Gadfly and midwife
Socrates
photo: Alamy, Peter Horree
Shelley was a Socrates lover and produced an excellent translation of the Symposium while on the run in Italy with young Mary Godwin.
Every modern philosopher from Kant to Foucault read Plato’s Dialogues. But today most people see Socrates as a boring old philosopher with a beard, something like his portrayal in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Bill and Ted call him “So-crates”, to rhyme with “mates” as a sign of their poor education).
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