Socrates Memes Explained: Corrupting the Youth, the Hemlock and David’s Death of Socrates

Last updated: November 3, 2026

Socrates memes tend to return to two scenes from 399 BC: the trial in which Athens charged him with corrupting the young, and the cup of poison he drank in prison afterwards. In Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Apology, the indictment calls Socrates “a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth”, a man who does not believe in the gods of the state and brings in new divinities of his own. Plato’s Phaedo tells the story of his death, while admitting in passing that Plato himself was ill that day and absent. The two memes in this post, an awkward office hug and a set of speech bubbles pasted onto Jacques-Louis David’s painting, are riffs on those two texts.

The office meme takes the first charge literally. A young man in a blue shirt and tie, labelled “The youth of Athens”, stares at the floor with the expression of someone counting the seconds. Behind him a grinning older woman in a red blouse and cream sweater vest, labelled “Socrates”, has her arm draped round his shoulders. The joke works because “corrupting the youth” sounds like a euphemism for something worse. The actual charge was about religion and about what he taught young men to do.

Three Charges and a Man From Pitthos

Socrates was prosecuted in 399 BC for impiety: not recognising the city’s gods, introducing new divinities and corrupting the young, with death as the requested penalty.

The prosecutor was Meletus, backed by Anytus and Lycon. Plato’s Apology paraphrases the charge through Socrates’ own mouth, but a more official-sounding version survives too. Diogenes Laërtius, writing some six centuries later, claims to quote the sworn affidavit, which, according to Favorinus, was still kept in the Athenian archive in the Metroön: “This indictment and affidavit is sworn by Meletus”, son of Meletus of Pitthos, and it ends flatly: “The penalty demanded is death.” (II.40). Whether Diogenes really copied a document or copied someone who said they had is impossible to check. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy connects the “new divinities” charge to Socrates’ daimonion, the inner voice he said had warned him since childhood.

A jury of ordinary Athenian citizens found him guilty, and after Socrates provocatively proposed free meals in the Prytaneum as his “punishment” and only then offered a fine (“Let thirty minæ be the penalty”, guaranteed by Plato, Crito and other friends), sentenced him to death. Why a democracy did that, and how far the charges were cover for a grudge about his association with the oligarchs who had briefly seized Athens, is a longer and more political story, told in our post Did Democracy Kill Socrates? For the memes, the question that matters is what “corrupting” was supposed to mean.

Corrupting the Youth Meant Teaching Them to Ask Questions

On Plato’s account, Socrates “corrupted” young Athenians by showing them how to cross-examine their elders, who then blamed him for the embarrassment.

The Apology is surprisingly specific. Socrates tells the jury that “young men of the richer classes”, who had time on their hands, followed him around and enjoyed watching him question people who claimed to be wise. Then they started doing it themselves: they “often imitate me, and proceed to examine others”. The people they embarrassed blamed the teacher and called him “this villainous misleader of youth”, reaching for the stock accusations made against all philosophers, studying things in the clouds and making the weaker argument the stronger. The SEP’s summary is almost comic in its restraint: Athenian youths imitated Socrates’ questioning style, “much to the annoyance of some of their elders”.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls this cross-examination the elenchus: Socrates asks for a definition, draws out what else the speaker believes, and lets the contradictions surface. In the Euthyphro, a man prosecuting his own father for murder offers several definitions of piety, and none of them survives. Socratic dialogue memes copy that rhythm of small, polite questions ending in collapse, and our post on the Socratic method as an ideal dialogue explains how it actually works.

Socrates also blames a comedy. In the Apology he tells the jurors they had all seen the Socrates of Aristophanes, a man who claims to walk on air and spout nonsense. Aristophanes’ Clouds, staged in 423 BC, a generation before the trial, showed a Socrates running a school of natural science and slippery argument where students learn to dodge debts and justify beating their parents, as the SEP describes it. Socrates claims most of his jurors absorbed that picture as children. Plato’s Socrates treats the play, staged decades before Meletus filed anything, as evidence against him.

What the Office Meme Gets Wrong (and Right)

The meme’s sexual reading misses the charge, which was about religion and moral influence, and it inverts a well-known story about Socrates and a beautiful young man.

Standard translations, Jowett’s included, render the charge as “corrupts the youth”, which is closer to “ruining” or “leading astray” than to anything romantic. The Symposium has a better twist. There, Alcibiades, a rich and celebrated young aristocrat, describes trying to seduce Socrates and failing completely; the SEP notes that Socrates refused to sleep with him.

The meme does get one thing right: the discomfort. Being “corrupted” by Socrates meant being publicly shown that you did not understand the words you used every day, such as courage, piety or justice, and many of his conversation partners look about as happy as the young man in the blue shirt. That kind of embarrassment, repeated across the agora, is what the jurors heard in the word “corrupts”.

