During the last years of the Peloponnesian War, a strange figure might have been seen in Athens: a short, ugly, odd-looking man, poorly-clad and utterly indifferent to criticism of his habits or appearance, but a man to whom every one listened when he began to speak. This was Socrates, the Greek philosopher.
His father was a stone-cutter and a poor man, but he seems to have given to his son the best education that was to be had in Athens, for Socrates often quoted from Greek literature, especially from Homer, and he speaks of having studied with his friends "the treasures which the wise men of old have left us in their books."
Very little is known of the early life of Socrates, but he passed his youth and early manhood during the greatest years of Athenian history. He was born ten years after the Persian had been defeated at Plataea and driven out of Greece; as a boy, he had seen the Long Walls being built; he had grown up in the Athens of Pericles, a contemporary of Sophocles, and Euripides, of Pheidias and of Thucydides. When the clouds gathered over Athens and war came, he served in the army as a common soldier; he had lived through the short-lived triumphs and the tragic disasters which befell the city; he had been hungry when food was scarce, he had seen Athens besieged and taken; he had watched the Long Walls destroyed, and he had lived through the Terror when the Thirty ruled Athens. It was a life lived in very stirring times, and Socrates had taken his share in the happenings. During the war, he served in one of the northern campaigns, and he amazed everyone by his extraordinary power of enduring hunger and thirst, and all the hardships of a cold Thracian winter. One of his friends says of this time that
his fortitude in enduring cold was surprising. There was a severe frost, for the winter in that region is really tremendous, and everybody else either remained indoors, or if they went out had on an amazing quantity of clothes, and were well shod, and had their feet swathed in felt and fleeces: in the midst of this, Socrates with his bare feet on the ice and in his ordinary dress marched better than the other soldiers who had shoes, and they looked daggers at him because he seemed to despise them. Another tale of what he did on this expedition is worth hearing. One morning, he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon—there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him and the remark ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this was not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning, and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the Sun and went his way.[[3]]
At the close of the war Socrates was in Athens, a man now of over sixty years of age. He held one or two offices of state, when he was known for his fearless refusal to do what he thought was wrong. On one occasion he refused to obey orders that were given him, because he believed that obedience would involve him in doing what he thought to be wrong. "I showed," he said, "not by mere words but by my actions, that I did not care a straw for death: but that I did care very much indeed about doing wrong."
Socrates was very poor and as he would take no money for his teaching, his means of livelihood were very scanty. He went about barefoot and had only one cloak which he wore until it was so old that it became a matter of joke amongst his friends. He not only had no luxuries of any kind, but hardly the bare necessities of life, yet he was quite content and used to say: "How many things there are which I do not want." Socrates married Xanthippe, a woman of a most violent temper. He used to say that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; and "as they," said he, "when they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I, after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with anyone else whatever."[[4]]
The Athenians had always been intellectually very alert and had tried to solve all kinds of problems. They asked how it was that things came into being, how they continued to exist, of what they were made and similar questions. But when Athens had become an Empire and ruled over many men and states, the questions began to change. People were less interested in how things originated, than in questions arising from their daily experience. They asked, what is a state, what is a citizen, what is justice, what is temperance, courage, cowardice and so on. In order to answer these questions, a body of teachers had arisen in Athens who were called Sophists, or Wise Men. They taught every kind of subject and established a number of schools. The older Greek teachers did not like these Sophists, partly because they took money for their teaching, and hitherto, though Athenian philosophers had accepted presents, they had never charged definite fees; partly because they taught so many subjects that it was thought they could teach nothing thoroughly; partly because they seemed to aim at teaching young men to argue in order to get the better of their opponents rather than to seek for Truth; and above all, because they were often sceptical as to the existence of the gods. There were some very good teachers amongst the Sophists, and they opened up a great many new fields of thought to the Athenians, but a weak side to their teaching was that they only stated general principles, and often asserted as absolute facts things that never had been definitely proved one way or the other. They used words carelessly without stopping to think of their real meaning, and they never suggested that there was anything they did not know.
Socrates saw that though the teaching of the Sophists might increase information it was fatal to real thinking, and he began to teach in Athens in order to show what real thinking was. He taught in no school, had no classes and took no pay. He was willing to talk to any and everyone who would listen to him. He ever
lived in the public eye; at early morning he was to be seen betaking himself to one of the promenades or wrestling grounds; at noon he would appear with the gathering crowds in the market-place; and as day declined, wherever the largest throng might be encountered, there was he to be found, talking for the most part, while anyone who chose might stop and listen.[[5]]
Socrates talked to and questioned everyone and tried to show people what real knowledge was. He was filled with a passionate belief in the importance of truth above all things. He said that to make inaccurate statements and to use words with a wrong or careless meaning was "not only a fault in itself, it also created an evil in the soul." He showed those who listened to him the evil that came from pretending to know what one did not know, and the first step in his teaching was to make them realize their ignorance. To this end he questioned and cross-examined them, until they contradicted themselves, or found no answer and generally ended in hopeless difficulties, simply because they would not acknowledge at the beginning that they did not know what he had asked. One of his friends once said: "Indeed, Socrates, I no longer believe in my answers; everything seems to me to be different from what it used to seem," and another speaking of him said: "Socrates makes me acknowledge my own worthlessness. I had best be silent for it seems that I know nothing at all."