Socrates Trivia
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50 free Socrates trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Socrates wrote nothing, and yet everyone knows how he died. This quiz covers the man behind the hemlock: his stoneworker father and midwife mother, the deme of Alopece, his war service, his famous ugliness and bare feet, Xanthippe and the water jug, the oracle at Delphi, the gadfly, the daimonion, the elenchus and the midwifery of ideas. It then follows the trial of 399 BC in detail: the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, Meletus and his fellow accusers, the 30 votes that would have acquitted him, the offer of free meals as a 'penalty', Crito's escape plan and the Laws of Athens, the Phaedo deathbed and the rooster owed to Asclepius. It finishes with the sources and the afterlife: Aristophanes's Clouds, Plato and Xenophon, Aristotle's coinage, Antisthenes and Aristippus, David's painting and Schleiermacher's attack. Easy questions suit any philosophy student; the expert tier asks for jury numbers and Greek terms. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Socrates, his trial and the Platonic dialogues, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Plato and on Greek philosophy.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which comedy has time-travelling teenagers collect Socrates for a California high-school history presentation?
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. The two slackers bundle him into their phone-booth time machine along with Napoleon and Billy the Kid, and insist on calling him 'So-crates'.
Q 02What did Socrates himself leave behind for readers?
No writings
No writings. In Plato's Phaedrus he even distrusts the written word, which he says is like a painting that stays silent when you ask it a question.
Q 03What was the trade of Socrates's father Sophroniscus?
Stoneworker
Stoneworker. An ancient tradition had Socrates learn the craft too: draped figures of the Graces at the entrance to the Acropolis were said to be his work.
Q 04In Plato's Apology, Socrates tells the jury that which kind of life is not worth living?
The unexamined life
The unexamined life. He said it after the guilty verdict, to explain why he could not simply go into exile and keep quiet: giving up his questioning would be no life at all.
Q 05Socrates's pupil Xenophon helped lead which army of Greek mercenaries home from Persia?
The Ten Thousand
The Ten Thousand. Before joining them Xenophon asked Socrates's advice and was sent to consult an oracle, but asked only which gods to sacrifice to, and Socrates scolded him for it.
Q 06What is the scholarly difficulty of reconstructing the real Socrates from contradictory sources called?
The Socratic problem
The Socratic problem. Aristophanes drew a comic crank, Xenophon a sober moralist and Plato a sly ironist, and some scholars think the real man can no longer be recovered.
Q 07Which Aristophanes comedy features a caricature of Socrates as an absurd atheist?
The Clouds
The Clouds shows Socrates dangling in a basket to study the sky. At his trial, Plato has him blame the comedy for the old prejudice against him.
Q 08In Aristophanes's play, what is the name of the school Socrates runs?
The Thinkery
The Thinkery takes in Strepsiades, an old farmer who wants to learn to argue his way out of his debts. He ends the play by setting the place on fire.
Q 09How did Aristophanes's comedy about Socrates fare at the City Dionysia of 423 BC?
It came last of three
It came last of three, behind Cratinus's Pytine and Ameipsias's Connus, another comedy that mocked Socrates. Aristophanes rewrote it, and only the revision survives.
Q 10What delayed Socrates's execution for about a month?
A sacred voyage
A sacred voyage: the city's ship was away at Delos on its yearly mission to Apollo, and no executions were allowed until it came back. Socrates spent the wait in prison talking with friends.
Q 11Alongside corrupting the youth, what was the other charge against Socrates?
Impiety
Impiety, or asebeia. In court Socrates argued the charge contradicted itself: his accuser called him a complete atheist, yet also blamed him for believing in new divine beings.
Q 12How long did the trial of Socrates last?
A day
A day. The law gave even a capital case a single day in court, and Plato has Socrates complain that with more time he could have won the jury round.
Q 13What poison did Socrates drink to carry out his sentence?
Hemlock
Hemlock. In Plato's account he drank it calmly, walked about until his legs grew heavy, then lay down while the numbness crept upward from his feet.
