Volume 8 — CHAPTER LXVIII. SOKRATES. (continued 2)

It is indisputable, then, that Sokratês laid down a general ethical theory which is too narrow, and which states a part of the truth as if it were the whole. But, as it frequently happens with philosophers who make the like mistake, we find that he did not confine his deductive reasonings within the limits of the theory, but escaped the erroneous consequences by a partial inconsistency. For example; no man ever insisted more emphatically than he, on the necessity of control over the passions and appetites, of enforcing good habits, and on the value of that state of the sentiments and emotions which such a course tended to form.[742] In truth, this is one particular characteristic of his admonitions. He exhorted men to limit their external wants, to be sparing in indulgence, and to cultivate, even in preference to honors and advancement, those pleasures which would surely arise from a performance of duty, as well as from self-examination and the consciousness of internal improvement. This earnest attention, in measuring the elements and conditions of happiness, to the state of the internal associations as contrasted with the effect of external causes, as well as the pains taken to make it appear how much the latter depend upon the former for their power of conferring happiness, and how sufficient is moderate good fortune in respect to externals, provided the internal man be properly disciplined, is a vein of thought which pervades both Sokratês and Plato, and which passed from them, under various modifications, to most of the subsequent schools of ethical philosophy. It is probable that Protagoras or Prodikus, training rich youth for active life, without altogether leaving out such internal element of happiness, would yet dwell upon it less; a point of decided superiority in Sokratês.

The political opinions of Sokratês were much akin to his ethical, and deserve especial notice, as having in part contributed to his condemnation by the dikastery. He thought that the functions of government belonged legitimately to those who knew best how to exercise them for the advantage of the governed. “The legitimate king or governor was not the man who held the sceptre, nor the man elected by some vulgar persons, nor he who had got the post by lot, nor he who had thrust himself in by force or by fraud, but he alone who knew how to govern well.”[743] Just as the pilot governed on shipboard, the surgeon in a sick man’s house, the trainer in a palæstra; every one else being eager to obey these professional superiors, and even thanking and recompensing them for their directions, simply because their greater knowledge was an admitted fact. It was absurd, Sokratês used to contend, to choose public officers by lot, when no one would trust himself on shipboard under the care of a pilot selected by hazard,[744] nor would any one pick out a carpenter or a musician in like manner.

We do not know what provision Sokratês suggested for applying his principle to practice, for discovering who was the fittest man in point of knowledge, or for superseding him in case of his becoming unfit, or in case another fitter than he should arise. The analogies of the pilot, the surgeon, and professional men generally, would naturally conduct him to election by the people, renewable after temporary periods; since no one of these professional persons, whatever may be his positive knowledge, is ever trusted or obeyed except by the free choice of those who confide in him, and who may at any time make choice of another. But it does not appear that Sokratês followed out this part of the analogy. His companions remarked to him that his first-rate intellectual ruler would be a despot, who might, if he pleased, either refuse to listen to good advice, or even put to death those who gave it. “He will not act thus,” replied Sokratês, “for if he does, he will himself be the greatest loser.”[745]

We may notice in this doctrine of Sokratês the same imperfection as that which is involved in the ethical doctrine; a disposition to make the intellectual conditions of political fitness stand for the whole. His negative political doctrine is not to be mistaken: he approved neither of democracy, nor of oligarchy. As he was not attached, either by sentiment or by conviction, to the constitution of Athens, so neither had he the least sympathy with oligarchical usurpers, such as the Four Hundred and the Thirty. His positive ideal state, as far as we can divine it, would have been something like that which is worked out in the “Cyropædia” of Xenophon.

In describing the persevering activity of Sokratês, as a religious and intellectual missionary, we have really described his life; for he had no other occupation than this continual intercourse with the Athenian public; his indiscriminate conversation, and invincible dialectics. Discharging faithfully and bravely his duties as an hoplite on military service,—but keeping aloof from official duty in the dikastery, the public assembly, or the senate-house, except in that one memorable year of the battle of Arginusæ,—he incurred none of those party animosities which an active public life at Athens often provoked. His life was legally blameless, nor had he ever been brought up before the dikastery until his one final trial, when he was seventy years of age. That he stood conspicuous before the public eye in 423 B.C., at the time when the “Clouds” of Aristophanês were brought on the stage, is certain: he may have been, and probably was, conspicuous even earlier: so that we can hardly allow him less than thirty years of public, notorious, and efficacious discoursing, down to his trial in 399 B.C.

It was in that year that Melêtus, seconded by two auxiliaries, Anytus and Lykon, presented against him, and hung up in the appointed place, the portico before the office of the second or king-archon, an indictment against him in the following terms: “Sokratês is guilty of crime: first, for not worshipping the gods whom the city worships, but introducing new divinities of his own; next, for corrupting the youth. The penalty due is—death.”

It is certain that neither the conduct nor the conversation of Sokratês had undergone any alteration for many years past; since the sameness of his manner of talking is both derided by his enemies and confessed by himself. Our first sentiment, therefore, apart from the question of guilt or innocence, is one of astonishment, that he should have been prosecuted, at seventy years of age, for persevering in an occupation which he had publicly followed during twenty-five or thirty years preceding. Xenophon, full of reverence for his master, takes up the matter on much higher ground, and expresses himself in a feeling of indignant amazement that the Athenians could find anything to condemn in a man every way so admirable. But whoever attentively considers the picture which I have presented of the purpose, the working, and the extreme publicity of Sokratês, will rather be inclined to wonder, not that the indictment was presented at last, but that some such indictment had not been presented long before. Such certainly is the impression suggested by the language of Sokratês himself, in the “Platonic Apology.” He there proclaims, emphatically, that though his present accusers were men of consideration, it was neither their enmity, nor their eloquence, which he had now principally to fear; but the accumulated force of antipathy,—the numerous and important personal enemies, each with sympathizing partisans,—the long-standing and uncontradicted calumnies,[746] raised against him throughout his cross-examining career.

