SOCRATES

(469-399 B. C.)

BY HERBERT WEIR SMYTH

REAT teachers are not often great writers: some indeed have written nothing, and among these the greatest is Socrates. If the qualities of his genius made Socrates a teacher chrough the spoken, not through the written word, he created a literature in which, through the devotion of his pupils, his message to the world has been transmitted to us. It is fortunate that Xenophon and Plato were so different in character and aptitudes. If the historian was incapable of grasping the full significance of his master's search for truth and its transforming power, he pictures for us the homelier side of the life of Socrates,- his practical virtues, his humanity,— and defends him from calumny and reproach. In the larger vision of Plato the outlines of the man were merged into the figure of the ideal teacher. To disengage with certainty the man Socrates from the dialectician into whose mouth Plato puts his own transcendental philosophy, is beyond our powers; but in the pages of Xenophon, unillumined indeed by Plato's matchless urbanity and grace, we have a record of Socrates's conversations that bears the mark of verisimilitude.

The life of Socrates falls in a period of the history of thought when the speculations of a century and more had arrived at the hopeless conclusion that there was no real truth, no absolute standard of right and wrong, no difference between what is essential and what is accidental; and that all man can know is dependent upon sensation, and perception through the senses. But the position of Socrates in history is not to be understood by a mere statement of his methods, or his results in regenerating philosophical investigation.

Born in 469, or perhaps 471, the son of the statuary Sophroniscus and Phænarete a midwife, he received the education of the Athenian youth of the time in literature, - which embraced chiefly the study of Homer,-in music, and in geometry and astronomy. He is said to have tried his hand for a time at his father's trade; and a group of the Graces, currently believed to be his work, was extant as late as the second century A. D. Like the Parisian, whose world is bounded by the boulevards, Socrates thought Athens world enough for him.

He remained in his native city his entire life; unlike the Sophists, who traveled from city to city making gain of their wisdom. On one occasion indeed he attended the games at Corinth; and as a soldier underwent with fortitude the privations of the campaign at Potidæa, where he saved the life of Alcibiades, whose influence, directly or indirectly, was to work ruin alike to Athens and his master. He was engaged in the battles of Delium in 424 and Amphipolis in 422. His life was by preference free from event. Warned by the deterrent voice of his "divine sign," he took no part in public affairs except when he was called upon to fulfill the ordinary duties of citizenship. Until his trial before the court that sentenced him to death, he appeared in a public capacity on only two occasions; in both of which he displayed his lofty independence and tenacity of purpose in the face of danger. In 406, withstanding the clamor of the mob, he alone among the presidents of the assembly refused to put to vote the inhuman and illegal proposition to condemn in a body the generals at Arginusæ; and during the Reign of Terror in 404 he disobeyed the incriminating command of the Thirty Tyrants to arrest Leon, whom they had determined to put to death.

He seems at an early age to have recoiled from speculations as to the cause and constitution of the physical world; believing that they dealt with problems not merely too deep for human intellect but sacred from man's finding out. "Do these students of nature's laws," he indignantly exclaimed, "think they already know human affairs well enough, that they begin to meddle with the Divine ?»

To Socrates "the proper study of mankind is man." In the market-place he found material for investigation at once more tangible and of a profounder significance than the atomic theory of Democritus. "Know thyself" was inscribed on the temple of the god of Delphi; and it was Socrates's conviction that a "life without self-examination was no life at all." Since the Delphian oracle declared him to be the wisest of men, he felt that he had a Divine mission to make clear the meaning of the god, and to seek if haply he might find some one wiser than himself; for he was conscious that he knew nothing.

He was pos

To this quest everything was made subordinate. sessed of nothing, for he had the faculty of indigence. Fortunately, as Renan has put it, all a Greek needed for his daily sustenance was a few olives and a little wine. "To want nothing," said Socrates, "is Divine; to want as little as possible is the nearest possible approach to the Divine life." Clad in shabby garments, which sufficed alike for summer and winter, always barefoot (a scandal to Athenian propriety), taking money from no man so as not to "enslave himself," professing with his "accustomed irony" to be unable to teach anything