PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO than with that of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, or Democritus Yet his inXuence on subsequent philosophy, down to our own day, has been incomparably greater than theirs In antiquity many schools of thought claimed Socrates as a founder and many individuals revered him as a paragon philosopher In the Middle Ages his history was not much studied, but his name appears on the page whenever a logician or metaphysician wishes to give an example: ‘Socrates’ was to scholastic philosophers what ‘John Doe’ long was to legal writers In modern times Socrates’ life has been held up as a model by philosophers of many diVerent kinds, especially by philosophers living under tyranny and risking persecution for refusal to conform to unreasoned ideology Many thinkers have made their own the dictum that has as good a claim as any to be his own authentic utterance: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ The hard facts of Socrates’ life not take long to tell He was born in Athens about 469 bc, ten years after the Persian invasions of Greece had been crushed at the battle of Plataea He grew up during the years when Athens, a Xourishing democracy under the statesman Pericles, exercised imperial hegemony over the Greek world It was a golden age of art and literature, which saw the sculptures of Phidias and the building of the Parthenon, and in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their great tragedies At the same time Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, wrote his accounts of the Persian Wars, and Anaxagoras introduced philosophy to Athens The second half of Socrates’ life was overshadowed by the Peloponnesian War (431–4), in which Athens was eventually forced to cede the leadership of Greece to victorious Sparta During the Wrst years of the war he served in the heavy infantry, taking part in three major engagements He acquired a reputation for conspicuous courage, shown particularly during the retreat after a disastrous defeat at Delium in 422 Back in Athens during the last years of the war, he held oYce in the city’s Assembly in 406 A group of commanders was tried for abandoning the bodies of the dead after a sea victory at Arginusae It was unconstitutional to try the commanders collectively rather than individually, but Socrates was alone in voting against the illegality, and the accused were executed In 404, after the war had ended, the Spartans replaced Athenian democracy with an oligarchy, ‘the Thirty Tyrants’, long remembered for a reign 33