We may notice in this doctrine of Sokratês the same imperfection as that which is involved in the ethical doctrine; a disposition to make the intellectual conditions of political fitness stand for the whole. His negative political doctrine is not to be mistaken: he approved neither of democracy, nor of oligarchy. As he was not attached, either by sentiment or by conviction, to the constitution of Athens, so neither had he the least sympathy with oligarchical usurpers, such as the Four Hundred and the Thirty. His positive ideal state, as far as we can divine it, would have been something like that which is worked out in the “Cyropædia” of Xenophon.
In describing the persevering activity of Sokratês, as a religious and intellectual missionary, we have really described his life; for he had no other occupation than this continual intercourse with the Athenian public; his indiscriminate conversation, and invincible dialectics. Discharging faithfully and bravely his duties as an hoplite on military service,—but keeping aloof from official duty in the dikastery, the public assembly, or the senate-house, except in that one memorable year of the battle of Arginusæ,—he incurred none of those party animosities which an active public life at Athens often provoked. His life was legally blameless, nor had he ever been brought up before the dikastery until his one final trial, when he was seventy years of age. That he stood conspicuous before the public eye in 423 B.C., at the time when the “Clouds” of Aristophanês were brought on the stage, is certain: he may have been, and probably was, conspicuous even earlier: so that we can hardly allow him less than thirty years of public, notorious, and efficacious discoursing, down to his trial in 399 B.C.
It was in that year that Melêtus, seconded by two auxiliaries, Anytus and Lykon, presented against him, and hung up in the appointed place, the portico before the office of the second or king-archon, an indictment against him in the following terms: “Sokratês is guilty of crime: first, for not worshipping the gods whom the city worships, but introducing new divinities of his own; next, for corrupting the youth. The penalty due is—death.”
It is certain that neither the conduct nor the conversation of Sokratês had undergone any alteration for many years past; since the sameness of his manner of talking is both derided by his enemies and confessed by himself. Our first sentiment, therefore, apart from the question of guilt or innocence, is one of astonishment, that he should have been prosecuted, at seventy years of age, for persevering in an occupation which he had publicly followed during twenty-five or thirty years preceding. Xenophon, full of reverence for his master, takes up the matter on much higher ground, and expresses himself in a feeling of indignant amazement that the Athenians could find anything to condemn in a man every way so admirable. But whoever attentively considers the picture which I have presented of the purpose, the working, and the extreme publicity of Sokratês, will rather be inclined to wonder, not that the indictment was presented at last, but that some such indictment had not been presented long before. Such certainly is the impression suggested by the language of Sokratês himself, in the “Platonic Apology.” He there proclaims, emphatically, that though his present accusers were men of consideration, it was neither their enmity, nor their eloquence, which he had now principally to fear; but the accumulated force of antipathy,—the numerous and important personal enemies, each with sympathizing partisans,—the long-standing and uncontradicted calumnies,[746] raised against him throughout his cross-examining career.
In truth, the mission of Sokratês, as he himself describes it, could not but prove eminently unpopular and obnoxious. To convince a man that, of matters which he felt confident of knowing, and had never thought of questioning or even of studying, he is really profoundly ignorant, insomuch that he cannot reply to a few pertinent queries without involving himself in flagrant contradictions, is an operation highly salutary, often necessary, to his future improvement; but an operation of painful surgery, in which, indeed, the temporary pain experienced is one of the conditions almost indispensable to the future beneficial results. It is one which few men can endure without hating the operator at the time; although doubtless such hatred would not only disappear, but be exchanged for esteem and admiration, if they persevered until the full ulterior consequences of the operation developed themselves. But we know, from the express statement of Xenophon, that many, who underwent this first pungent thrust of his dialectics, never came near him again: he disregarded them as laggards,[747] but their voices did not the less count in the hostile chorus. What made that chorus the more formidable, was the high quality and position of its leaders. For Sokratês himself tells us, that the men whom he chiefly and expressly sought out to cross-examine, were the men of celebrity as statesmen, rhetors, poets, or artisans; those at once most sensitive to such humiliation, and most capable of making their enmity effective.
When we reflect upon this great body of antipathy, so terrible both from number and from constituent items, we shall wonder only that Sokratês could have gone on so long standing in the market-place to aggravate it, and that the indictment of Melêtus could have been so long postponed; since it was just as applicable earlier as later, and since the sensitive temper of the people, as to charges of irreligion, was a well-known fact.[748] The truth is, that as history presents to us only one man who ever devoted his life to prosecute this duty of an elenchic, or cross-examining missionary, so there was but one city, in the ancient world at least, wherein he would have been allowed to prosecute it for twenty-five years with safety and impunity; and that city was Athens. I have in a previous volume noted the respect for individual dissent of opinion, taste, and behavior, among one another, which characterized the Athenian population, and which Periklês puts in emphatic relief as a part of his funeral discourse. It was this established liberality of the democratical sentiment at Athens which so long protected the noble eccentricity of Sokratês from being disturbed by the numerous enemies which he provoked: at Sparta, at Thebes, at Argos, Milêtus, or Syracuse, his blameless life would have been insufficient as a shield, and his irresistible dialectic power would have caused him to be only the more speedily silenced. Intolerance is the natural weed of the human bosom, though its growth or development may be counteracted by liberalizing causes; of these, at Athens, the most powerful was, the democratical constitution as there worked, in combination with diffused intellectual and æsthetical sensibility, and keen relish for discourse. Liberty of speech was consecrated, in every man’s estimation, among the first of privileges; every man was accustomed to hear opinions, opposite to his own, constantly expressed, and to believe that others had a right to their opinions as well as himself. And though men would not, as a general principle, have extended such toleration to religious subjects, yet the established habit in reference to other matters greatly influenced their practice, and rendered them more averse to any positive severity against avowed dissenters from the received religious belief. It is certain that there was at Athens both a keener intellectual stimulus, and greater freedom as well of thought as of speech, than in any other city of Greece. The long toleration of Sokratês is one example of this general fact, while his trial proves little, and his execution nothing, against it, as will presently appear.