In truth, the mission of Sokratês, as he himself describes it, could not but prove eminently unpopular and obnoxious. To convince a man that, of matters which he felt confident of knowing, and had never thought of questioning or even of studying, he is really profoundly ignorant, insomuch that he cannot reply to a few pertinent queries without involving himself in flagrant contradictions, is an operation highly salutary, often necessary, to his future improvement; but an operation of painful surgery, in which, indeed, the temporary pain experienced is one of the conditions almost indispensable to the future beneficial results. It is one which few men can endure without hating the operator at the time; although doubtless such hatred would not only disappear, but be exchanged for esteem and admiration, if they persevered until the full ulterior consequences of the operation developed themselves. But we know, from the express statement of Xenophon, that many, who underwent this first pungent thrust of his dialectics, never came near him again: he disregarded them as laggards,[747] but their voices did not the less count in the hostile chorus. What made that chorus the more formidable, was the high quality and position of its leaders. For Sokratês himself tells us, that the men whom he chiefly and expressly sought out to cross-examine, were the men of celebrity as statesmen, rhetors, poets, or artisans; those at once most sensitive to such humiliation, and most capable of making their enmity effective.

When we reflect upon this great body of antipathy, so terrible both from number and from constituent items, we shall wonder only that Sokratês could have gone on so long standing in the market-place to aggravate it, and that the indictment of Melêtus could have been so long postponed; since it was just as applicable earlier as later, and since the sensitive temper of the people, as to charges of irreligion, was a well-known fact.[748] The truth is, that as history presents to us only one man who ever devoted his life to prosecute this duty of an elenchic, or cross-examining missionary, so there was but one city, in the ancient world at least, wherein he would have been allowed to prosecute it for twenty-five years with safety and impunity; and that city was Athens. I have in a previous volume noted the respect for individual dissent of opinion, taste, and behavior, among one another, which characterized the Athenian population, and which Periklês puts in emphatic relief as a part of his funeral discourse. It was this established liberality of the democratical sentiment at Athens which so long protected the noble eccentricity of Sokratês from being disturbed by the numerous enemies which he provoked: at Sparta, at Thebes, at Argos, Milêtus, or Syracuse, his blameless life would have been insufficient as a shield, and his irresistible dialectic power would have caused him to be only the more speedily silenced. Intolerance is the natural weed of the human bosom, though its growth or development may be counteracted by liberalizing causes; of these, at Athens, the most powerful was, the democratical constitution as there worked, in combination with diffused intellectual and æsthetical sensibility, and keen relish for discourse. Liberty of speech was consecrated, in every man’s estimation, among the first of privileges; every man was accustomed to hear opinions, opposite to his own, constantly expressed, and to believe that others had a right to their opinions as well as himself. And though men would not, as a general principle, have extended such toleration to religious subjects, yet the established habit in reference to other matters greatly influenced their practice, and rendered them more averse to any positive severity against avowed dissenters from the received religious belief. It is certain that there was at Athens both a keener intellectual stimulus, and greater freedom as well of thought as of speech, than in any other city of Greece. The long toleration of Sokratês is one example of this general fact, while his trial proves little, and his execution nothing, against it, as will presently appear.

There must doubtless have been particular circumstances, of which we are scarcely at all informed, which induced his accusers to prefer their indictment at the actual moment, in spite of the advanced age of Sokratês.

In the first place, Anytus, one of the accusers of Sokratês, appears to have become incensed against him on private grounds. The son of Anytus had manifested interest in his conversation, and Sokratês, observing in the young man intellectual impulse and promise, endeavored to dissuade his father from bringing him up to his own trade of a leather-seller.[749] It was in this general way that a great proportion of the antipathy against Sokratês was excited, as he himself tells us in the “Platonic Apology.” The young men were those to whom he chiefly addressed himself, and who, keenly relishing his conversation, often carried home new ideas which displeased their fathers;[750] hence the general charge against Sokratês, of corrupting the youth. Now this circumstance had recently happened in the peculiar case of Anytus, a rich tradesman, a leading man in politics, and just now of peculiar influence in the city, because he had been one of the leading fellow-laborers with Thrasybulus in the expulsion of the Thirty, manifesting an energetic and meritorious patriotism. He, like Thrasybulus and many others, had sustained great loss of property[751] during the oligarchical dominion; which perhaps made him the more strenuous in requiring that his son should pursue trade with assiduity, in order to restore the family fortunes. He seems, moreover, to have been an enemy of all teaching which went beyond the narrowest practicality, hating alike Sokratês and the sophists.[752]

While we can thus point out a recent occurrence, which had brought one of the most ascendent politicians in the city into special exasperation against Sokratês, another circumstance which weighed him down was, his past connection with the deceased Kritias and Alkibiadês. Of these two men, the latter, though he had some great admirers, was on the whole odious; still more from his private insolence and enormities than from his public treason as an exile. But the name of Kritias was detested, and deservedly detested, beyond that of any other man in Athenian history, as the chief director of the unmeasured spoliation and atrocities committed by the Thirty. That Sokratês had educated both Kritias and Alkibiadês, was affirmed by the accusers, and seemingly believed by the general public, both at the time and afterwards.[753] That both of them had been among those who conversed with him, when young men, is an unquestionable fact; to what extent, or down to what period, the conversation was carried, we cannot distinctly ascertain. Xenophon affirms that both of them frequented his society when young, to catch from him an argumentative facility which might be serviceable to their political ambition; that he curbed their violent and licentious propensities, so long as they continued to come to him; that both of them manifested a respectful obedience to him, which seemed in little consonance with their natural tempers; but that they soon quitted him, weary of such restraint, after having acquired as much as they thought convenient of his peculiar accomplishment. The writings of Plato, on the contrary, impress us with the idea that the association of both of them with Sokratês must have been more continued and intimate; for both of them are made to take great part in the Platonic dialogues, while the attachment of Sokratês to Alkibiadês is represented as stronger than that which he ever felt towards any other man; a fact not difficult to explain, since the latter, notwithstanding his ungovernable dispositions, was distinguished in his youth not less for capacity and forward impulse, than for beauty; and since youthful beauty fired the imagination of the Greeks, especially that of Sokratês, more than the charms of the other sex.[754] From the year 420 B.C., in which the activity of Alkibiadês as a political leader commenced, it seems unlikely that he could have seen much of Sokratês, and after the year 415 B.C. the fact is impossible; since in that year he became a permanent exile, with the exception of three or four months in the year 407 B.C. At the moment of the trial of Sokratês, therefore, his connection with Alkibiadês must at least have been a fact long past and gone. Respecting Kritias, we make out less; and as he was a kinsman of Plato, one of the well-known companions of Sokratês, and present at his trial, and himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with Sokratês may have continued longer; at least a color was given for so asserting. Though the supposition that any of the vices either of Kritias or Alkibiadês were encouraged, or even tolerated, by Sokratês, can have arisen in none but prejudiced or ill-informed minds, yet it is certain that such a supposition was entertained; and that it placed him before the public in an altered position after the enormities of the Thirty. Anytus, incensed with him already on the subject of his son, would be doubly incensed against him as the reputed tutor of Kritias.

