[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]
[Picture: Of] the men who sought after God in the darkness, "if haply
they might feel after Him," none had come so near the truth as Socrates,
a sculptor by trade, and yet a great philosopher, and, so far as we can
see, the wisest and best man who ever grew up without any guide but
nature and conscience. Even the oracle at Delphi declared that he was
the wisest of men, because he did not fancy he knew what he did not know,
and did not profess to have any wisdom of his own. It was quite
true--all his thinking had only made him quite sure that he knew nothing;
but he was also sure that he had an inward voice within him, telling him
which was the way in which he should walk. He did not think much about
the wild tales of the Greek gods and goddesses; he seems to have
considered them as fancies that had grown up on some forgotten truth, and
he said a healthy mind would not dwell upon them; but he was quite sure
that above all these there was one really true Most High God, who
governed the world, rewarded the good, punished the bad, and sent him the
inward voice, which he tried to obey to the utmost of his power, and by
so doing, no doubt, his inward sight grew clearer and clearer. Even in
his home his gentleness and patience were noted, so that when his
scolding wife Xantippe, after railing at him sharply, threw some water at
his head, he only smiled, and said, "After thunder follows rain." He did
not open a school under a portico, but, as he did his work, all the
choicest spirits of Greece resorted to him to argue out these questions
in search of truth; and many accounts of these conversations have been
preserved to us by his two best pupils, Plato and Xenophon.
[Picture: Socrates] But in the latter days of the Peloponnesian war, when
the Athenians were full of bitterness, and had no great deeds to
undertake outside their city, a foolish set of arguing pretenders to
philosophy arose, who were called the Sophists, and who spent their time
in mere empty talk, often against the gods; and the great Socrates was
mixed up in people's fancy with them. A comic writer arose, named
Aristophanes, who, seeing the Athenians fallen from the greatness of
their fathers, tried to laugh them into shame at themselves. He
particularly disliked Euripides, because his tragedies seemed, like the
Sophists, not to respect the gods; and he also more justly hated
Alkibiades for his overbearing ways, and his want of all real respect for
gods or men. It was very hard on Socrates that the faults of his pupils
should be charged against him; but Aristophanes had set all Athens
laughing by a comedy called "The Clouds," in which a good-for-nothing
young man, evidently meant for Alkibiades, gets his father into debt by
buying horses, and, under the teaching of Socrates, learns both to cheat
his creditors and to treat respect for his father as a worn-out notion.
The beauty and the lisp of Alkibiades were imitated so as to make it
quite plain who was meant by the youth; and Socrates himself was
evidently represented by an actor in a hideous comic mask, caricaturing
the philosopher's snub nose and ugly features. The play ended by the
young man's father threatening to burn down the house of Socrates, with
him in it. This had been written twenty years before, but it had been
acted and admired again and again, together with the other comedies of
Aristophanes--one about a colony of birds who try to build a city in the
air, and of whom the chorus was composed; and another, called "The
Frogs," still more droll, and all full of attacks on the Sophists.
Thus the Athenians had a general notion that Socrates was a corrupter of
youth and a despiser of the gods, for in truth some forms of worship,
like the orgies of Bacchus, and other still worse rites which had been
brought in from the East, were such that no good man could approve them.
One of the thirty tyrants had at one time been a pupil of his, and this
added to the ill-feeling against him; and while Xenophon was still away
in Asia, in the year 399, the philosopher was brought to trial on three
points, namely, that he did not believe in the gods of Athens, that he
brought in new gods, and that he misled young men; and for this his
accusers demanded that he should be put to death.
Socrates pleaded his own cause before the council of the Areopagus. He
flatly denied unbelief in the gods of his fathers, but he defended his
belief in his genius or in-dwelling voice, and said that in this he was
only like those who drew auguries from the notes of birds, thunder, and
the like; and as for his guidance of young men, he called on his accusers
to show whether he had ever led any man from virtue to vice. One of them
answered that he knew those who obeyed and followed Socrates more than
their own parents; to which he replied that such things sometimes
happened in other matters--men consulted physicians about their health
rather than their fathers, and obeyed their generals in war, not their
fathers; and so in learning, they might follow him rather than their
fathers. "Because I am thought to have some power of teaching youth, O
my judges!" he ended, "is that a reason why I should suffer death? My
accusers may procure that judgment, but hurt me they cannot. To fear
death is to seem wise without being so, for it is pretending to
understand what we know not. No man knows what death is, or whether it
be not our greatest happiness; yet all fear and shun it."
His pupil Plato stood up on the platform to defend him, and began, "O ye
Athenians, I am the youngest man who ever went up in this place--"
"No, no," they cried, with one voice; "the youngest who ever went down!"
They would not hear a word from him; and 280 voices sentenced the great
philosopher [Picture: Plato] to die, after the Athenian fashion, by being
poisoned with hemlock. He disdained to plead for a lessening of the
penalty; but it could not be carried out at once, because a ship had just
been sent to Delos with offerings, and for the thirty days while this was
gone no one could be put to death. Socrates therefore was kept in
prison, with chains upon his ankles; but all his friends were able to
come and visit him, and one of them, named Krito, hoped to have contrived
his escape by bribing the jailer, but he refused to make anyone guilty of
a breach of the laws for the sake of a life which must be near its close,
for he was not far from seventy years old; and when one of his friends
began to weep at the thought of his dying innocent, "What!" he said,
"would you think it better for me to die guilty?"
When the ship had come back, and the time was come, he called all his
friends together for a cheerful feast, during which he discoursed to them
as usual. All the words that fell from him were carefully stored up, and
recorded by Plato in a dialogue, which is one of the most valuable things
that have come down to us from Greek times. It was not Socrates, said
the philosopher, whom they would lay in the grave. Socrates' better
part, and true self, would be elsewhere; and all of them felt sure that
in that unknown world, as they told him, it must fare well with one like
him. He begged them, for their own sakes, never to forget the lessons he
had taught them; and when the time had come, he drank the hemlock as if
it had been a cup of wine: he then walked up and down the room for a
little while, bade his pupils remember that this was the real deliverance
from all disease and impurity, and then, as the fatal sleep benumbed him,
he lay down, bidding Krito not forget a vow he had made to one of the
gods; and so he slept into death. "Thus," said Plato, "died the man who,
of all with whom we were acquainted, was in death the noblest, in life
the wisest and the best."
Plato himself carried on much of the teaching of his master, and became
the founder of a sect of philosophy which taught that, come what may,
virtue is that which should, above all, be sought for as making man
noblest, and that no pain, loss, or grief should be shunned for virtue's
sake. His followers were called Stoics, from their fashion of teaching
in the porticos or porches, which in Greek were named _stoai_. Their
great opponents were the Epicureans, or followers of a philosopher by
name Epicurus, who held that as man's life is short, and as he knew not
whence he came, nor whither he went, he had better make himself as happy
as possible, and care for nothing else. Epicurus, indeed, declared that
only virtue did make men happy; but there was nothing in his teaching to
make them do anything but what pleased themselves, so his philosophy did
harm, while that of the Stoics did good. A few Pythagoreans, who
believed in the harmony of the universe, still remained; but as long as
the world remained in darkness, thinking men were generally either Stoics
or Epicureans.
[Picture: View]