meno: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is teachable? Or is it not teachable, but attainable by practice? Or is it attainable neither by practice nor by learning, and do people instead acquire it by nature, or in some other way?

socrates: In the past, Meno, the Thessalians were renowned among the Greeks and admired for both horsemanship and wealth, but now, I think, they are admired for wisdom as well, and particularly the fellow-citizens of your friend Aristippus, the men of Larisa. You have Gorgias to thank for this, for since he came to that city he has made the leading Aleuadae, of whom your lover Aristippus is one, court him for his wisdom, as well as the leading people among the other Thessalians. And besides he has given you this very habit of fearlessly and magnificently answering any question anyone asks, as is only reasonable for people who have knowledge, since he himself makes himself available for any Greek who wishes to pose him any question he likes, and answers absolutely everyone.

But the situation here, my dear Meno, is quite the opposite: there has been a drought of wisdom, as it were, and in all likelihood wisdom has vanished from these parts and migrated to your people.

Plato's progress

Socrates (469–399 bc) was the first great Athenian philosopher. His pupil Plato (427/424–347 bc) was the second. Socrates, who left nothing in writing, was a charismatic but also provocative public figure on the streets of Athens, raising deep ethical questions with all and sundry, and thereby spawning both adulators and sworn enemies. The final victory of his enemies, who secured his conviction and execution at the age of 70, also marked his canonization as a philosophical guru and martyr. Over the following hundred years and more, numerous philosophers set out to resume and complete the project which Socrates was seen as having initiated. Among these, it was Plato who stood out, both as an incomparably great prose writer and as arguably the most seminal of all ancient thinkers, even if his own pupil Aristotle could compete for this latter title. Plato's philosophical writings were mainly in the form of dialogues and, unusually for an ancient Greek author, they have survived in their entirety.

Although we know Plato's dates with some precision, have good evidence that the Laws was his last work, and can group a few other dialogues near the end of his life because of their stylistic similarity to the Laws, we have no reliable indicators of date for the great majority of his works, including the Meno and Phaedo.

The first sentence of Plato's Republic recounts how Socrates went on a journey of descent – a katabasis – leaving the secure walls of Athens in order to celebrate the introduction of a new worship:

With this opening metaphor of descent – and continuing on through its central books of ascent to the final mythical katabasis and revelatory reascent (anabasis) of the Myth of Er (614b–621d) – Plato's Republic announces itself to be an original and revolutionary journey toward the truth, passing through extraordinarily mysterious terrain. This opening also suggests what the text goes on to confirm, namely, that the purpose of the Republic is to introduce a new cult outside the walls of the traditional dispensation. The divinity of this sect proves not to be a Thracian night-goddess, however, but the Reality of the Form-world, and its new worship involves not nocturnal horse races (328a), but the intellectual activity of philosophizing whose sacrificial rewards are threefold: wisdom, happiness, and the assurance of immortality.

That truth has always in some sense been a matter of justice can already be heard in the historical articulations we have inherited as the “correspondence theory of truth.” The origin of the correspondence theory has been explicitly traced to the statement from Aristotle's Metaphysics already cited in Chapter 1: “On the one hand, the false is to say [τὸ μὲν λέγειν] that what is, is not or that what is not, is; on the other hand, the true is to say that what is, is and what is not, is not, so that the one saying that it is or is not is either speaking the truth or is false.” We have already suggested that truth involves a saying that, in stretching out toward things, is capable of responding appropriately to the ways things ex-press themselves. ‘Ex-pression’ here means literally to press outward. It names the mode of presentation in which the unicity of things announces itself. Whatever else a correspondence theory of truth involves, at its core is an attuned ability to cor-respond to and with the expression of things. The etymology of the term ‘correspondence’ is instructive in this regard: ‘cor-’ is equivalent to ‘com-,’ which means “together,” and ‘respond’ is from the Latin respondēre, to answer. Correspondence describes the site of ontological encounter in which things respond together with one another.

Socrates had the amazing good fortune of having Plato, one of the great literary figures of the West, to tell his story. Xenophon the Athenian (c. 425–354 bce) is not Plato’s equal, but his substantial writings about Socrates are second only to Plato’s for our knowledge of Socrates.

A most unusual man, Xenophon was as capable of leading hard men as he was of writing subtle books. As an adolescent, he knew Socrates, who was then nearing sixty, though it isn’t clear that he was among Socrates’ more devoted companions. While still in his mid-twenties, Xenophon was thrust into the command of a desperate troop of Greek mercenaries, stranded 1,000 miles from home before the gates of Babylon. Xenophon proved to be a charismatic and successful military leader. After many adventures, he led this famous band, known as “The Ten Thousand,” back home to Greece.

Exiled from Athens because of his Spartan connections, Xenophon in later life was a striking innovator in prose literary forms. His writings about Socrates, about one-sixth of his complete works, include two shorter pieces, the Symposium and the Apology of Socrates, that appear to recast Plato’s works by the same titles. The Oeconomicus (“The Artful Estate Holder”) is a reflection on wealth and virtue, set mostly as a conversation between Socrates and a wealthy gentleman. His longest Socratic work, known as the Memorabilia (“Memoirs of Socrates”), tells of a wide variety of Socrates’ conversations and actions, with a special emphasis on the good influence Socrates had on his friends in both word and deed.s