Of Melêtus, the primary, though not the most important accuser, we know only that he was a poet; of Lykon, that he was a rhetor. Both these classes had been alienated by the cross-examining dialectics to which many of their number had been exposed by Sokratês. They were the last men to bear such an exposure with patience, and their enmity, taken as a class rarely unanimous, was truly formidable when it bore upon any single individual.

We know nothing of the speeches of either of the accusers before the dikastery, except what can be picked out from the remarks in Xenophon and the defence of Plato. Of the three counts of the indictment, the second was the easiest for them to support, on plausible grounds. That Sokratês was a religious innovator, would be considered as proved by the peculiar divine sign, of which he was wont to speak freely and publicly, and which visited no one except himself. Accordingly, in the “Platonic Defence,” he never really replies to this second charge. He questions Melêtus before the dikastery, and the latter is represented as answering, that he meant to accuse Sokratês of not believing in the gods at all;[755] to which imputed disbelief Sokratês answers with an emphatic negative. In support of the first count, however,—the charge of general disbelief in the gods recognized by the city,—nothing in his conduct could be cited; for he was exact in his legal worship like other citizens, and even more than others, if Xenophon is correct.[756] But it would appear that the old calumnies of the Aristophanic “Clouds” were revived, and that the effect of that witty drama, together with similar efforts of Eupolis and others, perhaps hardly less witty, was still enduring; a striking proof that these comedians were no impotent libellers. Sokratês manifests greater apprehension of the effect of the ancient impressions, than of the speeches which had been just delivered against him: but these latter speeches would of course tell, by refreshing the sentiments of the past, and reviving the Aristophanic picture of Sokratês, as a speculator on physics as well as a rhetorical teacher for pleading, making the worse appear the better reason.[757] Sokratês, in the “Platonic Defence,” appeals to the number of persons who had heard him discourse, whether any of them had ever heard him say one word on the subject of physical studies;[758] while Xenophon goes further, and represents him as having positively discountenanced them, on the ground of impiety.[759]

As there were three distinct accusers to speak against Sokratês, so we may reasonably suppose that they would concert beforehand on what topics each should insist; Melêtus undertaking that which related to religion, while Anytus and Lykon would dwell on the political grounds of attack. In the “Platonic Apology,” Sokratês comments emphatically on the allegations of Melêtus, questions him publicly before the dikasts, and criticizes his replies: he makes little allusion to Anytus, or to anything except what is formally embodied in the indictment; and treats the last count, the charge of corrupting youth, in connection with the first, as if the corruption alleged consisted in irreligious teaching. But Xenophon intimates that the accusers, in enforcing this allegation of pernicious teaching, went into other matters quite distinct from the religious tenets of Sokratês, and denounced him as having taught them lawlessness and disrespect, as well towards their parents as towards their country. We find mention made in Xenophon of accusatory grounds similar to those in the “Clouds;” similar also to those which modern authors usually advance against the sophists.

Sokratês, said Anytus and the other accusers, taught young men to despise the existing political constitution, by remarking that the Athenian practice of naming archons by lot was silly, and that no man of sense would ever choose in this way a pilot or a carpenter, though the mischief arising from bad qualification, was in these cases far less than in the case of the archons.[760] Such teaching, it was urged, destroyed in the minds of the hearers respect for the laws and constitution, and rendered them violent and licentious. As examples of the way in which it had worked, his two pupils Kritias and Alkibiadês might be cited, both formed in his school; one, the most violent and rapacious of the Thirty recent oligarchs; the other, a disgrace to the democracy, by his outrageous insolence and licentiousness;[761] both of them authors of ruinous mischief to the city.

Moreover, the youth learned from him conceit of their own superior wisdom, and the habit of insulting their fathers as well as of slighting their other kinsmen. Sokratês told them, it was urged, that even their fathers, in case of madness, might be lawfully put under restraint; and that when a man needed service, those whom he had to look to, were not his kinsmen, as such, but the persons best qualified to render it: thus, if he was sick, he must consult a surgeon; if involved in a lawsuit, those who were most conversant with such a situation. Between friends also, mere good feeling and affection was of little use; the important circumstance was, that they should acquire the capacity of rendering mutual service to each other. No one was worthy of esteem except the man who knew what was proper to be done, and could explain it to others: which meant, urged the accuser, that Sokratês was not only the wisest of men, but the only person capable of making his pupils wise; other advisers being worthless compared with him.[762]

He was in the habit too, the accusation proceeded, of citing the worst passages out of distinguished poets, and of perverting them to the mischievous purpose of spoiling the dispositions of youth, planting in them criminal and despotic tendencies. Thus he quoted a line of Hesiod: “No work is disgraceful; but indolence is disgraceful:” explaining it to mean, that a man might without scruple do any sort of work, base or unjust as it might be, for the sake of profit. Next, Sokratês was particularly fond of quoting those lines of Homer, in the second book of the Iliad, wherein Odysseus is described as bringing back the Greeks, who had just dispersed from the public agora in compliance with the exhortation of Agamemnôn, and were hastening to their ships. Odysseus caresses and flatters the chiefs, while he chides and even strikes the common men; though both were doing the same thing, and guilty of the same fault; if fault it was, to obey what the commander-in-chief had himself just suggested. Sokratês interpreted this passage, the accuser affirmed, as if Homer praised the application of stripes to poor men and the common people.[763]

