Socrates lived in Athens, a city-state in ancient Greece, from 425-399 B.C.E. He was the teacher of Plato who was the teacher of Aristotle who was the teacher of Alexander the Great who by the age of 33 conquered almost the entire Persian empire. It is sometimes pointed out that what the character of Jesus is to Christendom, the character of Socrates is to Western philosophy. Some have gone so far as to claim that the Jesus story is just a rewriting of the Socrates story. The similarity is striking: both supposedly sacrificed themselves for their respective causes, having been sentence to death for crimes against their respective states. Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote an autobiography, leaving it to oral historians and subsequent writers to interpret their lives.
In his last year, Socrates was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. In his prison cell, at the age of seventy, he ingested the poisonous plant hemlock. And thus, he carried out his own sentence. Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth and worshipping false gods. At his trial he testified on his own behalf, but to no avail. Less jurors ruled in his favor after he spoke. On one account, jurors that at first did not find him guilty, later cried out for his execution. Nevertheless, his testimony was not entirely in vain. Though it marks the death of Socrates, in many ways it marks the dawn of western philosophy.
