Ancient Greek Philosophy
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50 free Ancient Greek Philosophy trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ancient Greek philosophy began with a handful of curious people on the shores of the Aegean who decided that the world could be explained without myths. Within two centuries Athens had produced Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, three thinkers whose arguments about truth, justice and the good life still set the agenda for philosophy classes today. This quiz covers the whole story: the trial and death of Socrates, the best-known ideas and dialogues of Plato, Aristotle's work on ethics, logic and nature, and the rival schools that came after them, from the Stoics to the sceptics. The earliest Presocratic thinkers and a few later Greek and Roman followers are here too. It is written for students revising a philosophy or classics course, for quiz hosts who need a reliable round, and for anyone who has ever wondered who actually said what. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which poison did Socrates drink to carry out the death sentence passed on him by an Athenian jury?
Hemlock
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.
Q 02Which future conqueror did Aristotle tutor as a thirteen-year-old prince at the request of King Philip II?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great took his lessons at Mieza, a royal estate near Pella, and Aristotle encouraged him toward eastern conquest.
Q 03In a famous allegory from Plato's Republic, lifelong prisoners watching shadows on a wall are chained inside what?
A cave
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.
Q 04Which legendary island makes its first known appearance in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias?
Atlantis
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.
Q 05The word philosophy comes from the ancient Greek philosophia, which literally means the love of what?
Wisdom
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.
Q 06Which Greek thinker, credited with a theorem about right-angled triangles, founded a secretive school at Croton?
Pythagoras
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.
Q 07Which Greek philosopher is said to have lived in a large ceramic jar and carried a lit lamp around Athens by day?
Diogenes
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.
Q 08Which Renaissance artist created The School of Athens, a Vatican fresco with Plato and Aristotle at its centre?
Raphael
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.
Q 09Which Roman emperor wrote the Stoic notebook now called Meditations, composing it in Greek rather than Latin?
Marcus Aurelius
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.
Q 10Besides impiety toward the gods, Socrates was convicted of corrupting which group of Athenians?
The youth
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.
Q 11In a famous paradox devised by Zeno of Elea, which swift hero of the Trojan War can never overtake a tortoise?
Achilles
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.
Q 12Which sanctuary of Apollo, home to a famous oracle, had the maxim 'Know thyself' inscribed on its temple?
Delphi
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.
Q 13What was the name of the school that Plato founded in a sacred olive grove outside the walls of Athens?
The Academy
Q 21Socrates is said to have declared at his trial that which kind of life is not worth living?
Unexamined
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.
Q 22Socrates told the jury at his trial that he was like which biting insect, sent to rouse a sluggish horse?
A gadfly
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.
Q 23Socrates compared his way of drawing out ideas to the trade of his mother, Phaenarete, who was what?
A midwife
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.
The Academy took its name from the site, a grove linked to a legendary hero called Akademos, and every academy since has borrowed it.
Q 14Which name is given to the idea in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics that each virtue lies between two opposite vices?
The golden mean
The golden mean puts courage between cowardice and rashness, though Aristotle added that rash people are generally cowards putting on a brave face.
Q 15Aristotle argued that the Earth must be which shape, pointing to the round shadow it casts on the Moon during eclipses?
A sphere
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.
Q 16Which school of ancient Greek philosophers takes its name from a word meaning dog-like?
The Cynics
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.
Q 17In the Poetics, Aristotle says that tragedy stirs pity and fear in the audience to bring about what emotional release?
Catharsis
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.
Q 18In Plato's philosophy, every horse, bed or triangle in the physical world is a mere shadow of its perfect, eternal what?
Form
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.
Q 19In Plato's Republic, a Lydian shepherd finds a ring, known as the Ring of Gyges, that grants which power?
Invisibility
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.
Q 20According to Plato's Republic, which rulers should govern the ideal city once they qualify at the age of fifty?
Philosopher-kings
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.
Q 24Which woman, remembered for a fierce temper, was married to Socrates and bore his son Lamprocles?
Xanthippe
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.
Q 25Which play by Aristophanes caricatures Socrates as the head of a school of idlers called the Thinkery?
The Clouds
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.
Q 26Socrates served Athens as a soldier in three campaigns of which long conflict, according to Plato?
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War took him to Potidaea, where he is said to have saved the life of Alcibiades, a future Athenian general.
Q 27In Plato's Phaedo, the dying Socrates asks his friend Crito to repay a debt of which animal to Asclepius?
A rooster
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.
Q 28Which work by Plato, with a Greek title meaning a speech in defence, records what Socrates said at his trial?
Apology
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.
Q 29Which soldier, author of the Anabasis about the Ten Thousand's retreat, also wrote dialogues starring Socrates?
Xenophon
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.
Q 30Which dialogue by Plato takes place at a banquet where the guests compete with speeches in praise of love?
Symposium
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.