Nothing could be easier than for an accuser to find matter for inculpation of Sokratês, by partial citations from his continual discourses, given without the context or explanations which had accompanied them; by bold invention, where even this partial basis was wanting; sometimes also by taking up real error, since no man who is continually talking, especially extempore, can always talk correctly. Few teachers would escape, if penal sentences were permitted to tell against them, founded upon evidence such as this. Xenophon, in noticing the imputations, comments upon them all, denies some, and explains others. As to the passages out of Hesiod and Homer, he affirms that Sokratês drew from them inferences quite contrary to those alleged;[764] which latter seem, indeed, altogether unreasonable, invented to call forth the deep-seated democratical sentiment of the Athenians, after the accuser had laid his preliminary ground by connecting Sokratês with Kritias and Alkibiadês. That Sokratês improperly depreciated either filial duty or the domestic affections, is in like manner highly improbable. We may much more reasonably believe the assertion of Xenophon, who represents him to have exhorted the hearer “to make himself as wise, and as capable of rendering service, as possible; so that, when he wished to acquire esteem from father or brother or friend, he might not sit still, in reliance on the simple fact of relationship, but might earn such feeling by doing them positive good.”[765] To tell a young man that mere good feeling would be totally insufficient, unless he were prepared and competent to carry it into action, is a lesson which few parents would wish to discourage. Nor would any generous parent make it a crime against the teaching of Sokratês, that it rendered his son wiser than himself, which probably it would do. To restrict the range of teaching for a young man, because it may make him think himself wiser than his father, is only one of the thousand shapes in which the pleading of ignorance against knowledge was then, and still continues occasionally to be, presented.

Nevertheless, it is not to be denied that these attacks of Anytus bear upon the vulnerable side of the Sokratic general theory of ethics, according to which virtue was asserted to depend upon knowledge. I have already remarked that this is true, but not the whole truth; a certain state of the affections and dispositions being not less indispensable, as conditions of virtue, than a certain state of the intelligence. An enemy, therefore, had some pretence for making it appear that Sokratês, stating a part of the truth as the whole, denied or degraded all that remained. But though this would be a criticism not entirely unfounded against his general theory, it would not hold against his precepts or practical teaching, as we find them in Xenophon; for these, as I have remarked, reach much wider than his general theory, and inculcate the cultivation of habits and dispositions not less strenuously than the acquisition of knowledge.

The censures affirmed to have been cast by Sokratês against the choice of archons by lot at Athens, are not denied by Xenophon. The accuser urged that “by such censures Sokratês excited the young men to despise the established constitution, and to become lawless and violent in their conduct.”[766] This is just the same pretence, of tendency to bring the government into hatred and contempt, on which in former days prosecutions for public libel were instituted against writers in England, and on which they still continue to be abundantly instituted in France, under the first President of the Republic. There can hardly be a more serious political mischief than such confusion of the disapproving critic with a conspirator, and imposition of silence upon dissentient minorities. Nor has there ever been any case in which such an imputation was more destitute of color than that of Sokratês, who appealed always to men’s reason and very little to their feelings; so little, indeed, that modern authors make his coldness a matter of charge against him; who never omitted to inculcate rigid observance of the law, and set the example of such observance himself. Whatever may have been his sentiments about democracy, he always obeyed the democratical government, nor is there any pretence for charging him with participation in oligarchical schemes. It was the Thirty who, for the first time in his long life, interdicted his teaching altogether, and were on the point almost of taking his life; while his intimate friend Chærephon was actually in exile with the democrats.[767]

Xenophon lays great emphasis on two points, when defending Sokratês against his accusers. First, that his own conduct was virtuous, self-denying, and strict in obedience to the law. Next, that he accustomed his hearers to hear nothing except appeals to their reason, and impressed on them obedience only to their rational convictions. That such a man, with so great a weight of presumption in his favor, should be tried and found guilty as a corruptor of youth,—the most undefined of all imaginable charges,—is a grave and melancholy fact in the history of mankind. Yet when we see upon what light evidence modern authors are willing to admit the same charge against the sophists, we have no right to wonder that the Athenians when addressed, not through that calm reason to which Sokratês appealed, but through all their antipathies, religious as well as political, public as well as private—were exasperated into dealing with him as the type and precursor of Kritias and Alkibiadês.

After all, the exasperation, and the consequent verdict of guilty, were not wholly the fault of the dikasts, nor wholly brought about by his accusers and his numerous private enemies. No such verdict would have been given, unless by what we must call the consent and concurrence of Sokratês himself. This is one of the most important facts of the case, in reference both to himself and to the Athenians.

We learn from his own statement in the “Platonic Defence,” that the verdict of guilty was only pronounced by a majority of five or six, amidst a body so numerous as an Athenian dikastery; probably five hundred and fifty-seven in total number,[768] if a confused statement in Diogenes Laërtius can be trusted. Now any one who reads that defence, and considers it in conjunction with the circumstances of the case and the feelings of the dikasts, will see that its tenor is such as must have turned a much greater number of votes than six against him. And we are informed by the distinct testimony of Xenophon,[769] that Sokratês approached his trial with the feelings of one who hardly wished to be acquitted. He took no thought whatever for the preparation of his defence; and when his friend Hermogenês remonstrated with him on the serious consequences of such an omission, he replied, first, that the just and blameless life, which he was conscious of having passed, was the best of all preparations for defence; next, that having once begun to meditate on what it would be proper for him to say, the divine sign had interposed to forbid him from proceeding. He went on to say, that it was no wonder that the gods should deem it better for him to die now, than to live longer. He had hitherto lived in perfect satisfaction, with a consciousness of progressive moral improvement, and with esteem, marked and unabated, from his friends. If his life were prolonged, old age would soon overpower him; he would lose in part his sight, his hearing, or his intelligence; and life with such abated efficacy and dignity would be intolerable to him. Whereas, if he were condemned now, he should be condemned unjustly, which would be a great disgrace to his judges, but none to him; nay, it would even procure for him increase of sympathy and admiration, and a more willing acknowledgment from every one that he had been both a just man and an improving preceptor.[770]

