 According to Cicero, Socrates (469–399 BCE) was the first to bring philosophy down from heaven, locating it in cities and even in people’s kitchens (Tusc.V.10). A humbly born man who refused the lucrative mantle of the sophistic professional teacher, yet attracted many of the most ambitious and aristocratic youth of Athens to accompany him in his questioning of them and their elders as to the nature of the virtues they claimed to possess or understand, he left no philosophical writings. We know him only through the surviving testimony of others, first the lampoons in Aristophanes’ comic plays, and above all the “Socratic” dialogues written by his student Plato and his associate Xenophon (dialogues by others are known only by titles or fragments), and the remarks of Plato’s student Aristotle, as well as other sources from after or even long after his death (for a collection, see Giannantoni 1990, and see the entry on  Socrates).