Socrates

The man the cave story is quietly about. He wrote nothing; he stood in the market and questioned, on the conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living — and Athens tried him for corrupting the young and impiety, and he drank the hemlock in 399 BCE rather than flee. When Plato has the prisoners threaten to kill whoever tries to free them (Republic 517a), the fiction is autobiography: he watched his teacher return to the cave, and he watched the cave win. Every later tradition of the freed one who goes back down — including the tzaddik who descends for the sparks — walks past this grave.