Remains of a Temple at Metapontum
CHAPTER XXXIX. SOCRATES AND THE SOPHISTS
It was not till the superior talents of Pericles had quieted the storms of war and faction that science, which had in the interval received great improvement among the Asian Greeks, revived at Athens with new vigour. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, the preceptor and friend of Pericles, bred in all the learning of the Ionian school, is said first to have introduced what might properly be called philosophy there. To him is attributed the first introduction in European Greece of the idea of one eternal, almighty, and all-good Being, or, as he is said, after Thales, to have expressed himself, a perfect mind, independent of body, as the cause or creator of all things. The gods received in Greece, of course, were low in his estimation; the sun and moon, commonly reputed divinities, he held to be mere material substances, the sun a globe of stone, the moon an earth, nearly similar to ours. A doctrine so repugnant to the system on which depended the estimation of all the festivals, processions, sacrifices, and oracles, which so fascinated the vulgar mind, was not likely to be propagated without reprehension. Even the science which enabled men to calculate an eclipse was offensive, inasmuch as it lowered the importance, and interfered with the profits, of priests, augurs, interpreters, and seers. An accusation of impiety was therefore instituted against Anaxagoras; the general voice went with the prosecutors; and all that the power and influence of Pericles could do for his valued friend, was to procure him means of escape from Attica.
But while physical and metaphysical speculation engaged men of leisure, other learning had more attraction for the ambitious and needy. Athens always was the great field for acquiring fame and profit in this line; yet those who first attained eminence in it were foreigners there, Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily, Prodicus of the little island of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. All these are said to have acquired considerable riches by their profession. Their success invited numbers to follow their example; and Greece, but far more especially Athens, shortly abounded with those who, under the name of sophists, professors of wisdom, undertook to teach every science. The scarcity and dearness of books gave high value to that learning which a man with a well-stored mind, and a ready and clear elocution could communicate. None, without eloquence, could undertake to be instructors; so that the sophists, in giving lessons of eloquence, were themselves the example. They frequented all places of public resort, the agora, the public walks, the gymnasia, and the porticoes; where they recommended themselves to notice by an ostentatious display of their abilities, in disputation among one another, or with whoever would converse with them.
The profession of sophist had not long flourished, and no Athenian had acquired fame in any branch of philosophy, when the singular talents, and singular manners and pursuits, of Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, engaged public attention. The father was a statuary, and is not mentioned as very eminent in his profession; but, as a man, he seems to have been respected among the most eminent of the commonwealth: he lived in particular intimacy with Lysimachus, son of the great Aristides. Socrates, inheriting a very scanty fortune, had a mind wholly intent upon the acquisition and communication of knowledge. The sublime principles of theology, taught by Anaxagoras, made an early impression upon his mind. They led him to consider what should be the duty owed by man to such a Being as Anaxagoras described his Creator; and it struck him that, if the providence of God interfered in the government of this world, the duty of man to man, little considered by poets or priests as any way connected with religion, and hitherto almost totally neglected by philosophers, must be a principal branch of the duty of man to God. It struck him further that, with the gross defects which he saw in the religion, the morality, and the governments of Greece, though the favourite inquiries of the philosophers, concerning the nature of the Deity, the formation of the world, the laws of the heavenly bodies, might, while they amused, perhaps also enlarge and improve the minds of a few speculative men, yet the investigation of the social duties was infinitely more important, and might be infinitely more useful, to mankind in general. Endowed by nature with a most discriminating mind, and a singularly ready eloquence, he directed his utmost attention to that investigation; and when, by reflection, assisted and proved by conversation among the sophists and other able men, he had decided an opinion, he communicated it, not in the way of precept, which the fate of Anaxagoras had shown hazardous, but by proposing a question, and, in the course of interrogatory argument, leading his hearers to the just conclusion.
We are informed by his disciple Xenophon how he passed his time. He was always in public. Early in the morning he went to the walks and the gymnasia: when the agora filled, he was there; and, in the afternoon, wherever he could find most company. Generally he was the principal speaker. The liveliness of his manner made his conversation amusing as well as instructive, and he denied its advantages to nobody. But he was nevertheless a most patient hearer; and preferred being the hearer whenever others were present able and disposed to give valuable information to the company. He did not commonly refuse invitations, frequently received, to private entertainments; but he would undertake no private instruction, nor could any solicitation induce him to relieve his poverty by accepting, like the sophists and rhetoricians, a reward for what he gave in public.