The Students Who Made the Charge Stick

There is a darker reason why “corrupting the youth” may have convinced a jury, and Plato’s Apology never mentions it. Two of the young men most closely associated with Socrates became notorious. Alcibiades, the brilliant aristocrat of the Symposium, was accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, defected to Sparta during the war and later fled to Persia. Critias, another member of Socrates’ circle, became a leader of the Thirty, the oligarchic junta that ruled Athens by terror in 404 and 403 BC and killed hundreds of citizens.

An amnesty after the restoration of democracy forbade prosecutions for what had happened under the Thirty, which may be why the indictment speaks vaguely of corrupting the young rather than naming anyone. But Athenians remembered. Half a century later, the orator Aeschines reminded a jury that Athens had put “Socrates the sophist” to death because he was shown to have educated Critias. Xenophon, in his Memorabilia, felt obliged to answer exactly this accusation, arguing that Critias and Alcibiades behaved well while they kept company with Socrates and went wrong only after they left him.

None of this proves that Socrates taught tyranny. His recorded conversations push in the opposite direction, and under the Thirty he refused an order to arrest an innocent man, Leon of Salamis, at real risk to himself. But it explains why the charge was not absurd to the people who voted on it. When the memes treat “corrupting the youth” as a strange euphemism, they miss that for many jurors it had two names and a body count.

Why Socrates Became the Internet’s Favourite Philosopher

Search engines know something the history books rarely say out loud: Socrates is the most memed philosopher of all. People who would never open the Apology search for Socrates memes by the thousands, and they usually want to know two things. What is the joke, and why him of all people? The answer has less to do with the internet than with the way Plato wrote.

First, Socrates comes pre-formatted. Plato’s dialogues are scripts, with a name, a colon and a line of speech, which is exactly the shape of a meme or a text post. The so-called Socratic dialogue meme copies it directly. “Socrates: Would you agree that a thing is either X or not X? Random Athenian: Of course, Socrates. Socrates: And would you also agree that…” Three exchanges later the Athenian has conceded something absurd, or found that he cannot define a word he uses every day, and the last panel is usually just “wait”. It is a fair parody of the elenchus, the cross-examination described in the next sections, compressed to the length of a phone screen.

Second, there is the yes-man problem, which readers noticed long before the internet. In the long middle stretches of the Republic, Socrates’ partners Glaucon and Adeimantus mostly answer with variations of “certainly”, “of course” and “how could it be otherwise?”. Classicists debate how seriously to take this, since the agreement often follows real argument earlier in the conversation. The memes do not debate it. They show a smug Socrates surrounded by nodding companions, and the joke is that Plato, who wrote both parts, made his hero win every argument against opponents he scripted himself. We look at that criticism in The Socratic Method Explained.

Third, there is the death. A man executed by his own city for asking too many questions is an irresistible character, and every generation has made him its own: a martyr for the Enlightenment, a symbol of free speech, a stubborn old man who would not take the hint. Popular culture added its own versions. In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) two time-travelling teenagers pronounce his name “So-crates” and take him to a shopping mall, and a much repeated joke about his last words, “I drank what?”, is usually credited to the 1985 comedy Real Genius. The two memes in this post belong to this tradition. One misreads the charge, the other rewrites the death scene, and both assume you know enough about the original to get the joke.

And finally there is the look. Socrates is the rare ancient philosopher whose face people recognise, thanks to Roman copies of Greek portrait busts showing a snub nose, a bald head and a beard, close to how Plato and Xenophon describe him: famously ugly, often compared to a satyr. A face that recognisable is a gift to meme makers. The stickers and shirts in the slider below borrow it for the same reason.

The Gadfly Who Asked for a Free Dinner

If the memes make Socrates look smug, the Apology gives them some support. Asked to defend himself, he did not plead. He described himself as a gadfly that the god had attached to the city, which he compared to a large, well-bred horse made sluggish by its size and in need of being stung awake. Kill me, he warned the jurors, and you will not easily find another, and you will sleep through the rest of your lives unless the god sends you someone else.

Then came the counter-proposal. Athenian procedure let a convicted defendant suggest an alternative penalty, and the sensible move was exile. Socrates proposed instead that, as a benefactor of the city, he should receive free meals in the Prytaneum, an honour reserved for Olympic victors and public heroes. Only after that did he mention a fine. It is hard to read the scene without thinking that he was, in the language of the memes, trolling the jury. It is also hard to miss the seriousness underneath. In the same speech he tells them that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, and that he would rather die than give up philosophy. Whether that is admirable integrity or a fatal failure to read the room is still argued, and it is the subject of Did Democracy Kill Socrates?.

A Cup of Poison and a Debt to Asclepius

Plato’s Phaedo describes Socrates spending his last day arguing about the immortality of the soul, then drinking the poison calmly in his cell.

