Socrates thinks while sitting statue

The seated Socrates lost in thought is an iconographic invention of the Roman period, when philosopher portraits became a popular genre and the great teachers of Athens were imagined in the postures of contemplation that defined them. Socrates' method, the elenchus or refutation by questioning, required of him long stretches of seemingly motionless thought; Plato reports in the Symposium that Socrates once stood in one place from dawn until noon working out a problem, ignoring everyone who passed. The seated thinker in marble captures that quintessentially Socratic state: motionless on the outside, restless on the inside.