50 Fun Facts About Ancient Greek Philosophy

Which poison did Socrates drink to carry out the death sentence passed on him by an Athenian jury?

Hemlock ended his life at 70, after he had joked to the jurors that a fitting punishment would be free meals at the city's sacred hearth, an honour usually kept for Olympic victors.

Which future conqueror did Aristotle tutor as a thirteen-year-old prince at the request of King Philip II?

Alexander the Great took his lessons at Mieza, a royal estate near Pella, and Aristotle encouraged him toward eastern conquest.

In a famous allegory from Plato's Republic, lifelong prisoners watching shadows on a wall are chained inside what?

A cave holds the prisoners in Book VII, where the shadows come from objects carried in front of a fire behind them. Plato uses the scene to show what education does to human nature.

Which legendary island makes its first known appearance in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias?

Atlantis appears in no source older than Plato, who claimed the tale came from Egyptian records translated by the Athenian lawmaker Solon. He told it as an allegory on the hubris of nations.

The word philosophy comes from the ancient Greek philosophia, which literally means the love of what?

Wisdom is sophia in Greek, joined here to a root meaning loving. The same word names Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, a church dedicated to Holy Wisdom.

Which Greek thinker, credited with a theorem about right-angled triangles, founded a secretive school at Croton?

Pythagoras is said to have banned his followers from eating fava beans, and later legend says he once persuaded a bull to give them up too.

Which Greek philosopher is said to have lived in a large ceramic jar and carried a lit lamp around Athens by day?

Diogenes also mocked Plato's definition of man as a featherless biped: he is said to have plucked a chicken and carried it into Plato's school as an example.

Which Renaissance artist created The School of Athens, a Vatican fresco with Plato and Aristotle at its centre?

Raphael is believed to have given his Plato the face of Leonardo da Vinci, and he slipped a self-portrait of his own into the crowd of thinkers.

Which Roman emperor wrote the Stoic notebook now called Meditations, composing it in Greek rather than Latin?

Marcus Aurelius filled its twelve books with private notes for his own guidance and self-improvement, and probably never meant anyone else to read them.

Besides impiety toward the gods, Socrates was convicted of corrupting which group of Athenians?

The youth of Athens were the supposed victims, though Socrates argued he would never corrupt anyone on purpose, since a corrupted neighbour would only harm him in return.

In a famous paradox devised by Zeno of Elea, which swift hero of the Trojan War can never overtake a tortoise?

Achilles must first reach the spot where the tortoise started, by which time it has crept ahead, and so on without end. Zeno built such puzzles to back his teacher's claim that reality never changes.

Which sanctuary of Apollo, home to a famous oracle, had the maxim 'Know thyself' inscribed on its temple?

Delphi carried two more maxims on the same temple, one warning against excess, and Plato later reinterpreted the famous one to mean, roughly, know your soul.

What was the name of the school that Plato founded in a sacred olive grove outside the walls of Athens?

The Academy took its name from the site, a grove linked to a legendary hero called Akademos, and every academy since has borrowed it.

Which name is given to the idea in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics that each virtue lies between two opposite vices?

The golden mean puts courage between cowardice and rashness, though Aristotle added that rash people are generally cowards putting on a brave face.

Aristotle argued that the Earth must be which shape, pointing to the round shadow it casts on the Moon during eclipses?

A sphere also explained why travellers heading south saw new constellations climb above the horizon, he argued, noting stars visible from Egypt and Cyprus but not from farther north.

Which school of ancient Greek philosophers takes its name from a word meaning dog-like?

The Cynics may owe the label to the Cynosarges gymnasium where their founder taught, a name meaning place of the white dog, though it stuck as a jab at their rough, shameless way of life.

In the Poetics, Aristotle says that tragedy stirs pity and fear in the audience to bring about what emotional release?

Catharsis was a medical word for purging the body until Aristotle borrowed it, comparing the effect of a tragedy on a spectator's mind to a physical cleansing.

In Plato's philosophy, every horse, bed or triangle in the physical world is a mere shadow of its perfect, eternal what?

Form is the usual translation of Plato's word idea, from a Greek root meaning to see. He placed the Forms outside space and time, where nothing could ever change them.

In Plato's Republic, a Lydian shepherd finds a ring, known as the Ring of Gyges, that grants which power?

Invisibility lets him seduce the queen, murder the king and seize the throne of Lydia. Glaucon tells the tale to ask whether anyone would stay just if they could never be caught.

According to Plato's Republic, which rulers should govern the ideal city once they qualify at the age of fifty?

Philosopher-kings would qualify only after thirty-five years of education and fifteen more in lesser offices. Plato even suggests sending away everyone over ten so the young could be raised afresh.

Socrates is said to have declared at his trial that which kind of life is not worth living?

The unexamined life was his reason for rejecting exile: to be cut off from debating with his fellow citizens would have been, for him, a fate worse than death.

Socrates told the jury at his trial that he was like which biting insect, sent to rouse a sluggish horse?

A gadfly is easy to swat, he warned, but killing a critic who stings the city awake would injure Athens more than it injured him.

Socrates compared his way of drawing out ideas to the trade of his mother, Phaenarete, who was what?

A midwife delivers babies, and in Plato's Theaetetus he says he does the same for ideas, helping a thought grow in someone else's mind until it is ready to be born.

Which woman, remembered for a fierce temper, was married to Socrates and bore his son Lamprocles?

Xanthippe has the Greek word for horse built into her name, a sign that often marked a noble background, and some scholars think she came from an aristocratic family.