These words, spoken before his trial, intimate a state of belief which explains the tenor of the defence, and formed one essential condition of the final result. They prove that Sokratês not only cared little for being acquitted, but even thought that the approaching trial was marked out by the gods as the term of his life, and that there were good reasons why he should prefer such a consummation as best for himself. Nor is it wonderful that he should entertain that opinion, when we recollect the entire ascendency within him of strong internal conscience and intelligent reflection, built upon an originally fearless temperament, and silencing what Plato[771] calls “the child within us, who trembles before death;” his great love of colloquial influence, and incapacity of living without it; his old age, now seventy years, rendering it impossible that such influence could much longer continue, and the opportunity afforded to him, by now towering above ordinary men under the like circumstances, to read an impressive lesson, as well as to leave behind him a reputation yet more exalted than that which he had hitherto acquired. It was in this frame of mind that Sokratês came to his trial, and undertook his unpremeditated defence, the substance of which we now read in the “Platonic Apology.” His calculations, alike high-minded and well-balanced, were completely realized. Had he been acquitted after such a defence, it would have been not only a triumph over his personal enemies, but would have been a sanction on the part of the people and the popular dikastery to his teaching, which, indeed, had been enforced by Anytus,[772] in his accusing argument, in reference to acquittal generally, even before he heard the defence: whereas his condemnation, and the feelings with which he met it, have shed double and triple lustre over his whole life and character.

Prefaced by this exposition of the feelings of Sokratês, the “Platonic Defence” becomes not merely sublime and impressive, but also the manifestation of a rational and consistent purpose. It does, indeed, include a vindication of himself against two out of the three counts of the indictment; against the charge of not believing in the recognized gods of Athens, and that of corrupting the youth; respecting the second of the three, whereby he was charged with religious innovation, he says little or nothing. But it bears no resemblance to the speech of one standing on his trial, with the written indictment concluding “Penalty, Death,” hanging up in open court before him. On the contrary, it is an emphatic lesson to the hearers, embodied in the frank outpouring of a fearless and self-confiding conscience. It is undertaken, from the beginning, because the law commands; with a faint wish, and even not an unqualified wish, but no hope, that it may succeed.[773] Sokratês first replies to the standing antipathies against him without, arising from the number of enemies whom his cross-examining elenchus had aroused against him, and from those false reports which the Aristophanic “Clouds” had contributed so much to circulate. In accounting for the rise of these antipathies, he impresses upon the dikasts the divine mission under which he was acting, not without considerable doubts whether they will believe him to be in earnest;[774] and gives that interesting exposition of his intellectual campaign, against “the conceit of knowledge without the reality,” of which I have already spoken. He then goes into the indictment, questions Melêtus in open court, and dissects his answers. Having rebutted the charge of irreligion, he reverts again to the imperative mandate of the gods under which he is acting, “to spend his life in the search for wisdom, and in examining himself as well as others;” a mandate, which if he were to disobey, he would be then justly amenable to the charge of irreligion;[775] and he announces to the dikasts distinctly, that, even if they were now to acquit him, he neither could nor would relax in the course which he had been pursuing.[776] He considers that the mission imposed upon him is among the greatest blessings ever conferred by the gods upon Athens.[777] He deprecates those murmurs of surprise or displeasure, which his discourse evidently called forth more than once,[778] though not so much on his own account as on that of the dikasts, who will be benefited by hearing him, and who will hurt themselves and their city much more than him, if they should now pronounce condemnation.[779] It was not on his own account that he sought to defend himself, but on account of the Athenians, lest they by condemning him should sin against the gracious blessing of the god; they would not easily find such another, if they should put him to death.[780] Though his mission had spurred him on to indefatigable activity in individual colloquy, yet the divine sign had always forbidden him from taking active part in public proceedings; on the two exceptional occasions when he had stood publicly forward,—once under the democracy, once under the oligarchy,—he had shown the same resolution as at present; not to be deterred by any terrors from that course which he believed to be just.[781] Young men were delighted as well as improved by listening to his cross-examinations; in proof of the charge that he had corrupted them, no evidence had been produced; neither any of themselves, who, having been once young when they enjoyed his conversation, had since grown elderly; nor any of their relatives; while he on his part could produce abundant testimony to the improving effect of his society, from the relatives of those who had profited by it.[782]

“No man (says he) knows what death is; yet men fear it as if they knew well that it was the greatest of all evils, which is just a case of that worst of all ignorance, the conceit of knowing what you do not really know. For my part, this is the exact point on which I differ from most other men, if there be any one thing in which I am wiser than they; as I know nothing about Hades, so I do not pretend to any knowledge; but I do know well, that disobedience to a person better than myself, either god or man, is both an evil and a shame; nor will I ever embrace evil certain, in order to escape evil which may for aught I know be a good.[783] Perhaps you may feel indignant at the resolute tone of my defence; you may have expected that I should do as most others do in less dangerous trials than mine; that I should weep, beg and entreat for my life, and bring forward my children and relatives to do the same. I have relatives like other men, and three children; but not one of them shall appear before you for any such purpose. Not from any insolent dispositions on my part, nor any wish to put a slight upon you, but because I hold such conduct to be degrading to the reputation which I enjoy; for I have a reputation for superiority among you, deserved or undeserved as it may be. It is a disgrace to Athens, when her esteemed men lower themselves, as they do but too often, by such mean and cowardly supplications; and you dikasts, instead of being prompted thereby to spare them, ought rather to condemn them the more for so dishonoring the city.[784] Apart from any reputation of mine, too, I should be a guilty man, if I sought to bias you by supplications. My duty is to instruct and persuade you, if I can; but you have sworn to follow your convictions in judging according to the laws, not to make the laws bend to your partiality; and it is your duty so to do. Far be it from me to habituate you to perjury; far be it from you to contract any such habit. Do not, therefore, require of me proceedings dishonorable in reference to myself, as well as criminal and impious in regard to you, especially at a moment when I am myself rebutting an accusation of impiety advanced by Melêtus. I leave to you and to the god, to decide as may turn out best both for me and for you.”[785]

