all who were free in ancient times. Nor need his merits be exaggerated in order to prove the blessing that descended upon him, not to make him secure, but to awaken his anxiety and his thoughtfulness. He said things, if we trust the reports of old, of which he could not himself have perceived the full and glorious significance; and when he was discoursing, for the last time, of immortality, he interrupted himself to order the sacrifice of a cock to Esculapius. It would have been unnatural that he should have been totally spared the errors which lay in ambush amongst men. But though he could not obliterate the stains of the humanity he bore, he washed them partly from his brow in the spring to which his steps were led. Ardent to learn because he knew how much he had to learn, yet humble because he felt how much there was beyond his learning,237 he called himself the architect of his own philosophy,238 but confessed that his morality was imparted to him from a spirit with which his higher nature alone obtained communion.239 Socrates was so entirely above all others as to seem the only one in the heathen universe who heard the voices or beheld the forms of 66 237 Ελεγε δὲ καὶ ἓν μόνον ἀγαθὸν εἶναι, τὴν ἐπιστήμην, " He said, too, there was but one great good, namely, knowledge." Diog. Laert., II. 31. So Xen., Mem., III. 9. 5. If the reader have forgotten the account in the Apology of the exertions made by Socrates to find a man wiser than himself, which resulted in his conviction that wisdom was but the humble consciousness of human ignorance, I beg him here to read it in any translation of Plato. 238 Xen., Conviv., I. 5. 239 It is in this view that his demon, or, as we should call it, his guardian angel, is to be explained. See Cic., De Div., I. 54. Xen., Mem., I. 1. 4. 240 Truth. He was a moral man; and his desires reached beyond the freedom of the body under law, or that of the mind under knowledge, to the higher freedom of the soul, which can exist only under morality. Full of earnestness to make this known among he confined his instructions neither to school nor class, but sought his pupils in the thoroughfares, the lowly as well as the magnificent amongst his countrymen. In teaching some of the grandest lessons to be learned or practised through liberty, he caught a glimpse of the world to which, not altogether blindfold, he looked forward, and where a place has since been promised to the pure in heart. He was the chosen servant to make one effort, at least, in the preparation of the human mind for the promises of Him who not only beheld the truth, but revealed it to make His followers free. Had the Greeks been slaves to Persia, Macedonia, or Rome, Socrates would scarcely have been born amongst them; had they, on the other hand, been truer to liberty, he would certainly not have been condemned, like a criminal, to die. The design of his life, however, may have been completed in the manner of his death. The very fact, that he wrote nothing, while other philosophers were allowed to compose each a library, as their works in some cases may be styled, compels us to consider Socrates in a peculiar light. It was permitted that the pall should be a little withdrawn from the prospects that had 240 Τοῖς βουλομένοις ἐξῆν ἀκούειν. Xen., Mem., I. 1. 10. long been lost, if they had ever been received; but it was not for man, even with the aid of God, to restore the dead to life, or to begin a new creation. Four centuries before the Saviour, when freedom seemed, perhaps, to have reached its highest development, the promise was made, as we read it, through Socrates, that there was to be a completer freedom granted when human powers should be increased and human virtues purified. He was slain, even though his message was but half delivered, and noways comprehended, when he died. Later in our history, we shall meet with his successors; but they scarcely belong to the liberty of Greece, except that they owed their intelligence to the energy and the achievements of preceding generations. The history of philosophy is important to the history of freedom, only so far as the theories of which the one is composed coincide with the actions of the other. We hear some fuller sounds, indeed, through the silence of the following centuries; but the ears that heard them in their time found little comfort in their tones. There was no other Socrates 241 to learn, much less to show, the truth, so far as it can be attained through liberty alone. His own scholars seemed to forget what he had taught them; Plato would not believe it fit to speak of the deity, towards whom he aspired, before common men; 242 241 We find but one Socrates 242 Plat.,.Timæus, p. 114, ed. amongst them," the Athenians. Stallbaum. Cf. Lactant., De Ira, Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, Vol. VII. Works, p. 136. 11. and Aristotle denied the possibility of persuading the multitude to be virtuous.243 Schools were still 244 opened; but there were few, comparatively speaking, whom they received, fewer still whom they actually informed. Doctrines of one class and another were still propounded; sciences of various kinds were still pursued; but, except in the exact, the mathematical or the physical branches,245 there was no sap to flow, no foliage to endue. The earth was waiting for knowledge from Heaven.246 There remains now nothing that cannot be more rapidly related, within the half or three quarters of a century succeeding to the death of Socrates. It is not necessary to raise our voices or multiply our epithets to describe the offences through which the laws and the liberties of Greece were brought to shame. One kind of evil might infest an oligarchy, as at Sparta, and another kind prey upon a democracy, as at Athens; but there are more general errors to be charged upon the characteristics of the whole nation, as long ago described. The ideality and the rivalry that had hurried state after state, through peace and 243 Arist., Eth. Nic., X. 10, ed. Bekker. Τοὺς δὲ πολλοὺς αδυνατεῖν πρὸς καλοκαγαθίαν προτρέψασθαι. 244 See the account of Aristotle's work, and the remonstrance of Alexander against its being addressed to common people. Plut., Alex., 7. 245 In the mention of which there ought to be included an allusion, at least, to the scholars of Alexandria under the Ptolemies. 246I have a desire," writes Hans Christian Andersen, in Greece, "to express the idea that the godlike was here on earth to maintain its contest, that it is thrust backwards, and yet advances again victoriously through all ages." Story of My Life. war, to the acme each was able to attain, still drove them down the other side to the effeminacy and the dissension in which they were sure to find their ruin. The Thirty Tyrants were driven out of Athens by the heroic enterprise of Thrasybulus, and the laws of Solon were, the same year, nominally restored, under Euclides, the Archon.247 But Socrates was condemned within the next four years. The license of the multitude was at its height in the reaction ensuing upon the servitude and terror from which they had been delivered by leaders whose surrender of Socrates was so much a greater shame than any glory they could have won, that the government of the orator, the satirist, or the buffoon, who presently reigned on the stage or in the assembly, was but precipitated.248 Aristophanes, with all his amazing genius, is only the mouthpiece of his contemporaries; sensitive as they to the love of country inborn in every Athenian, but, like them, insolent where he might have better been reverential, as he was ruthless where it became him to be anxious and compassionate.249 Without the limits of Greece, the Ten Thousand retreated from Cunaxa, under Xenophon, whose 247 A. C. 403. Plut., Aris., 1. 248 As for the assembly itself, see Xen., Hell., I. 7. 12, referring to a still earlier date. Its pay was increased by Agyrrhius in the time of Aristophanes. Schömann, Assemb. Athen., Ch. V. 249 See the conversation between Demosthenes, Nicias, and the sau sage-seller, in the "Knights" (141 et seq.), the abuse of Euripides in the "Frogs," and of Socrates in the "Clouds." Compare an essay by Heyne, Op. Acad., Tom. IV. 23, "Libertatis et æqualitatis civilis in Atheniensium republica delineatio ex Aristophane." |