“Despite his insistence on the examined life,” Socrates has never been a figure the rest of us have known well, said Walter Isaacson in The New York Times. Western philosophy’s first great thinker ...

Socrates’s insistence on challenging Athenian culture might be one of Western intellectual tradition’s greatest gifts — a ...

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life Bettany Hughes Alfred A. Knopf, 528 pp., $35 Reviewed by Jonathan E. Lazarus Less than five decades after its Periclean Golden Age ...

The Hemlock Cup Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes Knopf, 528 pp., $35 In 399 b.c., in a prison cell in Athens, a man — convicted and sentenced to death a month ...

IF THE most famous philosopher of all were alive today, he might find America remarkably similar to his own Athens of the fifth century BC. Socrates would witness a vibrant and proud democracy, and ...

At the site of the Agora, the ancient city’s public square, I visit the ruins of the house of Simon the Cobbler. He also pretended to be a philosopher. By Simon Critchley Mr. Critchley is a philosophy ...

The brilliant cultural historian Hughes (Helen of Troy) has again produced an intriguing and entertaining biohistory of one of the most important individuals in the ancient world, and of the Athenian ...