Personal Narrative: I Am Socrates

I am Socrates. It will probably be a surprise to you that I knew next to nothing, because I suppose, my name has always been mentioned as being pre-eminent among philosophers and it would be reasonable to draw the conclusion that I was very learned. Indeed, my name is so illustrious, that I have become a watershed for ancient thinking. Philosophers would come to be referred to as being pre- or post-Socratic. The truth is that I really knew very little. And yet, if I am to be honest, the Oracle at Delphi, who I have always revered as the voice of the gods had said that there was none alive who was wiser than Socrates. So we have in this a paradox.

The main reason that I am so well-known was not of my doing, but that of my protégés, especially

The island of Euboea lay off the north and the eastern coasts. To the north-west along the ‘Road’, known simply as the Dromos, more than 20 meters wide, ran the major route from Athens, over the pass carved by the River Kiphissos through the Kithaeron mountains to Thebes in the land of Boeotia. Travelling to the west past the sacrosanct Attican town of Eleusis, taking the left fork were the cities of Megara and Corinth on the narrow Corinthian isthmus and to the right the long road to Delphi in Elis. In the south west were the islands of Salamis and Aegina in the Saronic gulf, where the culture was slightly different and they spoke with a Doric dialect. Sparta, in the land of Laconia, where they also spoke this same dour way, was some distance further to the south west, in the middle of the large four-fingered peninsula we called the Peloponnesus, after the mythical King Pelops. To the south and south east was the Attican peninsula with the cliffs of the sacred promontory at Sounion overlooking the Aegean Sea and the numerous small Aegean