Aeschines of Sphettus

Aeschines of Sphettus (, c. 425 BC – c. 350 BC) or Aeschines Socraticus, son of Lysanias, of the deme Sphettus of Athens, was a philosopher who in his youth was a follower of Socrates. Historians call him Aeschines Socraticus—"the Socratic Aeschines"—to distinguish him from the more historically influential Athenian orator also named Aeschines. His name is sometimes but now rarely written as Aischines or Æschines. Aeschines and Socrates According to Plato, Aeschines of Sphettus was present at the trial and execution of Socrates. We know that after Socrates' death, Aeschines went on to write philosophical dialogues, just as Plato did, in which Socrates was main speaker. Though Aeschines' dialogues have survived only as fragments and quotations by later writers, he was renowned in antiquity for his accurate portrayal of Socratic conversations. According to John Burnet, Aeschines' style of presenting Socratic dialogue was closer to Plato's than Xenophon's. (Some modern scholars believe that Xenophon's writings are inspired almost entirely by Plato's and/or by the influence of other Socratics such as Antisthenes and Hermogenes. On the other hand, there is no good reason to think that Aeschines' writings were not based almost entirely on his own personal recollections of Socrates.) Socratic dialogues According to Diogenes Laërtius, Aeschines wrote seven Socratic dialogues: Alcibiades (not to be confused with either Platonic dialogue of the same name) Aspasia Axiochus (not to be confused with the dialogue of the same name erroneously included in the Platonic corpus) Callias Miltiades Rhinon Telauges Of these, we have the most information about the Alcibiades and the Aspasia, and only a little about the others. The Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia compiled a dozen centuries later, ascribes to Aeschines several other works called "headless" or "Prefaceless" (akephaloi): Phaidon, Polyainos, Drakon, Eryxias, On Excellence, The Erasistratoi, and The Skythikoi. Few modern scholars believe these other works were written by Aeschines.