So. Socrates.

Today we went over our notes for our test tomorrow. And then we went more in depth about Socrates and what happened in his life. We learned that as a young man, he worked as a stonemason, and he also fought heroically in the Peloponnesian War. His working class backgrounds and battlefield experiences may have shaped the way he viewed the world. We learned he was a tough guy, he became a teacher at a time in his life: he met with young students just outside the agora.

He had some controversy though. Athens was a great city which attracted brilliant thinkers, visitors from all over the world shared their knowledge of science, and things like medicine, literature, and philosophy. This however was often at odds with traditional teachings which centered around the Greek gods, which got young people thinking and questioning.
He was charged with two crimes: corruption of Athens youth, and impiety (not believing in the gods of the state.)
His defense was this: "It's my job to be gadfly to the lazy, sluggish horse that is Athens." "I should actually be rewarded with free dinners for life."
A jury of 500 male citizens found him guilty. His death was hard for almost everyone, and they allowed him the chance to be free, but he refused, in order to prove his respect and loyalty to Athenian democracy. He had the mindset that he was getting punished by his people and wasn't going to "run away" from it, but take the punishment heroically. His cause of death was having to drink a cup of poison hemlock.

We went into more detail about the Socratic Method too. Basically, you ask a series of questions to determine someones underlying beliefs and how much they know. He thought you should have reasoning, deeper meaning, and look further into things. This led to the Scientific Method.

Socrates summed pretty much everything that we learned up: The unexamined life is not worth living.