The execution was delayed because the sacred ship to Delos had been crowned for its voyage the day before the trial, and Athens carried out no public executions until it returned. Plato tells the story through Phaedo, an eyewitness, who lists the friends present and adds, “Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill” (59b). So the classic account of Socrates’ death comes from someone who, by his own text, was not there. Early in the day Socrates has his wife Xanthippe, distraught and holding their child, taken home. At the end, in Jowett’s version, the jailer arrives carrying “a cup of poison” and tells Socrates to “walk about until your legs are heavy”, then lie down. Socrates asks whether he may pour a libation from the cup, drinks, and feels the cold rise from his feet. His last words ask a friend to settle a religious debt: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius”. Phaedo closes by calling him the wisest, justest and best man he had known.

Was it hemlock? Plato never names the plant; he only calls it the drug, to pharmakon. The identification is ancient all the same: Diogenes Laërtius writes that Socrates “drank the hemlock” (II.42), and the SEP names the Conium maculatum variety used for citizen executions. Scholars have argued about whether Plato prettified the death. Christopher Gill (1973) and others claimed hemlock would produce a much more violent end, while Enid Bloch, in a 2001 study, argued that poison hemlock causes a creeping paralysis that matches Plato’s description detail by detail. The quiet death of the memes may be accurate after all, though the debate is not fully closed.

David Put Plato in the Room

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turned the Phaedo into the image many Socrates memes borrow.

In the Met’s audio guide, Katharine Baetjer describes one of his arms pointing toward the heavens while the other reaches for the cup, mid-argument, and followers expressing all the stages of grief. Two deliberate liberties stand out. The Met notes that Socrates was reported to be old and ugly, while David gives him the noble body of a distinguished middle-aged man. And the museum identifies the figure at the foot of the bed as Plato, the author whose Phaedo preserved the story, even though that same text says Plato was absent. David was painting a philosophical ideal, and the person who wrote it down got an honorary seat.

A popular Socrates meme pastes speech bubbles onto exactly this scene. Socrates, cup in hand, proposes: “How’s this… instead of just thinking about stuff, why don’t we think about thinking about stuff?” A grieving follower answers that this is freakin’ genius (the original is less polite), and the man at the bedside warns that they are going to need a lot more scrolls. It is a good joke about epistemology, the study of knowledge, though the history needs one correction. Questions about knowledge predate Socrates: the SEP credits the poet-philosopher Xenophanes, active around 540 BC, with “pioneering reflections on the conditions of knowledge”. A whole dialogue devoted to defining knowledge comes later, Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates tests three definitions and rejects all of them.

“I Know That I Know Nothing” Is a Later Compression

The line on so many Socrates memes condenses a more careful sentence from the Apology, and Plato never writes it in that form.

After the oracle at Delphi declared that no one was wiser than Socrates, he went looking for someone wiser and found a politician who thought he knew things he did not. Socrates concluded that he had a small advantage, since “I neither know nor think that I know” (21d). The punchier version comes from later writers. Diogenes Laërtius, for example, says Socrates “knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance” (II.32). The difference matters to philosophers, because “I know that I know nothing” contradicts itself, while Plato’s Socrates mostly avoids the trap. Where the slogan comes from, and what Socrates thought real knowledge would require, is the subject of our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge.

The Calm Was Real, and Xenophon Has a Theory

The memes’ unbothered Socrates, chatting while he reaches for the poison, fits the ancient sources, and Xenophon offers a more prosaic reason for it.

Xenophon, another student who wrote about Socrates, published his own Apology and complained that earlier writers had missed the key point: Socrates had come to regard “death as for himself preferable to life”. Past seventy (Plato’s Socrates tells the jury he is “more than seventy years of age”), Xenophon’s Socrates expects worse eyesight, duller hearing and a slower mind, and sees no reason to beg a jury to keep him alive for that. On this reading, the defiant tone at the trial was partly a choice to stop negotiating. Xenophon also preserves one of the best exchanges of the whole affair. A devoted follower, Apollodorus, says the hardest thing is to see him put to death unjustly. Socrates, smiling, asks whether he would rather see him put to death justly.

That disagreement has a name. Scholars call it the Socratic problem: if we only know Socrates through others, which portrait is closest to the man? Aristophanes gives us a comic charlatan running a school for sophistry. Xenophon gives us a pious, practical adviser who talks a lot about household management and good sense. Plato gives us the incomparable questioner of the early dialogues and, later, a mouthpiece for Plato’s own theories about Forms and the immortal soul.

The classicist Gregory Vlastos argued in Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991) that we can separate a historical Socrates, the questioner of the early dialogues who claims to know nothing, from the confident system builder of Plato’s middle works. Many scholars accept something like this division; others think it imposes more order on the texts than they contain. For the memes, the practical upshot is simple. The Socrates of “I know nothing” and the cross-examination is mostly the early Plato’s; the Socrates who explains the soul on his deathbed is Plato’s Phaedo; the Socrates who argued that death is better than old age is Xenophon’s. The internet happily mixes all three, which, given how much the sources contradict each other, is not the worst way to remember him.

Socrates wrote nothing himself (SEP), so every scene on these memes passes through Plato, Xenophon or, since 1787, a painter in Paris, and the three do not always agree.

Socrates spent a lot of his corrupting asking people what their words meant, which is the subject of our post on Socrates and definitions.