Who were Socrates' contemporaries?
Socrates lived from 470 to 399 BC, in golden Athens. In a single city, thinkers, poets and physicians shaped their fields for good.
Socrates' lifespan is highlighted, the other bars show a few notable contemporaries.
Meanwhile, in the same years.
Teacher and student
As far as is known, Socrates never wrote anything down himself. What is known about him comes above all from his students Plato and Xenophon. Plato was 29 when his teacher was sentenced to death: he sat in the court at the trial, but was absent at the execution. He writes about himself in the third person: “Plato, I believe, was ill.”
Medicine and philosophy
While Socrates asked in Athens how one should live, Hippocrates on Kos was freeing medicine from priests and incantations. One tested convictions in conversation, the other illnesses at the bedside.
Golden Athens
When the Parthenon began to rise on the Acropolis from 447 BC, Socrates was in his early twenties. Inside stood a colossal Athena of gold and ivory, a work by the sculptor Phidias. Socrates stayed in this city all his life and spoke to people in the marketplace, testing with them what justice and a good life really mean.
Between empires
Socrates was born ten years after the Greeks defeated the Persians. Their empire began beyond the Aegean and reached from Asia Minor to the Indus, the largest the world had seen. Egypt belonged to it for a long time, and its history already reached further back then than the span from Socrates to today.
The stage of Athens
When Socrates was a young man, Sophocles was filling the theaters of Athens. The poet, about 27 years older, wrote more than 120 plays, of which only seven survive, among them “Oedipus Rex” and “Antigone”. He died seven years before Socrates.
Walls in the east
The world Socrates knew reached as far as Persia and Egypt. No one in Athens knew of China, although the first sections of what would later become the Great Wall were being built there at the same time. Work on it went on for more than two thousand years, into the seventeenth century.
This is one slice. Parallel shows the rest.
Parallel shows you contemporaries at a glance, across art, music, science and politics. For anyone you are curious about, you can see who lived at the same time.
