The dialogue is centered on the person of Socrates, who was facing prosecution for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates was born in 469 BC and died in 399 BC. He drank hemlock voluntarily after having been condemned to death when convicted of the charges against him. He had lived in the city-state of Athens all his life, which he devoted to discussion of philosophical issues. He was married to Xanthippi, making him one of the few of the great philosophers before the twentieth century who were married. Nietzsche once asked,
What great philosopher hitherto has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer--these were not. A married philosopher belongs in comedy . . . and that exception . . . the sarcastic Socrates, it seems, married ironically just to demonstrate this proposition. (On the Genealogy of Morals, Part III, Section 7)
Many philosophers have found Socrates, to the contrary, an exemplary model of the philosopher, an honest, unpretentious seeker of the truth. This style clashed violently with that of his contemporaries, the Sophists, who will be discussed briefly below.
