What did Socrates think about human nature?

True to his teaching that "an unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 36a), Socrates spent most of his days examining the real reasons, or motivation, behind his human acts . His final act, in fact, epitomized what he was all about: Falsely sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and not believing in the ancestral gods (Apology, 17-42), Socrates, rather than suffer exile from the Athens he loved so much, willingly and with his own hand ended his life with a drink of deadly hemlock. Plato and Xenophon, Socrates' main biographers, paint his vocation, or calling in life, as an ardent desire to help people to live life to the fullest; that is, to live in conformity with their human nature (Phaedo, 63c).

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