CHAPTER V
SOCRATES (469–399 B. C.).
Socrates and Aristophanes. There were two ways in which the other elements in Greek society tried to meet the Sophists. One was led by Aristophanes, the other by Socrates. Aristophanes was a rich nobleman who looked back with pride upon the good old times. He would have a government of the best rather than of the many. He would destroy the Sophistic movement, and he wrote many satires upon Greek life with that end in view. His satire, The Clouds, is of especial interest in this connection. Socrates represents the other way in which the Sophistic movement was met. He accepted the Sophistic movement, but he read more deeply into it than the Sophists themselves, and he tried to find its truth.
The extraordinary personality of Socrates is the central figure in this age of critical inquiry. For the first time do we find philosophy centred in a great personality, and there is no more picturesque figure in history. The exposition of his doctrines is essentially a biography. He wrote nothing himself, and the literary sources of his life and teaching are found in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Symposium, in the writings of Plato, and in those of Aristotle. They throw different lights upon his character, and together give a fairly complete picture. Xenophon records the sober, practical, and popular side of Socrates, caught in casual conversation. Plato idealizes Socrates, especially in hislater writings, and he reveals Socrates’ character on its imaginative and spiritual sides.Aristotle is more discriminating and less sympathetic, but always reliable because he is a generation removed.[17]
The Personality and Life of Socrates. Alcibiades described Socrates as like the little cases sold upon the streets of Athens, which were made in the shape of Silenus and contained a carved image. The description was apt, for Socrates had a fine spiritual nature within an astonishing shell. He was short, stout, and thick-set, with his head set upon his shoulders. His eyes werebulging, his nose flat with upturned nostrils, his mouth big and grinning, and his beard disordered. His protruding belly was set upon slender legs, and his dress was slovenly. Nevertheless his geniality, his fine humor, the unselfishness which he manifested unstintedly toward his friends, exercised an irresistible charm upon all the remarkable personalities of his time. Over the Athenian youth his influence was very great, and he surrounded himself with a large circle of admirers, to the neglect of his home cares and his wife Xantippe. While the habit of the Sophists was to talk in private and for pay, Socrates was distinguished from all his contemporaries by the fact that he would talk in the public places with any one, rich or poor, and without remuneration.
His life had its ascetic side. He was frugal in his needs. He went barefoot, summer and winter, and his clothing was the scantiest. He was abstemious in food and drink. While on occasion at the feast he would drink more wine than any one else, yet he never was seen intoxicated. The ascetic side of his nature is seen in his refusal to cultivate gymnastics, because such training required much food. He tried to limit his wants. He was a model of hardiness, self-denial, and self-mastery, as many an anecdote will show. “No one ever saw or heard anything wicked in Socrates,” said Xenophon. “So pious was he that he never did anything without first consulting the Gods, so master of himself as never to prefer pleasure to goodness, so sensible as never to err in the choice between the better and the worse. In a word, he was the best and the most happy of men.”
At times Socrates seems intellectually stiff and prosaic.This may have been incidental to his asceticism, or the result of it. He was indifferent to the sensuous, and he explained the beautiful in terms of the useful. He refused to walk out because trees and flowers could teach him nothing. Art offered no suggestions to him, for it is useless even if it is inspired. His unpoetic and prosy nature was perhaps not due so much to his lack of taste as to his original mind overflowing with ideas. He was not perceptive, but reflective. He said that astronomy is a mystery, geometry is land measuring, which any man can do, arithmetic is merely permissible, and physics something to be neglected. “Ye may judge how unprofitable these studies are by seeing how men differ among themselves.” He was once found dancing at home by himself when he was expected to be at a dance with others, and his practical nature is also revealed in the fact that at the feast he was reminded of its utility.
The influence of Socrates’ dæmon or divine voice upon him is very interesting. He felt himself divinely called by his dæmon (Apology, 29, 33 f.) to unremitting labor in the moral perfecting of society through an examination of himself and his fellows. Socrates was moved by a deep religious feeling in all that he undertook. This divine leading is what he designates as his dæmon. He speaks of it as “the God” or “the gods” which speaks to other men through the oracles. This divine voice was ever with him, but as to specific actions it only warned him against the injudicious action, never incited him to the correct action. Specifically it did not tell him what to do so much as what not to do. When he was about to prepare a defense beforehand that he should make to the judges, his dæmon interposed, and so he relied upon the inspirationof the moment. On one of his campaigns he was observed to stand in communion with the dæmon the whole day, unmindful of the weather.
As to the education and intellectual training of Socrates, one must say that it formed a factor of less importance in his life. The uniqueness of Socrates’ character is only in small measure to be accounted for by his environment. He was one of those men who would have been great in any time. He got but little from his father, who was a sculptor, or from his mother, who was a midwife. He was not strictly an educated man, although he had the early education of an Athenian youth, and of course no one could grow up a citizen of Athens in the time of Pericles without absorbing its culture. His formal education probably consisted of music and gymnastics, and he was certainly familiar with the preceding schools of philosophy. Socrates lived a long life of contented poverty, and he dedicated his life to the public. Two inherited instincts were strong within him, which alone will account for his career: (1) his strong religious persuasion that he was acting under a mission from the gods; (2) his great intellectual originality, as shown in his teaching and in his power over others.
There are few striking events in Socrates’ career, except his death. He was born in Athens in 469 B. C. He began his divinely appointed work of redeeming Athens from the dangerous tendencies of the Sophists at the commencement of the Peloponnesian War. He served in three campaigns as a soldier. He also acted, when called upon, as prytanis, or lawgiver, although he stood aloof from political activity. At the advanced age of seventy he was accused of corrupting the youthand denying the gods. His life thus far would have seemed to be one of unimpeachable moral and brilliant intellectual monotony. But his death illuminates his life and makes it heroic, because his death shows what in reality his life was,—the tragic epitome of the Athenian social situation. His death was not due to himself, although he could have escaped, nor to his judges, although they could have acquitted him. It represents the inevitable conflict between the Greek ideal of universalism and Greek individualism. Its value is therefore historic. His particular accusers were actuated by personal animosity. Behind them were many others whom his efforts at reform and his bitter irony had made hostile. Behind all was the voice of Athenian conservatism against the Athenian culture movement. The charges against Socrates were in part true, and besides as a moral reformer he had been a public nuisance. Yet his death was a judicial murder. He was found guilty by his judges. To the sentence of death proposed by Meletus, one of his accusers, Socrates had the right to propose an alternative sentence, and the judges must choose between the two. Had Socrates proposed a small fine, it would probably have been accepted by the judges. He proposed, however, that Athens provide for him at the public expense, arrogant as he was in his complacent sense of virtue. The judges then could do nothing else than pronounce the sentence of death. This was delayed thirty days on account of the sacrifice at Delos. Even then Socrates could have easily escaped from jail. But he refused to do the law a wrong, and drank the hemlock in May, 399 B. C.