No one who reads the “Platonic Apology” of Sokratês will ever wish that he had made any other defence. But it is the speech of one who deliberately foregoes the immediate purpose of a defence, persuasion of his judges; who speaks for posterity, without regard to his own life: “solâ posteritatis curâ, et abruptis vitæ blandimentis.”[786] The effect produced upon the dikasts was such as Sokratês anticipated beforehand, and heard afterwards without surprise as without discomposure, in the verdict of guilty. His only surprise was, at the extreme smallness of the majority whereby that verdict was passed.[787] And this is the true matter for astonishment. Never before had the Athenian dikasts heard such a speech addressed to them. While all of them, doubtless, knew Sokratês as a very able and very eccentric man, respecting his purposes and character they would differ; some regarding him with unqualified hostility, a few others with respectful admiration, and a still larger number with simple admiration for ability, without any decisive sentiment either of antipathy or esteem. But by all these three categories, hardly excepting even his admirers, the speech would be felt to carry one sting which never misses its way to the angry feelings of the judicial bosom, whether the judges in session be one or a few or many, the sting of “affront to the court.” The Athenian dikasts were always accustomed to be addressed with deference, often with subservience: they now heard themselves lectured by a philosopher who stood before them like a fearless and invulnerable superior, beyond their power, though awaiting their verdict; one who laid claim to a divine mission, which probably many of them believed to be an imposture, and who declared himself the inspired uprooter of “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” which purpose many would not understand, and some would not like. To many, his demeanor would appear to betray an insolence not without analogy to Alkibiadês or Kritias, with whom his accuser had compared him. I have already remarked, in reference to his trial, that, considering the number of personal enemies whom he made, the wonder is, not that he was tried at all, but that he was not tried until so late in his life: I now remark in reference to the verdict, that, considering his speech before the dikastery, we cannot be surprised that he was found guilty, but only that such verdict passed by so small a majority as five or six.

That the condemnation of Sokratês was brought on distinctly by the tone and tenor of his defence, is the express testimony of Xenophon. “Other persons on trial (he says) defended themselves in such manner as to conciliate the favor of the dikasts, or flatter, or entreat them, contrary to the laws, and thus obtained acquittal. But Sokratês would resort to nothing of this customary practice of the dikastery contrary to the laws. Though he might easily have been let off by the dikasts, if he would have done anything of the kind even moderately, he preferred rather to adhere to the laws and die, than to save his life by violating them.”[788] Now no one in Athens except Sokratês, probably, would have construed the laws as requiring the tone of oration which he adopted; nor would he himself have so construed them, if he had been twenty years younger, with less of acquired dignity, and more years of possible usefulness open before him. Without debasing himself by unbecoming flattery or supplication, he would have avoided lecturing them as a master and superior,[789] or ostentatiously asserting a divine mission for purposes which they would hardly understand, or an independence of their verdict which they might construe as defiance. The rhetor Lysias is said to have sent to him a composed speech for his defence, which he declined to use, not thinking it suitable to his dignity. But such a man as Lysias would hardly compose what would lower the dignity even of the loftiest client, though he would look to the result also; nor is there any doubt that if Sokratês had pronounced it,—or even a much less able speech, if inoffensive,—he would have been acquitted. Quintilian,[790] indeed, expresses his satisfaction that Sokratês maintained that towering dignity which brought out the rarest and most exalted of his attributes, but which at the same time renounced all chance of acquittal. Few persons will dissent from this criticism: but when we look at the sentence, as we ought in fairness to do, from the point of view of the dikasts, justice will compel us to admit that Sokratês deliberately brought it upon himself.

If the verdict of guilty was thus brought upon Sokratês by his own consent and coöperation, much more may the same remark be made respecting the capital sentence which followed it. In Athenian procedure, the penalty inflicted was determined by a separate vote of the dikasts, taken after the verdict of guilty. The accuser having named the penalty which he thought suitable, the accused party on his side named some lighter penalty upon himself; and between these two the dikasts were called on to make their option, no third proposition being admissible. The prudence of an accused party always induced him to propose, even against himself, some measure of punishment which the dikasts might be satisfied to accept, in preference to the heavier sentence invoked by his antagonist.

Now Melêtus, in his indictment and speech against Sokratês, had called for the infliction of capital punishment. It was for Sokratês to make his own counter-proposition, and the very small majority, by which the verdict had been pronounced, afforded sufficient proof that the dikasts were no way inclined to sanction the extreme penalty against him. They doubtless anticipated, according to the uniform practice before the Athenian courts of justice, that he would suggest some lesser penalty; fine, imprisonment, exile, disfranchisement, etc. And had he done this purely and simply, there can be little doubt that the proposition would have passed. But the language of Sokratês, after the verdict, was in a strain yet higher than before it; and his resolution to adhere to his own point of view, disdaining the smallest abatement or concession, only the more emphatically pronounced. “What counter proposition shall I make to you (he said) as a substitute for the penalty of Melêtus? Shall I name to you the treatment which I think I deserve at your hands? In that case, my proposition would be that I should be rewarded with a subsistence at the public expense in the prytaneum; for that is what I really deserve as a public benefactor; one who has neglected all thought of his own affairs, and embraced voluntary poverty, in order to devote himself to your best interests, and to admonish you individually on the serious necessity of mental and moral improvement. Assuredly, I cannot admit that I have deserved from you any evil whatever; nor would it be reasonable in me to propose exile or imprisonment, which I know to be certain and considerable evils, in place of death, which may perhaps be not an evil, but a good. I might, indeed, propose to you a pecuniary fine; for the payment of that would be no evil. But I am poor, and have no money: all that I could muster might perhaps amount to a mina: and I therefore propose to you a fine of one mina, as punishment on myself. Plato, and my other friends near me, desire me to increase this sum to thirty minæ, and they engage to pay it for me. A fine of thirty minæ, therefore, is the counter penalty which I submit for your judgment.”[791]

