[flextheruler]

It’s funny you chose Socrates for this example because I believe he isn’t confirmed to have been a real person but rather a rhetorical character created by Plato.

Might be getting this wrong or new evidence has come to light, but I remember reading that theory years ago.

[malloryerik]

Memories deceive; it happens to me and I'm guessing to everyone. Odd that Aristophanes would have written a comedy about this character whom Plato would only invent years later, and so also that Xenophon, a student of Socrates like Plato, also wrote about him. Indeed Socrates lived and breathed just like you and I do; he drank water and wine and took dumps in the morning, and especially asked questions. But your memory was correct in the sense that we can't know how similar Plato's Socrates as written in the dialogues was to the real man, and often in the middle and later works it becomes clear that Plato's Socrates has become almost entirely a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. In that sense, Plato's Socrates, especially after the early dialogues, was a indeed fictitious rendering of a real man. Most of the named characters in Plato were (largely fictitious?) renderings of real people.

Personally, I like to remind myself of the fact -- kind of meditate on it to get it into me -- that the long gone people of distant eras were indeed just as real then as you and I are now. Of course we know this consciously but I find it's easy to neglect and stop feeling. Ancient Egyptians or Song Dynasty Chinese or even 5th and 4th century BCE Athenians become flat just-so stories, and when that happens I lose touch of the deep and pregnant mystery that lives in the gulf between historical record, popular imagination, and whatever it was that the people of the past actually experienced, however they actually thought and related. When I (authentically) reconnect with that mysterious reality it lights up a sense of awe in me, and reconditions and renews my relationship with the present, myself and others. I guess, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder.

[xNeil]

From Theodore Alois Buckley's introduction to Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad:

"When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant."

[imchillyb]

Plato recounts the moments of Socrates' death in Phaedo.

I'd suggest giving that a read, and then ponder the consequence of angering the state. Your very existence may be questioned by future generations. Your motives relegated to insanity or a fiction by those who remain.