In the variety of his communication on social duties he could not easily, and perhaps he did not desire entirely, to avoid either religious or political subjects; hazardous, both of them, under the jealous tyranny of democracy. It remains a question how far he was subject to superstition; but his honesty is so authenticated that it seems fairer to impute to him some weakness in credulity than any intention to deceive. If we may believe his own account, reported by his two principal disciples, he believed himself divinely impelled to the employment to which he devoted his life, inquiring and teaching the duty of man to man. A divine spirit, in his idea, constantly attended him; whose voice, distinctly heard, never expressly commanded what he was indisposed to do, but frequently forbade what he had intended. To unveil the nature of Deity was not among his pretensions. He only insisted on the perfect goodness and perfect wisdom of the Supreme God, the creator of all things, and the constant superintendence of his providence over the affairs of men. As included in these, he held that everything done, said, or merely wished by men, was known to the Deity, and that it was impossible he could be pleased with evil. The unity of God, though implied in many of his reported discourses, he would not in direct terms assert; rather carefully avoiding to dispute the existence of the multifarious gods acknowledged in Greece; but he strongly denied the weaknesses, vices, and crimes commonly imputed to them. Far however from proposing to innovate in forms of worship and religious ceremonies, so various in the different Grecian states, and sources of more doubt and contention than any other circumstances of the heathen religion, he held that men could not, in these matters, do wrong if they followed the laws of their own country and the institutions of their forefathers. He was therefore regular in sacrifice, both upon the public altars and in his family. He seems to have been persuaded that the Deity, by various signs, revealed the future to men; in oracles, dreams, and all the various ways usually acknowledged by those conversant in the reputed science of augury. “Where the wisdom of men cannot avail,” he said, “we should endeavour to gain information from the gods; who will not refuse intelligible signs to those to whom they are propitious.” Accordingly he consulted oracles himself, and he recommended the same practice to others, in every doubt on important concerns.
The circumstances of the Athenian government, in his time, could not invite a man of his disposition to offer himself for political situations. He thought he might be infinitely more useful to his country in the singular line, it might indeed be called a public line, which he had chosen for himself. Not only he would not solicit office, but he would take no part in political contest. In the several revolutions which occurred he was perfectly passive. But he would refuse nothing: on the contrary, he would be active in everything that he thought decidedly the duty of a citizen. When called upon to serve among the heavy-armed, he was exemplary in the duties of a private soldier; and as such he fought at Potidæa, Amphipolis, and Delium. We find him mentioned in civil office; at one time president of the general assembly, and at another a member of the council of Five Hundred. In each situation he distinguished himself by his unbending uprightness. When president, he resisted the violence of the assembled people, who voted a decree, in substance or in manner, contrary to the constitution. Neither entreaties nor threats could move him to give it the necessary sanction of his office. As a member of the council we have already seen him, in the office of prytanis, at the trial of the six generals, persevering in resistance to the injustice of popular tyranny, rendered useless through the want of equal constancy in his colleagues, who yielded to the storm. Under the Thirty again we have seen him, not in office indeed, but daring to refuse office, unworthy and illegal office, which the tyranny of the all-powerful Critias would have put upon him.
We are not informed when Socrates first became distinguished as a sophist; for in that description of men he was in his own day reckoned. When the wit of Aristophanes was directed against him in the theatre he was already among the most eminent, but his eminence seems to have been then recent. It was about the tenth or eleventh year of the Peloponnesian War, when he was six or seven and forty years of age, that, after the manner of the old comedy, he was offered to public derision upon the stage, by his own name, as one of the persons of the drama, in the comedy of Aristophanes, called the Clouds, which is yet extant. The audience, accustomed to look on defamation with carelessness, and to hold as lawful and proper whatever might amuse the multitude, applauded the wit, and even gave general approbation to the composition; but the high estimation of the character of Socrates sufficed to prevent that complete success which the poet had looked for. The crown, which rewarded him whose drama most earned the public favour, and which Aristophanes had so often won, was on this occasion refused him.
Two or three and twenty years had elapsed since the first representation of the Clouds; the storms of conquest suffered from a foreign enemy and from four revolutions in the civil government of the country, had passed; nearly three years had followed of that quiet which the revolution under Thrasybulus produced, and the act of amnesty should have confirmed, when a young man, named Meletus, went to the king-archon, delivered, in the usual form, an information against Socrates, and bound himself to prosecute. The information ran thus: “Meletus, son of Meletus, of the borough of Pitthos, declares these upon oath against Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of the borough of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of reviling the gods whom the city acknowledges, and of preaching other new gods: moreover he is guilty of corrupting the youth. Penalty, death.”