Subsistence in the prytaneum at the public expense, was one of the greatest honorary distinctions which the citizens of Athens ever conferred; an emphatic token of public gratitude. That Sokratês, therefore, should proclaim himself worthy of such an honor, and talk of assessing it upon himself in lieu of a punishment, before the very dikasts who had just passed against him a verdict of guilty, would be received by them as nothing less than a deliberate insult; a defiance of judicial authority, which it was their duty to prove, to an opinionated and haughty citizen, that he could not commit with impunity. The persons who heard his language with the greatest distress, were doubtless Plato, Krito, and his other friends around him; who, though sympathizing with him fully, knew well that he was assuring the success of the proposition of Melêtus,[792] and would regret that he should thus throw away his life by what they would think an ill-placed and unnecessary self-exaltation. Had he proposed, with little or no preface, the substitute-fine of thirty minæ with which this part of his speech concluded, there is every reason for believing that the majority of dikasts would have voted for it.

The sentence of death passed against him, by what majority we do not know. But Sokratês neither altered his tone, nor manifested any regret for the language by which he had himself seconded the purpose of his accusers. On the contrary, he told the dikasts, in a short address prior to his departure for the prison, that he was satisfied both with his own conduct and with the result. The divine sign, he said, which was wont to restrain him, often on very small occasions, both in deeds and in words, had never manifested itself once to him throughout the whole day, neither when he came thither at first, nor at any one point throughout his whole discourse. The tacit acquiescence of this infallible monitor satisfied him not only that he had spoken rightly, but that the sentence passed was in reality no evil to him; that to die now was the best thing which could befall him.[793] Either death was tantamount to a sound, perpetual, and dreamless sleep, which in his judgment would be no loss, but rather a gain, compared with the present life; or else, if the common mythes were true, death would transfer him to a second life in Hades, where he would find all the heroes of the Trojan war, and of the past generally, so as to pursue in conjunction with them the business of mutual cross-examination, and debate on ethical progress and perfection.[794]

There can be no doubt that the sentence really appeared to Sokratês in this point of view, and to his friends also, after the event had happened, though doubtless not at the time when they were about to lose him. He took his line of defence advisedly, and with full knowledge of the result. It supplied him with the fittest of all opportunities for manifesting, in an impressive manner, both his personal ascendency over human fears and weakness, and the dignity of what he believed to be his divine mission. It took him away in his full grandeur and glory, like the setting of the tropical sun, at a moment when senile decay might be looked upon as close at hand. He calculated that his defence and bearing on the trial would be the most emphatic lesson which he could possibly read to the youth of Athens; more emphatic, probably, than the sum total of those lessons which his remaining life might suffice to give, if he shaped his defence otherwise. This anticipation of the effect of the concluding scene of his life, setting the seal on all his prior discourses, manifests itself in portions of his concluding words to the dikasts, wherein he tells them that they will not, by putting him to death, rid themselves of the importunity of the cross-examining elenchus; that numbers of young men, more restless and obtrusive than he, already carried within them that impulse, which they would now proceed to apply; his superiority having hitherto kept them back.[795] It was thus the persuasion of Sokratês, that his removal would be the signal for numerous apostles, putting forth with increased energy that process of interrogatory test and spur to which he had devoted his life, and which doubtless was to him far dearer and more sacred than his life. Nothing could be more effective than his lofty bearing on his trial, for inflaming the enthusiasm of young men thus predisposed; and the loss of life was to him compensated by the missionary successors whom he calculated on leaving behind.

Under ordinary circumstances, Sokratês would have drunk the cup of hemlock in the prison, on the day after his trial. But it so happened that the day of his sentence was immediately after that on which the sacred ship started on its yearly ceremonial pilgrimage from Athens to Delos, for the festival of Apollo. Until the return of this vessel to Athens, it was accounted unholy to put any person to death by public authority. Accordingly, Sokratês remained in prison,—and we are pained to read, actually with chains on his legs,—during the interval that this ship was absent, thirty days altogether. His friends and companions had free access to him, passing nearly all their time with him in the prison; and Krito had even arranged a scheme for procuring his escape, by a bribe to the jailer. This scheme was only prevented from taking effect by the decided refusal of Sokratês to become a party in any breach of the law;[796] a resolution, which we should expect as a matter of course, after the line which he had taken in his defence. His days were spent in the prison, in discourse respecting ethical and human subjects, which had formed the charm and occupation of his previous life: it is to the last of these days that his conversation with Simmias, Kebês, and Phædon, on the immortality of the soul is referred, in the Platonic dialogue called “Phædon.” Of that conversation the main topics and doctrines are Platonic rather than Sokratic. But the picture which the dialogue presents of the temper and state of mind of Sokratês, during the last hours of his life, is one of immortal beauty and interest, exhibiting his serene and even playful equanimity, amidst the uncontrollable emotions of his surrounding friends,—the genuine, unforced persuasion, governing both his words and his acts, of what he had pronounced before the dikasts, that the sentence of death was no calamity to him,[797]—and the unabated maintenance of that earnest interest in the improvement of man and society, which had for so many years formed both his paramount motive and his active occupation. The details of the last scene are given with minute fidelity, even down to the moment of his dissolution; and it is consoling to remark that the cup of hemlock—the means employed for executions by public order at Athens—produced its effect by steps far more exempt from suffering than any natural death which was likely to befall him. Those who have read what has been observed above respecting the strong religious persuasions of Sokratês, will not be surprised to hear that his last words, addressed to Krito immediately before he passed into a state of insensibility, were: “Krito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: discharge the debt, and by no means omit it.”[798]

Thus perished the “parens philosophiæ,” the first of ethical philosophers; a man who opened to science both new matter, alike copious and valuable; and a new method, memorable not less for its originality and efficacy, than for the profound philosophical basis on which it rests. Though Greece produced great poets, orators, speculative philosophers, historians, etc., yet other countries having the benefit of Grecian literature to begin with, have nearly equalled her in all these lines, and surpassed her in some. But where are we to look for a parallel to Sokratês, either in or out of the Grecian world? The cross-examining elenchus, which he not only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect and to such noble purposes, has been mute ever since his last conversation in the prison; for even his great successor Plato was a writer and lecturer, not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found strong enough to bend his bow; much less, sure enough to use it as he did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory evidence, how much can be done by this sort of intelligent interrogation; how powerful is the interest which it can be made to inspire; how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening dormant reason and generating new mental power.

