This spirit, as manifested in the sophists and their teaching, directed itself against the old political spirit in all the departments of life—in religion, in politics, in education. It discredited the old popular gods, upon loyalty to whom the existence of the State had been supposed to depend, substituting for them some crude fancy like Vortex, or some bald abstraction like Intellect. It encouraged the individual to seek his end in his own pleasure, and to regard the State as but a means to that end. It championed an education in which these ideas occupied a prominent place. What the sophists actually taught the ambitious young men who sought their instruction, was self-assertion, unscrupulousness, and a showy rhetoric, in whose triumphal procession facts, fancies, and falsehoods marched together in brilliant array. It is but fair to them to say that, in their endeavor to instruct young men in the art of specious oratory, they laid the foundations of the art of rhetoric and the science of grammar. So much, at least, the world owes to them.
Since it was to the young men, who, freed from the discipline of home, pedagogue, school, and palæstra, could be met with anywhere, in the street, the agora, the gymnasium, that the sophists directed their chief attention, it was of course these who first showed the effects of their teaching. But their influence, falling in, as it did, with the pronounced radical tendencies of the time, soon made itself felt in all grades of education, from the family to the university, in the form of an irreverent, flippant, conceited rationalism, before whose self-erected and self-corrupted tribunal every institution in heaven and earth was to be tried. In the schools this influence showed itself in various ways: (1) in an increased attention to literature, and especially to the formal side of it, (2) in the tendency to substitute for the works of the old epic and lyric poets the works of more recent writers tinged with the new spirit, (3) in the introduction of new and complicated instruments and kinds of music, (4) in an increasing departure from the severe physical and moral discipline of the old days. We now, for the first time, hear of a teacher of literature, distinct from the music master, of teachers who possessed no copy of Homer (Alcibiades is said to have chastised such a one), of flutes, citharas, and the like in use in schools, of wildness and lewdness among boys of tender age. In the palæstra the new spirit showed itself in a tendency to substitute showy and unsystematic exercises for the vigorous and graded exercises of the older time, to sacrifice education to execution.
But, as already remarked, the new spirit showed itself most clearly and hurtfully in the higher education. The young men, instead of spending their time in vigorous physical exercise in the gymnasia and open country, began now to hang about the streets and public places, listening to sophistic discussions, and to attend the schools of the sophists, exercising their tongues more than any other part of their bodies. The effect of this soon showed itself in a decline of physical power, of endurance, courage, and manliness, and in a strong tendency to luxury and other physical sins. They now began to imagine for themselves a private life, very far from coincident with that demanded of a citizen, and to look upon the old citizen-life, and its ideals, sanctions, and duties, with contempt or pity, as something which they had learnt to rise above. The glory and well-being of their country were no longer their chief object of ambition. The dry rot of individualism, which always seems to those affected by it an evidence of health and manly vigor, was corrupting their moral nature, and preparing the way for the destruction of the State. For it was but too natural that these young men, when they came to be members of the State, should neglect its lessons and claims, and, following the new teachings, live to themselves. Thus, just as the character of the "Old Education" of Athens showed itself in the behavior of her sons in the Persian Wars, so that of her "New Education" showed itself fifty years later in the Peloponnesian War, that long and disastrous struggle which wrecked Athens and Greece.
Yet Athens and her education were not allowed to go to ruin without a struggle. The aristocratic party long stuck to the old principles and tried to give them effect; but, failing to understand the new circumstances and to take account of them, it erred in the application of them, by seeking simply to restore the old conditions. Individuals also exerted their best efforts for the same end. Æschylus, who had fought at Marathon, and who, more than any other Greek, was endowed with the spirit of religion, interpreted the old mythology in an ethical sense, and in this form worked it into a series of dramas, whereby the history and institutions of the Greek people were shown to be due to a guiding Providence of inexorable justice, rewarding each man according to his works, abhorring proud homes "gilded with impurity of hands," and dwelling with the pure and righteous, though housed in the meanest cot. Æschylus thus became, not only the father of Greek tragedy, but also the sublimest moral teacher Greece ever possessed. For moral grandeur there is but one work in all literature that can stand by the side of Æschylus' Oresteia, and that is the Divine Comedy. Yet Æschylus was driven from Athens on a charge of impiety, and died in exile.
