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the Greek soldiers. He went bare-footed in all seasons, even during the severe winter campain of Potidea, in the snow and frost of the ungenial Thracian climate. He was indifferent to his food, always eating the most homely and simple, and that most abstemiously. Though in proof of the strength of his constitution it may be stated that at festivals where his countrymen were in the habit of drinking potations "pottle deep," he far exceeded them all in the quantity of his libations, and never became intoxicated. It was his professed purpose to minimise his wants, as every want thrown aside, he deemed, likened him more to the gods, who wanted nothing. Of his moral courage two examples here must suffice. After the battle of Arginusæ in which the generals committed the sacrilege of neglecting to collect their wounded and dead, and of allowing the disabled ships to sink with their surviving crews, Callixenus preferred the charge against them, and proposed a violation of the constitution, in order to ensure their condign punishment; Socrates though rarely holding any political office was at the time a member of the Senate of Five Hundred, and one of the Prytanes whose duty it was to put the question of the day. Despite the great personal danger of opposing the will of an infuriated, and religiously excited people, he refused to put it to the vote, because of its illegality, and nothing could influence him to a violation of the law. Always obedient to the laws himself, he would never be a party to their being violated by another, nor be the instrument of that violation, no matter what the dangers which his rigid adherence to legality incurred. Fearing not death he had nothing to fear from man; and from this fear his pure and blameless life had preserved him. A man who in a city like Athens where acute and unprincipled men, where political partizans and offended teachers were ever on the watch to seize the opportunity of arraigning him before the civil authorities for real or supposed infraction of the laws, could say on the only one trial of his life, that that was the first time he had appeared before a dykastery, though more than seventy years of * age,* must have led an irreproachable life indeed; especially when we consider the publicity-nay the almost intrusive pertinacity with which he thrust himself before the eyes of the people, must this have been the case. Again, when the democracy of Athens was overthrown, and the tyrannous and bloody oligarchy of the Thirty the reigning power, Socrates was the only Greek who dared oppose their will, or refuse compli ance with their orders. The case was this. Critias the worthy leader of that disgraceful body, had organised a plan of arresting

Plato Apol. Soc. c. 1.

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all citizens whose wealth was coveted, or whose influence was feared. In order to make it appear that large numbers of citizens favoured their government, when arrests were to be made a certain number of Athenians were summoned to the Tholus, (Government House,) and directed to make the arrest personally, thereby incurring the odium due to the tyrants themselves. A citizen named Leon was one of the doomed, and five others were named by the Thirty to seize him. Among these was Socrates; and at a time when a murmur was ruin, and a word of opposition death, the philosopher, firmly, and, we doubt not, indignantly, refused all compliance in such tyrannic actions. His preservation proved that it is better to refuse obedience to tyrants, than to obey them in dishonourable and illegal offices; and is a crowning proof of the moral courage of Socrates.

In reading of the great influence of Socrates, we are not a little surprised how he was able to obtain it. Filled as the Greeks were with an intense admiration of physical beauty, and having, in the works of Phidias, models of the noblest kind always before their eyes, it is a matter of surprise how the homely-nay ugly-physiognomy of Socrates did not repulse them. On the other hand his good humour would do much to remove the repugnance which was at first excited by his personal appearance; seeing that he not only bore with laughter, but made jests himself about that ugliness. He had a flat nose, large ears, thick lips and prominent eyes-was in short diametrically opposed to all that Grecian taste conceived of beauty, and the wonder at first is that he ever acquired the influence of a teacher at all. Teacher, perhaps, we ought not to call him, as he always repudiated that title, calling himself a learner, a seeker after truth, and not knowing enough to enable him to teach. But in a little time this impression would be removed, both by the novelty of his mode of eliciting the ignorance of supposed wise men (copoì,) and by the beauty of his own moral doctrines, which were constantly being inculcated in the course of his pitiless interrogatories. "For," says Emerson, “under his hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor and the Islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted, if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for be thought not any evil happened to man of such magnitude as false opinions respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless

disputant who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose all-conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest, and draw them in the pleasantest manner into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist! Meno has discoursed a thousand times, át length, on virtue before many companies, and very well as it appeared to him; but at this moment he connot even tell what it is—the cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewildered him."*

