Socrates

A year reconstructed from a courtroom

469 BCE is a conventional reconstruction rather than a record of a birth. The ancient chronological evidence permits either 470 or 469 BCE.

Ancient biographical chronology allows that whole 470–469 BCE range, which is why the date is commonly written 470/469. The Stanford Encyclopedia cautions that much of Socrates' biographical information is disputed.

The figure is derived, not recorded: the conventional year is reconstructed partly from Socrates' claim at his trial in 399 BCE to be more than seventy.

What the sources do supply

The tradition names his parents as Sophroniscus, described as a stone-worker, and Phaenarete; Plato's Theaetetus has Socrates himself identify her as a midwife.

It also registers him precisely in civic terms: he belonged to the deme of Alopece, south-southeast of the Athens city wall, and to the tribe Antiochis. "Attica, Athens, Greece" is a modern address applied to an ancient political geography.

The infancy nobody witnessed

What is sometimes told about his first days is customary reconstruction. If Sophroniscus followed ordinary Athenian practice, the infant would have been admitted to the household around the fifth day and named around the tenth.

That sequence is an informed reconstruction of ordinary Athenian custom, not a surviving report about Socrates' infancy.

No surviving source records Socrates' exact birth day or the circumstances of the birth.