11. Many of Socrates’ Contemporaries Saw Him as a Jerk, and a Dangerous One at That
Socrates was a well-known and controversial figure in his native Athens. A gadfly, he often stopped people and asked them a series of questions that ultimately got them to contradict themselves and tied them up in logical knots – the Socratic Method. That made him unpopular with many, and comic dramatists often mocked him in their plays. He emerged in the context of a powerful Athens that bestrode the Greek world – a flourishing democracy that was the most powerful polis, or city state, of the era. Basically, the USA of the Greek world.
Socrates questioned democracy, which was music to the ears of Athens’ snobby rich young – think the equivalent of modern trust fund preppy spoiled brats who had just discovered Ayn Rand. He validated their view that privileged people like them had a natural right to lord it over the unwashed masses. One of those students, Alcibiades, went on to betray Athens and turn it upside down and inside out during the Peloponnesian War, which ended catastrophically for Athens. As seen below, that reflected badly on his teacher, Socrates.
