SOCRATES (WHO DIED IN 399 BCE) posed a lot of questions. Not that he had many answers. But then people with answers don‘t need to ask questions. Indeed, Socrates believed that questioning is so important that the unexamined life is simply not worth living, a statement that Plato (Plato, Apology 38a), his student, attributes to Socrates at the trial at which he was sentenced to death. Does the fact that this sentence was handed down because Socrates was believed to be undermining authority with his questioning make Socrates a martyr for the question? Socrates was prescient enough to see that his death was likely to ensure his reputation as a ‘wise man’ for posterity: ‘because they will say I am wise even if I am not’ (Apology 38c). Even at the last, a question.

Our sense of Socrates’s questions is not beyond questioning, either. We are dependent largely on Plato’s Socrates, and no serious student is ever entirely true to his or her teacher. Yet it is clear enough that Socrates’s questions were of a different order from the questions that were usually posed in the political arena, or demos, that dominated the life of Athenian citizens such as him. Ancient Athenian democracy, participatory as it was, put a premium on rhetoric. Indeed, a great deal of shame was attached to speaking badly in the Assembly. A good rhetor, naturally, would use questions to help him win the argument, perhaps putting off his opponent with what we would still call a rhetorical question today: a ‘how would you know?’, for example. Rhetorical questions give only the appearance of dialogue, for example when the speaker poses a question which he then goes on to answer himself. Rhetorical questioning, political as it is, concerns itself above all with the surface of things.

For Socrates, this type of questioning, while undoubtedly requiring ability, has no relation to truth. For his own part, he claimed to have ‘not the slightest skill as a speaker – unless, of course, by a skilful speaker [you] mean one who speaks the truth’ (Apology 17b). There was something somewhat rhetorical in Socrates affecting not to be able to speak well. Indeed, Socrates knew that he, too, had been accused of making ‘the weaker argument stronger’, as rhetoricians prized themselves on being able to do (Apology 18c).