Athens

This is still a city in Greece. However, at the time that the dialogs take place, the region now known as the nation of Greece was internally governed by independently run cities commonly known as city-states. These were centered in constitutions that included extensive voting rights amongst citizens.

The city-state had a prosperous economy and was often the dominant city-state of the Grecian region. Her main competitor was the city-state of Sparta. The city-states would unite for the purposes of facing larger external enemies or other threats to the Greek way of life.

The people of the time were generally polytheistic pagans. During the era of Socrates, there had been a few philosophers who wrote of an underlying or overarching unity in the cosmos but the main one that survives is called Parmenides who claimed that everything is made up of water.

Greece

There has been thousands...