Meletus son of Meletus of Pitthos has brought and sworn this charge against Socrates son of Sophroniscus of Alopeke: Socrates is a wrongdoer in not recognizing the gods which the city recognizes, and introducing other new divinities. Further, he is a wrongdoer in corrupting the young. Penalty, death.

According to Plato his last words were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget” (Ph. 118a). Asclepius was the god of health, and the sacrifice of a cock a normal thank-offering for recovery from illness. Perhaps those were in fact his last words, in which case it is interesting that his final concern should have been for a matter of religious ritual. (This was an embarrassment to rationalistic admirers of Socrates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.)

… the older view (held by Nietzsche among others) that the thanks is offered on behalf of Socrates himself, in gratitude for his recovery from the sickness of life (cf. Shakespeare’s “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well”), seems more likely.

A particularly interesting survival is an anonymous papyrus fragment now in Cologne;3 this contains part of a dialogue between Socrates and an unnamed person in Socrates’ cell after his sentence (recalling Plato’s Crito) in which Socrates is asked why he did not defend himself at the trial. In his answer Socrates is represented as maintaining, as in Protagoras, that pleasure is the supreme end of life, a position taken by the Cyrenaic school founded by Socrates’ associate Aristippus (also an author of dialogues). It has been plausibly suggested that the author may have belonged to that school.

Socrates narrates to an unnamed companion a conversation with Alcibiades, beginning by observing how Alcibiades’ political ambitions are prompted by emulation of Themistocles, the great statesman who had led Athens in the Persian war of 480. He then points out how Themistocles’ achievements were based on knowledge and intelligence, which were yet insufficient to save him from final disgrace and banishment. The point of this is to bring home to Alcibiades his intellectual inferiority to Themistocles and the consequent vanity of his pretensions to rival him, and the strategy is so successful that Alcibiades bursts into tears, lays his head on Socrates’ knees, and begs him to educate him. Socrates concludes by telling his companion that he was able to produce this effect not through any skill on his part but by a divine gift, which he identifies with his love for Alcibiades: “and so although I know no science or skill which I could teach anyone to benefit him, nevertheless I thought that by keeping company with Alcibiades I could make him better through the power of love”. This excerpt combines two themes prominent in Plato’s depiction of Socrates: the denial of knowledge or the capacity to teach and the role of love in stimulating relationships whose goal is the education of the beloved (see esp. Symposium and Phaedrus).

The only other Socratic dialogue of which any substantial excerpts survive (apart from the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon) is Aeschines’ Aspasia. This also connects with themes in other Socratic writings. It is a dialogue between Socrates and Callias, whose opening recalls Plato’s Apology 20a–c, but in reverse, since there Socrates reports a conversation in which Callias recommends the sophist Euenus of Paros as a tutor for his sons, whereas in Aeschines’ dialogue Callias asks Socrates whom he would recommend as a tutor, and is astonished when Socrates suggests the notorious courtesan Aspasia. Socrates supports his recommendation by instancing two areas in which Aspasia has special expertise: rhetoric, in which she instructed not only the famous Pericles but also Lysicles, another prominent politician; and marriage guidance.

Oeconomicus, a moralizing treatise on estate-management in the form of a Socratic dialogue.

Xenophon reports that Socrates identified wisdom first with self-control and then with justice and the rest of virtue.

(discussed in Laches). In section 6 he asserts the “Socratic paradox” familiar from Meno, Gorgias, and Protagoras that no one knows what he should do but fails to do it.

The crucial passage is Metaphysics 1078b 27–32, where Aristotle, discussing the antecedents of Plato’s theory of Forms, says the following: There are two things which may justly be ascribed to Socrates, inductive arguments and general definitions, for both are concerned with the starting-point of knowledge; Socrates did not, however, separate the universal or the definitions, but they (i.e. Plato and his followers) did, calling them the Forms of things.

We do not have to suppose either that Aristotle was personally intimate with Plato, his senior by over forty years (though he is said to have been a favourite pupil, and he wrote a poem in praise of Plato), or that personal reminiscences of Socrates were a staple topic of discussion in the Academy.

The central point is that, for Plato’s apologetic and philosophical purposes, historical truth was almost entirely irrelevant; for instance, the main point of the dialogues in which Socrates confronts sophists is to bring out the contrast between his genuine philosophizing and their counterfeit, and in so doing to manifest the injustice of the calumny which, by associating him with the sophists, had brought about his death.

Diotima, to whom belongs the account of the educational role of love, culminating in the vision of the Form of Beauty

“Socratic irony”, that is, pretended ignorance for dialectical purposes.

Rhetoric is the bogus counterpart of politikē, since the aim of the orator is not to promote people’s good, but to pander to their wishes by enabling them to get what they want through the power of persuasion. It thus promotes, not the genuinely good life, but a spurious appearance of it, as cosmetics is the skill, not of making people actually healthy, but of making them look healthy (465c).