Socrates     

The name Socrates may be familiar to you. He was one of the greatest of the western philosophers. He was also a great teacher. In what sense was he great as a teacher? You will find the answer if you read this article carefully.

    The Greek word for wisdom is sophia, and philos means a friend. So “philosopher” means a friend of wisdom, and this is the best possible description of Socrates, who was one of the wisest and bravest teachers the world has ever known.

    Socrates lived in Athens, nearly 500 years before the birth of Christ. He was not born important or rich, and indeed all his life he was poor, for he never asked his pupils to pay for what he taught them. He taught for the love of wisdom, not for money.
And what he had to say was always new and worth hearing. Before his time, most philosophers had been interested in studying what we would now call magic or superstition. Socrates, on the other hand, was interested in how ordinary people ought to behave and think. He did not just tell his pupils what he thought they should do --- in fact, he was fond of saying that he himself knew nothing. Instead, he would ask them endless questions about what they thought and believed; then he would talk about their answers and make them talk too.

    He would cunningly lead the conversation round in such a way that at the end of it people would suddenly see for themselves what was really true and right. They would feel they had worked it out for themselves --- which of course Socrates had helped them to do --- and would feel much more sure of it than if Socrates had just told them what to think and do, without helping them to see the reason why.
Socrates taught that “the man who is master of himself is truly free”. By being master of oneself he meant first knowing oneself, one’s faults and weaknesses and one’s good points, without pretending and without being vain, and then being able to control oneself. This knowledge of himself was what helped a man to be courageous, and the courageous man has a very important sort of freedom: freedom from fear.

    Socrates himself, because he was not afraid of the consequences, always felt free to teach what he thought was right, however unpopular this might make him with the powerful people in Athens.
No wonder all his pupils loved Socrates. But he made some dangerous enemies by his strange ways of teaching and asking questions. Some of the rulers in Athens did not like people to be encouraged to ask too many questions for fear they would begin asking questions about what their rulers were doing.

     So they accused Socrates of teaching young men wicked things and leading them to throw off their religion. This was false, for in fact Socrates was a very religious man. At last his enemies had him arrested, and he was condemned to death.
During the 30 days that lay between Socrates’ trial and execution, his friends and pupils were allowed to spend a great deal of time with him in his prison.

    They were astonished to find that he was calm and cheerful and seemed to have no fear of dying. He talked to them and taught them just as he used to in the streets and market-places of the city. One of his pupils, Crito sent money and asked the prison keeper to let him escape, but even then he would not go.

    The Greeks’ way of executing people was to make them drink a cup of hemlock, which is deadly poison. When the hemlock was brought to Socrates, his friends were in tears, but Socrates took the cup quietly and drank it as if it were a glass of wine at a banquet.

    
Simplified from Comprehension and Summary,
Oxford University Press 1979
Approximately 600 words.