But it was not the tragic drama alone that was inspired and made a preacher of righteousness: in the hands of Aristophanes, the comic drama exerted all its power for the same end. For over thirty years this inimitable humorist used the public theatre to lash the follies, and hold up to contempt the wretched leaders, of the Athenian populace, pointing out to his countrymen the abyss of destruction that was yawning before them. The world has never seen such earnest comedy, not even in the works of Molière or Beaumarchais. Yet it was all in vain. Long before his death, Aristophanes was forbidden to hold up to public scorn the degradation of his people.
Among the individual citizens who labored with all their might to bring back Athens to her old worth were two of very different character, endowments, and position, the one laboring in the world of action, the other in the world of thought. The first was Pericles, who, seeing that democracy was the order of the day, accepted it, and, by his personal character and position, strove to guide it to worthy ends. In order to encourage gymnastic exercises, particularly among the sons of the newer families, he built the Lyceum, in a grove sacred to Apollo, between Cynosarges and the city walls, as a gymnasium for them. With a view to encouraging among them the study of music, he built an odeon, or music-hall, under the southeast end of the Acropolis. Both were magnificent structures. What he did towards the completion of the great theatre for the encouragement of dancing, we do not know; that this entered into his plan, there can hardly be any doubt. But Pericles was too wise a man to suppose that he could induce his pleasure-seeking countrymen to subject themselves to the old discipline, without offering them an object calculated to rouse their ambition and call forth their energy. This object was nothing less than a united Greece, with Athens as its capital. How hard he tried to make this object familiar to them, and to render Athens worthy of the place he desired her to occupy, is pathetically attested to this day by the Propylæa and the Parthenon. On the frieze of the latter is represented the solemn sacrifice that was to cement the union of the Hellenic people, and place it at the head of civilization. When degenerate Greece resisted all his efforts to make her become one peaceably, he tried to make her do so by force, and the Peloponnesian War, started on a mere frivolous pretext, was the result. He did not live long enough to learn the outcome of this desperate attempt to wake his countrymen to new moral and political life, and it was well. If he had, he might have been forced to recognize that he had been attempting an impossible task,—trying to erect a strong structure with rotten timber, to make a noble State out of ignoble, selfish men. Unfortunately, the example of his own private life, in which he openly defied one of the laws of the State, and tried to make concubinage (ἑταίρησις) respectable, more than undid all the good he sought to accomplish. The truth is, Pericles was himself too deeply imbued with the three vices of his time—rationalism, self-indulgence, and love of show—to be able to see any true remedy for the evils that sprang from them. What was needed was not letters, music, gymnastics, dancing, or dream of empire, but something entirely different—a new moral inspiration and ideal.
This, the second of the men to whom reference has been made, Socrates, sought to supply. In the midst of self-indulgence, he lived a life of poverty and privation; in the midst of splendor and the worship of outward beauty, he pursued simplicity and took pleasure in his ugliness; in the midst of self-assertive rationalism and all-knowing sophistry, he professed ignorance and submission to the gods. The problem of how to restore the moral life of Athens and Greece presented itself to Socrates in this form: The old ethical social sanctions, divine and human, having, under the influence of rationalism and individualism, lost their power, where and how shall we find other sanctions to take their place? To answer this one question was the aim of Socrates' whole life. He was not long in seeing that any true answer must rest upon a comprehension of man's entire nature and relations, and that the sophists were able to impose upon his countrymen only because no such comprehension was theirs. He saw that the old moral life, based upon naïve tradition and prescription, sanctioned by gods of the imagination, would have to give place to a moral life resting upon self-understanding and reflection. He accordingly adopted as his motto the command of the Delphic oracle, Know Thyself (γνῶθι σεαυτóν), and set to work with all his might to obey it.