Q 21In the Theaetetus, Socrates compares his method to which profession?
Midwifery
Midwifery, his mother's trade. He claimed to have no wisdom of his own to deliver, only a knack for helping other people bring their ideas to birth.
Q 22What is the Greek name for the inner voice that Socrates said warned him off mistakes?
Daimonion
The daimonion only ever held him back and never urged him on. When it stayed silent all through his trial, he took that as a sign death was nothing to fear.
Q 23What was the name of Socrates's wife, mother of his son Lamprocles?
Xanthippe
Xanthippe. Later writers made her a byword for a scolding wife, yet Plato's only scene with her shows her at the prison with their child, grieving on his last day.
Q 14In Plato's account, Socrates's last words asked Crito to pay what debt to the god Asclepius?
A rooster
A rooster. The sick offered one to Asclepius, god of medicine, so scholars still argue over whether Socrates meant that death was curing him of life.
Q 15Which Plato dialogue shows Socrates discussing the immortality of the soul in the hours before his death?
Phaedo
Phaedo. Its narrator, Phaedo of Elis, lists the friends who were at the deathbed and adds that Plato himself was missing, apparently ill.
Q 16In the dialogue Crito, what does Socrates personify to argue he must not flee prison?
The Laws of Athens
The Laws of Athens. They remind him that he chose to live under them for seventy years when he could have left, and so agreed to obey even a verdict that goes against him.
Q 17Socrates's friend Chaerephon asked which oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates?
Delphi
Delphi. Socrates took the reply as a riddle and spent years cross-examining politicians, poets and craftsmen to test it, which made him many enemies.
Q 18How did the oracle answer when Chaerephon asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates?
No man was wiser
No man was wiser, came the reply. Socrates decided it could only mean that he, unlike those with a name for wisdom, knew how little he knew.
Q 19In Plato's Apology, Socrates likens himself to which creature, sent to rouse a sluggish city?
A gadfly
A gadfly. He pictured the city as a great, noble horse made slow by its own size, and warned the jury they would not easily find another to keep stinging it awake.
Q 20What is the Greek term for the Socratic method of question-and-answer refutation?
Elenchus
Elenchus. Socrates asks an expert to define a virtue, then draws out answers that contradict the definition, until the expert turns out not to know what he claimed to know.
Q 24In Plato's Symposium, which flamboyant general says Socrates saved his life in battle?
Alcibiades
Alcibiades. He says Socrates refused to leave him when he was wounded and got him out, armour and all, then pressed the generals to give the prize for valour to Alcibiades instead.
Q 25In a famous anecdote, what did Socrates's wife pour over his head?
A jug of water
A jug of water, in the oldest telling; later versions made it a chamber pot. Socrates is said to have shrugged that after so much thunder, rain was only to be expected.
Q 26Which of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims retells the story of Socrates being doused?
The Wife of Bath
The Wife of Bath. It is one of the tales of wicked wives her fifth husband loved to read aloud, until she tore a leaf from his book and he struck her deaf in one ear.
Q 27Which poet initiated the accusations against Socrates and demanded the death penalty?
Meletus
Meletus. Plato's Socrates calls him young and unknown, and says that without his two fellow accusers he would not have won even a fifth of the jury's votes.
Q 28In Plato's Apology, what surprised Socrates about the guilty verdict?
It was so close
It was so close: he had expected to lose heavily, and remarked that if only thirty jurors had voted the other way he would have walked free.
Q 29How did the jury's vote for death compare with its earlier vote to convict Socrates?
It drew more votes
It drew more votes. Diogenes Laertius says the death sentence gained eighty fresh votes, after Socrates answered the guilty verdict with a second, defiant speech.
Q 30In Plato's Apology, what does the convicted Socrates cheekily propose as his 'punishment'?
Free meals at public expense
Free meals at public expense, in the Prytaneum, an honour given to Olympic victors. He argued that a champion only makes the city feel happy, while he did it real good.