DeBlasio, Alyssa, and Victoria Juharyan. Introduction: Socrates in Russia. In Socrates in Russia, edited by Alyssa DeBlasio and Victoria Juharyan, 1-16. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

For more information on the published version, visit Brill's Website. https://brill.com/display/title/61348?rskey=GOZl3f&result=1

Alyssa DeBlasio is a professor of Russian at Dickinson College.

Socrates has captured the imagination of artists, philosophers, and writers for well over two thousand years. There is little concrete biographical evidence on the Socrates of history, and what we do know has been cobbled together from sources by those who knew him, or from the autobiographical declarations he is said to have made at his own trial and which went uncontested by his accusers. The son of Sophroniscus, probably a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife, Socrates was a citizen of Athens from the deme of Alopece. He did not take part in politics and rarely ventured outside the city walls, except while on military service during the Peloponnesian War. He associated with Euripides, who was about fifteen years his senior, and had many of his own students, including Plato, though he never taught for fees. Socrates was married, fathered three sons (all after the age of fifty), and died in poverty. According to both Plato and Xenophon, he was guided by a divine voice, his daimonion, though Plato's Socrates lived by the maxim that he knew only that he knew nothing, while Xenophon's Socrates openly acknowledged himself as an expert.