He now, therefore, went to meet the sophists on their own ground and with their own methods, and he did this so well as to be considered by many, Aristophanes among them, as the best possible representative of the class. What is true is, that he was the first Athenian who undertook to do what the sophists had for some time considered their special function,—to impart a "higher education" to the youth and men of Athens. He went about the streets, shops, walks, schools, and gymnasia of the city, drawing all sorts of persons into conversation, and trying to elicit truth for himself and them (for he pretended to know nothing). He was never so pleased as when he met a real sophist, who professed to have knowledge, and never so much in his element as when, in the presence of a knot of young men, he could, by his ironical, subtle questions, force said sophist to admit that he too knew nothing. The fact was, Socrates, studying Heraclitus, had become convinced that the reason why men fell into error was because they did not know themselves, or their own thoughts, because what they called thoughts were mere opinions, mere fragments of thoughts. He concluded that, if men were ever to be redeemed from error, intellectual and moral, they must be made to think whole thoughts. Accordingly, he took the ordinary opinions of men and, by a series of well-directed questions, tried to bring out their implications, that is, the wholes of which they were parts. Such is the Socratic or dialectic (= conversational) method. It does not pretend to impart any new knowledge, but merely, as Socrates said, to deliver the mind of the thoughts with which it is pregnant. And Socrates not only held that saving truth consisted of whole thoughts; he held also that all such thoughts were universally and necessarily true; that, while there might be many opinions about a thing, there could be but one truth, the same for all men, and therefore independent of any man. This was the exact opposite of what Protagoras the sophist had taught, the opposite of the gospel of individualism (see [p. 93]). Man is so far from being the measure of all things, that there is in all things a measure to which he must conform, if he is not to sink into error. This measure, this system of whole truths, implying an eternal mind to which it is present, and by which it is manifested in the world, is just what man arrives at, if he will but think out his thoughts in their completeness. In doing so, he at once learns the laws by which the universe is governed and finds a guide and sanction for his own conduct—a sanction no longer external and imposed by the State, but internal and imposed by the mind. A system like this involved a complete reversal of the old view of the relation between man and the State, and at the same time took the feet from under individualism. "It is true," said Socrates in effect, "that the individual, and not the State, is the source of all authority, the measure of all things; but he is so, not as individual, but as endowed with the universal reason by which the world, including the State, is governed." This is the sum and substance of Socrates' teaching, this is what he believed to be true self-knowledge. This is the truth whose application to life begins a new epoch in human history, and separates the modern from the ancient world; this is the truth that, reiterated and vivified by Christianity, forms the very life of our life to-day.
In adopting this view, Socrates necessarily formed "a party by himself," a party which could hope for no sympathy from either of the other two into which his countrymen were divided. The party of tradition charged him with denying the gods of his country and corrupting her youth; the radical party hated him because he convicted its champions of vanity, superficiality, and ignorance. Between them, they compassed his death, and Athens learnt, only when it was too late, that she had slain her prophet. But Socrates, though slain, was not dead. His spirit lived on, and the work which he had begun grew and prospered. Yet it could not save Athens, except upon a condition which she neither would nor could accept, that of remodelling her polity and the life of her citizens in accordance with divine truth and justice. Indeed, though he discovered a great truth, Socrates did not present it in a form in which it could be accepted under the given conditions. He himself even did not by any means see all the stupendous implications of his own principle, which, in fact, was nothing less than the ground of all true ethics, all liberty, and all science. It is doubtful whether any one sees them now, and certain that they have been nowhere realized. Still his truth and his life were not without their immediate effect upon Athens and Athenian education. Men, working in his spirit, and inspired with his truth, more or less clearly understood, almost immediately replaced the sophists in Athens, and drew the attention of her citizens, old and young, to the serious search for truth. In fact, from this time on, the intellectual tendency began to prevail over the gymnastic and musical, and this continued until, finally, it absorbed the whole life of the people, and Athens, from being a university-State, became a State-university. Such it was in the days of Cicero, Paul, Plutarch, Lucian, and Proclus. That this one-sided tendency was fatal to the political life of Athens, and therefore, in some degree, to its moral life, is clear enough; and, though we cannot hold Socrates personally responsible for this result, we must still admit that it was one which flowed from his system of thought. Personally, indeed, Socrates was a moral hero, and "five righteous" men like him, had they appeared, would have gone far to save Athens; but this very heroism, this inborn enthusiasm for righteousness, blinded him so far as to make him believe that men had only to know the right in order to be ready to follow it. Hence that exaggerated importance attached to right knowing, and that comparative neglect of right feeling and right doing, which in the sequel proved so paralyzing. Hence the failure of Socrates' teaching to stem the tide of corruption in Athens, and restore her people to heroism and worth.
Socrates left behind him many disciples, some of whom distinguished themselves in practical ways, others as founders of philosophic schools, emphasizing different sides of his teaching. He was but a few years in his grave when two of these were teaching regularly in the two old gymnasia of Athens. Plato, a full-blooded Athenian, was teaching in the Academy the intellectual and moral theories of his master, while Antisthenes, a half-breed (his mother being a Thracian), was inculcating the lesson of his heroic life in Cynosarges. Their followers were called, respectively, Academics and Cynics. Thus, by these two men, was the higher education for the first time introduced into the public institutions of Athens.