There must doubtless have been particular circumstances, of which we are scarcely at all informed, which induced his accusers to prefer their indictment at the actual moment, in spite of the advanced age of Sokratês.
In the first place, Anytus, one of the accusers of Sokratês, appears to have become incensed against him on private grounds. The son of Anytus had manifested interest in his conversation, and Sokratês, observing in the young man intellectual impulse and promise, endeavored to dissuade his father from bringing him up to his own trade of a leather-seller.[749] It was in this general way that a great proportion of the antipathy against Sokratês was excited, as he himself tells us in the “Platonic Apology.” The young men were those to whom he chiefly addressed himself, and who, keenly relishing his conversation, often carried home new ideas which displeased their fathers;[750] hence the general charge against Sokratês, of corrupting the youth. Now this circumstance had recently happened in the peculiar case of Anytus, a rich tradesman, a leading man in politics, and just now of peculiar influence in the city, because he had been one of the leading fellow-laborers with Thrasybulus in the expulsion of the Thirty, manifesting an energetic and meritorious patriotism. He, like Thrasybulus and many others, had sustained great loss of property[751] during the oligarchical dominion; which perhaps made him the more strenuous in requiring that his son should pursue trade with assiduity, in order to restore the family fortunes. He seems, moreover, to have been an enemy of all teaching which went beyond the narrowest practicality, hating alike Sokratês and the sophists.[752]
While we can thus point out a recent occurrence, which had brought one of the most ascendent politicians in the city into special exasperation against Sokratês, another circumstance which weighed him down was, his past connection with the deceased Kritias and Alkibiadês. Of these two men, the latter, though he had some great admirers, was on the whole odious; still more from his private insolence and enormities than from his public treason as an exile. But the name of Kritias was detested, and deservedly detested, beyond that of any other man in Athenian history, as the chief director of the unmeasured spoliation and atrocities committed by the Thirty. That Sokratês had educated both Kritias and Alkibiadês, was affirmed by the accusers, and seemingly believed by the general public, both at the time and afterwards.[753] That both of them had been among those who conversed with him, when young men, is an unquestionable fact; to what extent, or down to what period, the conversation was carried, we cannot distinctly ascertain. Xenophon affirms that both of them frequented his society when young, to catch from him an argumentative facility which might be serviceable to their political ambition; that he curbed their violent and licentious propensities, so long as they continued to come to him; that both of them manifested a respectful obedience to him, which seemed in little consonance with their natural tempers; but that they soon quitted him, weary of such restraint, after having acquired as much as they thought convenient of his peculiar accomplishment. The writings of Plato, on the contrary, impress us with the idea that the association of both of them with Sokratês must have been more continued and intimate; for both of them are made to take great part in the Platonic dialogues, while the attachment of Sokratês to Alkibiadês is represented as stronger than that which he ever felt towards any other man; a fact not difficult to explain, since the latter, notwithstanding his ungovernable dispositions, was distinguished in his youth not less for capacity and forward impulse, than for beauty; and since youthful beauty fired the imagination of the Greeks, especially that of Sokratês, more than the charms of the other sex.[754] From the year 420 B.C., in which the activity of Alkibiadês as a political leader commenced, it seems unlikely that he could have seen much of Sokratês, and after the year 415 B.C. the fact is impossible; since in that year he became a permanent exile, with the exception of three or four months in the year 407 B.C. At the moment of the trial of Sokratês, therefore, his connection with Alkibiadês must at least have been a fact long past and gone. Respecting Kritias, we make out less; and as he was a kinsman of Plato, one of the well-known companions of Sokratês, and present at his trial, and himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with Sokratês may have continued longer; at least a color was given for so asserting. Though the supposition that any of the vices either of Kritias or Alkibiadês were encouraged, or even tolerated, by Sokratês, can have arisen in none but prejudiced or ill-informed minds, yet it is certain that such a supposition was entertained; and that it placed him before the public in an altered position after the enormities of the Thirty. Anytus, incensed with him already on the subject of his son, would be doubly incensed against him as the reputed tutor of Kritias.
Of Melêtus, the primary, though not the most important accuser, we know only that he was a poet; of Lykon, that he was a rhetor. Both these classes had been alienated by the cross-examining dialectics to which many of their number had been exposed by Sokratês. They were the last men to bear such an exposure with patience, and their enmity, taken as a class rarely unanimous, was truly formidable when it bore upon any single individual.