answers. And the fact that he was written up by a young admirer, Plato (426–346), who in turn became a great philosopher, perhaps the greatest and surely the gr … (read more)

Socrates imagined that death is one of two things: Either it is extinction, or the release of the soul from the body and its migration to another place.

It is a curious fact that the two greatest moral teachers of the Western intellectual tradition — Socrates of Athens (470–399 BCE) and Jesus of Nazareth (4 BCE–30 CE) — wrote nothing.