Which play by Aristophanes caricatures Socrates as the head of a school of idlers called the Thinkery?

The Clouds has him make his entrance dangling in a basket on a rope, the better to observe the heavens. Plato later named the play as one reason Athens turned on Socrates.

Socrates served Athens as a soldier in three campaigns of which long conflict, according to Plato?

The Peloponnesian War took him to Potidaea, where he is said to have saved the life of Alcibiades, a future Athenian general.

In Plato's Phaedo, the dying Socrates asks his friend Crito to repay a debt of which animal to Asclepius?

A rooster was his last request to the friend who, a day or two earlier, had offered to bribe the guards and spirit him away to Thessaly, an escape Socrates refused.

Which work by Plato, with a Greek title meaning a speech in defence, records what Socrates said at his trial?

Apology kept that older sense of a reasoned defence for centuries, and the regretful meaning became the main one in English only in the 18th century.

Which soldier, author of the Anabasis about the Ten Thousand's retreat, also wrote dialogues starring Socrates?

Xenophon and Plato were both followers of Socrates whose dialogues about him survive whole, and Xenophon's include his own account of the philosopher's defence in court.

Which dialogue by Plato takes place at a banquet where the guests compete with speeches in praise of love?

Symposium comes from the Greek for drinking together, and the party has its mishaps: Aristophanes misses his turn to speak because of a bout of hiccups.

The Socratic method, as shown in Plato's early dialogues, tests beliefs mainly through what activity?

Asking questions until a confident answer fell apart is a technique with a Greek name, elenchus, meaning cross-examination for the purpose of refutation.

In Plato's Phaedrus, the human soul is pictured as which vehicle, pulled by two mismatched winged horses?

A chariot is easy for the gods to steer, since both their horses are good, but every mortal driver must fight a bad horse that drags the soul down to earth.

In a later legend, a sign over the door of Plato's school turned away anyone untrained in which subject?

Geometry first appears in the story some 700 years after the school was founded, so it cannot be verified, though mathematics was almost certainly taught there.

Plato sailed to which city to tutor the young tyrant Dionysius II, a venture that ended in failure?

Syracuse disappointed him more than once: an earlier ruler turned against him on his first visit, and the young Dionysius grew suspicious and expelled Plato's ally Dion.

Aristotle's followers were known as Peripatetics, a name taken from a Greek word for which everyday activity?

Walking while he lectured is the habit legend gives Aristotle, but the name really came from the peripatoi, the covered walkways where his school met.

Aristotle, son of a physician to the king of Macedon, was born in which city of northern Greece?

Stagira, about 55 km east of modern Thessaloniki, was not home for long: at seventeen or eighteen Aristotle moved to Athens to study and stayed nearly twenty years.

Which kind of argument, defined by Aristotle, draws a conclusion from two premises?

Syllogism comes from a Greek word for inference, and the classic example runs: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.

Aristotle famously wrote that man is by nature which kind of animal?

Political here means suited to the polis, the Greek city-state, which Aristotle saw as the best and most natural community for humans to live in.

Which name is given to the fifth element that Aristotle added to explain the stars and planets?

Aether later took the Latin name quintessence, literally fifth essence, which is why that word now means the purest example of something.

The lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which drives the plot of The Name of the Rose, dealt with what?

Comedy is the subject of the missing half, and in Umberto Eco's novel an elderly monk hides a surviving copy because he sees laughter as a threat to God's order.

Which thinker from Miletus, often called the first Greek philosopher, is said to have predicted a solar eclipse?

Thales also fell into a well while gazing at the stars, the story goes, and once got rich on an olive harvest by forecasting the weather, to prove philosophy could pay.

Which thinker from Abdera, known as the laughing philosopher, held that everything is atoms moving in a void?

Democritus is said to have earned the nickname by laughing at human ambition, though early sources credit his teacher Leucippus with first proposing the atomic idea.

Which philosopher from Ephesus taught that everything flows, so that nobody can step into one river twice?

Heraclitus wrote in riddles so cryptic that the ancients nicknamed him the Obscure, and he also became known as the weeping philosopher.

Which philosopher founded the Garden in Athens, teaching that pleasure is the absence of suffering?

Epicurus welcomed many female students to the Garden, and he argued that death is nothing to fear because the dead feel nothing at all.

The Stoics are named after the Stoa Poikile, their meeting place in the Athens marketplace, which was what?

A painted porch is what the name means: the colonnade was decorated with battle scenes, and the label Stoic had earlier been applied to poets who gathered there.

Which philosopher from Elea, known for a single poem, had his views defended by Zeno's paradoxes?

Parmenides held that true being is unchanging and eternal, and Plato named a dialogue after him in which he visits Athens at 65 and meets a young Socrates.

Which woman, a Neoplatonist teacher and mathematician, was murdered by a Christian mob in Roman Egypt?

Hypatia built astrolabes and hydrometers, and her killing shocked the empire, turning her into what later writers called a martyr for philosophy.

Which philosopher, who proposed the four classical elements, is said to have leapt into Mount Etna?

Empedocles jumped, one legend says, so people would think he had become a god, but the volcano threw back one of his bronze sandals and gave the trick away.

Which Greek word, literally meaning the state of good spirit, did Aristotle use for the highest human good?

Eudaimonia is commonly translated as happiness, but for Aristotle it described a whole way of living, one of virtuous activity in accordance with reason.

Which Byzantine emperor closed the revived school of Plato in Athens, ending Neoplatonist teaching there?

Justinian shut it down, and the last members are said to have sought protection at the court of the Persian king Khosrau I, carrying precious scrolls with them.