To this may be added that he never in any wise violated any of the precepts which came from him in the course of his conversations, by a conduct opposed to their spirit in his life. Truth-loving and truth-teaching, he lived truly. Scorning all political and civil power; turning willingly aside from the paths to worldly honours and profit he lived contentedly in poverty, pursuing the all-absorbing purpose of his life, the acquisition of wisdom, and the search after truth. We see the effects of his life and doctrines upon such men as Xenophon, and Plato, and Crito; while such men as Critias and Alcibiades were drawn to listen to his masterly power of dialectics, and to profit for their own personal and selfish advantages, by the power which his strong intellect and wonderful judgment gave them in their very different pursuits and purposes. Signaled out by God as the wisest of the Greeks, he knew not in what his wisdom consisted, but resolved to prove its truth by testing that of others. Athens was just the place for this. Assembled in her walls were men both native and visitors who professed to teach all subjects, and to enable their pupils to take part in all the affairs of a state in a manner that should ensure their success, and redound to their honour and profit. For this they were receiving large emoluments; and being public teachers were anxious to be questioned by Socrates, in order to show their superior wisdom and learning, Each was taken on the subject about which he professed to know most, and questioned as to the worth of the thing he sold, and how far he was himself a master of its principles. None doubted their ability to come successfully out of such a cross-examination, and scarcely any one refused the contest. They professed to teach justice, truth, wisdom, virtue, piety, rhetoric, and whatever was deemed necessary for an Athenian gentleman to know. Socrates

Emerson's Representative Men-Plato.

asked what was justice and injustice, piety and impiety, virtue and vice, and none could answer him. The things the sophists, (and here we use the word in its original Greek sense,) professed to teach and know were these, and on these subjects they were questioned; each according to his profession asked for a definition, one would be given, then came a series of interrogations seemingly unconnected with the subject in hand, and taken from the most ordinary affairs of life; often provoking laughter and indignation from the surprised or offended teacher, so irrelevant did they appear, but leading them on, by degrees, to conclusions directly opposed to their own definition. Then a new definition was offered, this, subject to the same kind of examination, ended in a similar discomfiture; and thus the poor teacher was fixed in a dilemma of the most inextricable nature, out of which there was no escape, and whose pitiless consequences there were no means of evading. Socrates held him fast by his powerful Elenchus, and there was no escape.

Nothing can be conceived more irritating to a popular teacher, certain of his own powers, and confident in the strength of his acquirements than such a proceedure. All his wisdom shown to have no foundation in reality, all mere "words, words, words," without substance;—the assumption of wisdom, not wisdom itself— such an exposure must have been painful in the extreme.

Professor Maurice says of the Elenchus of Socrates, "no doubt this would be a most irritating, vexatious course of proceeding. No doubt an opponent who had adopted a certain proposition, and was provided with abundance of arguments in defence of it, would be tortured beyond measure by finding himself not fairly encountered upon those arguments, but led back into a question which he had assumed, forced to give an account of a word which he had fancied every one was agreed upon, and not permitted after all to bring any of his own resources into play. It was most perplexing for a disciple who had come expecting that a certain doctrine would be either established or refuted, and, perhaps, that the ingenious arguments on both sides of the question might serve his purpose in a popular assembly, to find that he got no decision either way, and, moreover, that he himself had been talking all his life in a language which he did not understand, and using words as if they were algebraic characters. Yet in some way or other the sophist was taught that he was in the presence of some one stronger than himself. He might chafe and fret, and complain that he had been treated with great unfairness. He could not say that his opponent had not got the better of him in his own word

fighting; he could not say that all the scepticism which he had brought into play against the common thoughts and feelings of his countrymen had not been made to tell with tenfold force upon himself; he could not help owning and feeling that there was one in conflict with him who had some other end than the mere exercise or display of power, and yet who did possess a power before which his own quailed. On the other hand, the disciple amidst all his bewilderment, will have gone away with a feeling that he (perhaps for the first time in his life) has actually learned something better than the attainment of dominion over other men's minds, there is at least a most important and indispensable preliminary to it, unless we would have our own the sport of every deceiver."*

It has long been the wont to look upon Socrates from the negative point of view,-as the sceptic, the destroyer of other people's teachings, but not substituting any other, and better in their place as he whose wisdom found its culmination in the confession that "he nothing knew," that any opposite opinion runs contrary to that generally received. It is true Christians look upon him as being a better man than ordinary among a nation who could only be bad from their paganism, as having some insight into the great truths of moral and ethical doctrine; but still a scoffer and a doubter; and to the Greeks of his own time we doubt not but the representation of Aristophanes was in accordance with their own. It might be a somewhat exaggerated caricature, but the salient points were seized with truthfulness; for to ordinary pious Grecian men he seemed the promulgator of strange doctrines, the teacher of new religious opinions, and the denier of the gods-since to them his higher views of the Divine would be almost equivalent to a denial. If we look only to the Dialogues of Plato we are the less surprised at this view. In almost the whole series Socrates is the questioner of old and long established topics, forcing men by his ruthless logic to turn from point to point, to desert stronghold after stronghold, and end in utter and hopeless confusion. In almost all of these wondrous dialogues every thing remains unsettled. Is it of holiness they discourse? the sophists are so driven by this inexorable questioner, that they have no place on which to stand, no foothold for recovery; and thus they are left. Socrates never gave them a new basis on which to erect a more truthful and durable system. Nay the teaching of a system was not his business, but to cause men so to examine themselves, that, becoming con

* Maurice's Ancient Philosophy, C vi. Div. 11. Sec. 77.

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