Socrates

Reading notes

• Academica §16 that he knows nothing

  The Socratic profession of ignorance: Socrates affirms only that he knows that he knows nothing, and so was pronounced by Apollo the wisest of men. Cicero treats it as the root of the Academy's later skepticism.

• Ad Atticum 14.9 §1 O Socrates, and ye Socratic men

  A mock-philosophical apostrophe: Cicero affects Socratic indifference to the loss of his shops, thanking the philosophers for teaching him to despise such material misfortune.

• Brutus §292 that famous irony which they say was in Socrates

  Eironeia: Socratic irony, the affected disclaiming of one's own knowledge while drawing out others, as in Plato's dialogues. Atticus playfully accuses Cicero of using it in his praise of orators.

• On the Nature of the Gods §2.167 the foremost of philosophers, Socrates

  Socrates (469-399 BC), invoked as the supreme philosophical authority on the self-sufficiency of virtue. Balbus closes the providence argument with the Socratic-Stoic claim that for the truly good man all things turn out well.

• Laelius, On Friendship §7 judged the wisest even by Apollo's oracle

  Socrates, whom the Delphic oracle of Apollo pronounced the wisest of men (Plato, Apology 21a). Cicero alludes to him here and again at sections 10 and 13 without naming him.

• Tusculan Disputations §1.8 the old Socratic method of discussing against another's opinion

  The dialectical method by which Socrates argued against any thesis proposed, on the principle that truth emerges from refutation. Cicero adopts it as the form of the Tusculans, where an interlocutor states a view and Cicero argues the contrary.

• Tusculan Disputations §1.57 that discourse he held on the very day he departed from life

  Plato's Phaedo, set on the day of Socrates's execution, which develops the recollection argument and the case for immortality more fully than the Meno. Cicero refers to it repeatedly through the book as 'the book in which he dies.'

• Tusculan Disputations §1.71 Socrates neither sought an advocate for his capital trial nor begged before his judges

  Socrates's refusal to flatter the Athenian jury or employ a hired speechwriter at his trial in 399 BC, and his calm at drinking the hemlock. Cicero makes him the supreme exemplar of facing death from greatness of soul, drawing on Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

• Tusculan Disputations §1.74 the whole life of philosophers, as the same man says, is a rehearsal of death

  The Platonic-Socratic maxim from the Phaedo (64a, 67e) that philosophy is a 'practice of dying' (meletes thanatou), i.e. the training of the soul to detach itself from the body. Cicero develops it in the following section.

• Tusculan Disputations §3.31 her husband Socrates

  Socrates of Athens (469-399 BC), from whom (Cicero says) all ethical philosophy flows. His serene constancy of expression is offered as the model of a mind untroubled by passion.

• Tusculan Disputations §4.24 like a kind of Socratic medicine

  A reference to the Socratic method of curing the soul's cravings by reason, applied at once before the passion settles. Cicero treats philosophy throughout this book as a medicine of the soul.

• Tusculan Disputations §5.10 Socrates, however, was the first to call philosophy down from the sky

  A famous Ciceronian formulation of Socrates's turn from natural philosophy (cosmology, astronomy) to ethics, bringing philosophy "down from the sky" into the city and the home to inquire about good and evil and the conduct of life.

• Tusculan Disputations §5.108 Socrates indeed, when he was asked what country he claimed as his own, said, "The world"

  The proverbial cosmopolitan answer of Socrates, that he was a citizen of the whole world (kosmopolites). Cicero uses it to minimize the supposed evil of exile.