How much is known about Socrates? Is Plato's work the best we've got...

How much is known about Socrates? Is Plato's work the best we've got, including other Greeks that have written on the topic of Socrates? Was Socrates portrayal faithful to what is known of him or did Plato just use him as a character to forward his ideas as time went on?

Plato never existed

???

I've thought about that too.

How do we know the neoplatonics or medieval monks didn't just write under the name of Plato/Aristoteles for credibility?

...

What if the Greeks never existed?

What if the blacks were actually Kangz?

> Plato never existed

Socrates never existed

He did, but there's very little we have about him.

He was as ugly as Silenus.

Some scholars put forward the idea that Plato's depiction of Socrates is actually very little like how he was, and Xenophon is actually closer to what the average Socratic pupil was like, ergo what Socrates was like.

I mean, Aristophanes, a contemporary of Socrates, literally wrote a play satirizing him.

You fool, here's a REAL redpill:

Plato and Socrates both existed, but Aristotle is entirely fabricated, created initially by Alexander, then expounded upon by Roman thinkers using his name to give legitimacy to their ideas, then finally by Persian thinkers.

>reading Plato

pleb detected

That's more plausible than Plato never having existed.
What does Veeky Forums think of Aesop? Was he a real person or just a pen name to be slapped onto every Mycaenean/Archaic Period folk tale around?

>Aristotle is entirely fabricated

From what I've read and heard, we know from things like judiciary reports and tax records that he did indeed exist, but everything we know about him as a person is from Plato.

My argument against Plato's character of Socrates has always been that if Socrates died when Plato was barely out of childhood, there is no way that Plato can be considered a trustworthy witness to the life of a man who basically acted as a father towards him.

Why did Socrates look like a nigger?

Genetics, I suppose?

Schleiermacher's argument is that Xenophon's Socrates is too boring and unchallenging to have left the mark that he did on thinkers like Plato and that the conception of Xenophon's Socrates as more historically accurate isn't likely. From what I can tell it seems as though Socrates really focused on conduct and constant pursuit of the true, virtuous, and good; objective bettering of the soul. The theory of forms seems like an extension of his general method of thinking, but I would bet that the bulk of the theory comes from Plato himself.

>not reading Plato

Unenlightened layman detected

Aristophanes may have chosen Socrates based upon how ugly he was and how easy it was to make a theater mask for his face. The Socrates of the Clouds seems to be mostly interested with natural philosophy, something no one else wrote of him particularly pursuing. So the character maybe a confused mixture of Rhetoricians, Sophists, natural philosophers, and mathematicians written from the outside perspective of a playwright broadly satirizing intellectualism

>Was he a real person or just a pen name to be slapped onto every

Probably, all of his stories seem like an assortment of folktales/sayings. He may have compiled them though. Homer is definitely not one person or even was a person

Ancient Greece never existed. The entire tradition was made up by the Romans

Romans also never existed and were made up during the Renaissance.

This. Reading Xenophon is really good. Socrates was even in the Anabasis.

Did you actually read that post?

Xenophon is largely shit, especially his work about Socrates. His only ok work is the Anabasis, like you mentioned, but Herodotus and Thucydides are much more interesting as ancient historical accounts.

The Renaissance also didn't happen and was made up by anti-modernists to show how decadent modernism is.