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That Socrates, like many others including Xenophon, was fascinated by Alcibiades’ potential and ambition is evident. It’s easy to find echoes of their relationship in that between Plato and Dionysius of Syracuse, which started soon after Socrates died, and later on the third and most successful attempt by a Greek philosopher to help shape a true Hellenic philosopher-king: Aristotle’s role in the astonishing rise of Alexander of Macedon1.
Socrates didn't write anything and the jurors who condemned him to die had no way to know much about his philosophy, outside of hearsay. They did know that Socrates had long opposed the war against Sparta that had come to define Athens’ democratic mission2 and had long intrigued against such a mission; all of Socrates’ pupils, from Plato to Xenophon, knew this was the case, and thus abhorred democracy as much as their master did3.
Socrates' philosophy represents a radical departure from the sophist tradition that had taken over Greek thought in the previous generation. The Sophists in the jury during his trial were probably astonished when, facing the death penalty, the old master tried to demonstrate that their moral values were wrong-headed, and that they should be worried about the “welfare of their souls”: after all, by that time, Sophists had spent a century arguing that moral values are intrinsically worthless and relativistic4. But the old man was playing for posterity by then.
That Socrates ended up killed by Sophists is one of the greatest turns of human history. For it was those Sophists who made Socrates' philosophy and the Platonic school that followed it possible, as they broke down the mythic unity of words and things, by insisting on the gap that separates words from things. In a way, philosophy proper as devised by Socrates and his pupils can only be understood as a reaction, as “an attempt to close the gap the sophists opened up, to provide a foundation of truth for word”5, not all that different from that attempted by Confucius in China during the precedent generation.
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