Socrates wrote nothing. Everything we know of him comes through his students — chiefly Plato and Xenophon. The absence is paradoxical: the thinker who refused writing is taken as the starting point of all subsequent Western philosophy.

His method was the question. In a form of argument later called *elenchus*, he would pose successive questions until his interlocutor noticed the inconsistencies in their own answers. The goal was not to win but to bring the other into awareness of their ignorance — 'the only thing I know is that I know nothing' is the slogan of this stance.

In 399 BCE, in an Athens still recovering from defeat in the Peloponnesian War, a jury of 500 citizens tried him. The formal charges were 'impiety' and 'corrupting the youth', but the underlying motive was probably political: his students had included figures from the Thirty Tyrants who had briefly dismantled Athenian democracy. Socrates refused to plead, mocked the jury, and drank the hemlock calmly.

Plato's *Apology*, *Crito*, and *Phaedo* recount these final days. The death of Socrates remains the West's first great example of the tension between the free expression of thought and the limits of the state.