Hero Tales from History

by Smith Burnham

In Athens at this time there were not only many painters and sculptors, but numbers of men called philosophers, who gave all their time to thinking out the meaning of what they saw in the world around them, and trying to teach that meaning to such people as would listen to them. These philosophers differed widely from one another in their views. Some of the things they thought would seem very queer to us to-day, but they were doing their best to find out the truth.

A group of philosophers who held the same views was called a “school.” The schools of philosophy were not like the schools of to-day. They were simply gathering places, in some one’s house, or on a street corner, or in a public porch, or in a grove, where men who liked to think came together for talk and debate. Instead of children sitting quietly at desks, a school was made up of grown men walking about and talking a great deal.

Socrates found that he was much more interested in listening to what the philosophers thought than he was in carving statues. So he gave up his work with his father and went out to visit the schools. But as he went from one school to another, he could see that no one of them was right in every way. He decided that he could not learn the real truth from them. So he resolved to walk the streets and ask questions of the people he met there. He was so anxious to know that he could learn from anyone he talked with, whether man, woman, or child. He met many men who thought they were philosophers when they were not, for it was considered a great thing to be known as a famous thinker, and all men aimed at it.

When Socrates met a man who claimed to be wise, he would ask questions as if he himself did not know anything, and he would thus lead on from one thing to another till sometimes he made the man say the very opposite of what he had said before, making him ashamed of himself. This way of drawing out the truth by questions and proving the wrongness of some ways of reasoning is known to-day as the “Socratic method.”

The Greeks were great believers in beauty. They thought whatever is beautiful must be right. But Socrates saw handsome men and beautiful women leading wrong lives, and he made such people angry by saying so. Socrates himself was far from handsome. He was short and thick-set. His head was bald and his eyes bulged out in a comical way. His nose was broad and flat; his lips were thick and his ears stood out, making him look like the clowns the Greeks laughed at in their great out-door theaters.

More than this, Socrates was poor. He had learned, while a young man, that those who had most of the so-called good things of life were the most unhappy. So he made up his mind that the best kind of wealth lay in not wanting much. He did not care for good things to eat. He went barefoot, and wore the same thin garment both summer and winter.

The Greeks were fond of art for the sake of art. But Socrates believed in right living, and loved art only for heart’s sake—for the sake of doing good and making people happy. He also believed that to know is to live, and that in order to live right one must first know what is right. He claimed to have a certain force or voice within which showed him what was right. He was the first of all the wise men of the heathen world to believe that this inner light should be a correct moral guide to right living.

Even the gods the Greeks worshiped did things of the worst kind; they were spiteful, cruel, and wicked. So the people did not think it wrong to act as their gods did. They did not understand what Socrates meant when he said he had a voice within himself which told him what he should or should not do. So they thought he was trying to make them believe in a strange god, when they had too many already.