It has been often customary to exhibit Sokratês as a moral preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself the general reverence attached to his name. This is, indeed, a true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute, nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other hand, Arkesilaus, and the New Academy,[799] a century and more afterwards, thought that they were following the example of Sokratês—and Cicero seems to have thought so too—when they reasoned against everything; and when they laid it down as a system, that, against every affirmative position, an equal force of negative argument might be brought up as counterpoise. Now this view of Sokratês is, in my judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. He laid down a clear, though erroneous line of distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. About physics, he was more than a skeptic; he thought that man could know nothing; the gods did not intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken, for all except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not acquire such information, but ought not to labor after it. But respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of Sokratês were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge; a field, wherein, with that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them. Nay, Sokratês went a step further; and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Sokratês felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, and patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it; yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Sokratês found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards: “Opinio copiæ inter causas inopiæ est.” Sokratês found that those notions respecting human and social affairs, on which each man relied and acted, were nothing but spontaneous products of the “intellectus sibi permissus,” of the intellect left to itself either without any guidance, or with only the blind guidance of sympathies, antipathies, authority, or silent assimilation. They were products got together, to use Bacon’s language, “from much faith and much chance, and from the primitive suggestions of boyhood,” not merely without care or study, but without even consciousness of the process, and without any subsequent revision. Upon this basis the sophists, or professed teachers for active life, sought to erect a superstructure of virtue and ability; but to Sokratês, such an attempt appeared hopeless and contradictory—not less impracticable than Bacon in his time pronounced it to be, to carry up the tree of science into majesty and fruit-bearing, without first clearing away those fundamental vices which lay unmolested and in poisonous influence round its root. Sokratês went to work in the Baconian manner and spirit; bringing his cross-examining process to bear, as the first condition to all further improvement, upon these rude, self-begotten, incoherent generalizations, which passed in men’s minds for competent and directing knowledge. But he, not less than Bacon, performs this analysis, not with a view to finality in the negative, but as the first stage towards an ulterior profit; as the preliminary purification, indispensable to future positive result. In the physical sciences, to which Bacon’s attention was chiefly turned, no such result could be obtained without improved experimental research, bringing to light facts new and yet unknown; but on those topics which Sokratês discussed, the elementary data of the inquiry were all within the hearer’s experience, requiring only to be pressed upon his notice, affirmatively as well as negatively, together with the appropriate ethical and political end; in such manner as to stimulate within him the rational effort requisite for combining them anew upon consistent principles.

If, then, the philosophers of the New Academy considered Sokratês either as a skeptic, or as a partisan of systematic negation, they misinterpreted his character, and mistook the first stage of his process—that which Plato, Bacon, and Herschel call the purification of the intellect—for the ultimate goal. The elenchus, as Sokratês used it, was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment.[800]

There are two points, and two points only, in topics concerning man and society, with regard to which Sokratês is a skeptic; or rather, which he denies; and on the negation of which, his whole method and purpose turn. He denies, first, that men can know that on which they have bestowed no conscious effort, no deliberate pains, no systematic study, in learning. He denies, next, that men can practise what they do not know;[801] that they can be just, or temperate, or virtuous generally, without knowing what justice, or temperance, or virtue is. To imprint upon the minds of his hearers his own negative conviction, on these two points is, indeed, his first object, and the primary purpose of his multiform dialectical manœuvring. But though negative in his means, Sokratês is strictly positive in his ends; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive result; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured, comprehensive, self-explanatory knowledge, as the condition and guarantee of virtuous practice. Sokratês was, indeed, the reverse of a skeptic; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and practical eye; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception of the road which he was travelling; no man ever combined, in like manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary,[802] with the acuteness, the originality, the inventive resource, and the generalizing comprehension, of a philosopher.

His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value and of universal application. That purification of the intellect, which Bacon signalized as indispensable for rational or scientific progress, the Sokratic elenchus affords the only known instrument for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument may have been applied since the death of its inventor, the necessity and use of it neither have disappeared, nor ever can disappear. There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Sokratês made war: there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association, resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparates or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases, and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account: there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education, to break up, disentangle, analyze, and reconstruct, these ancient mental compounds; and who has not been driven to do it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial elenchus no longer stands in the market-place to lend him help and stimulus.

To hear of any man,[803] especially of so illustrious a man, being condemned to death on such accusations as that of heresy and alleged corruption of youth, inspires at the present day a sentiment of indignant reprobation, the force of which I have no desire to enfeeble. The fact stands eternally recorded as one among the thousand misdeeds of intolerance, religious and political. But since amidst this catalogue each item has its own peculiar character, grave or light, we are bound to consider at what point of the scale the condemnation of Sokratês is to be placed, and what inferences it justifies in regard to the character of the Athenians. Now if we examine the circumstances of the case, we shall find them all extenuating; and so powerful, indeed, as to reduce such inferences to their minimum, consistent with the general class to which the incident belongs.

First, the sentiment now prevalent is founded upon a conviction that such matters as heresy and heretical teaching of youth are not proper for judicial cognizance. Even in the modern world, such a conviction is of recent date; and in the fifth century B.C. it was unknown. Sokratês himself would not have agreed in it; and all Grecian governments, oligarchical and democratical alike, recognized the opposite. The testimony furnished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the treatises “De Republicâ” and “De Legibus,” we find that there is nothing about which he is more anxious, than to establish an unresisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Sokratês was at Athens, would not have been allowed to pursue his vocation for a week, in the Platonic Republic. Plato would not, indeed, condemn him to death; but he would put him to silence, and in case of need send him away. This, in fact, is the consistent deduction, if you assume that the state is to determine what is orthodoxy and orthodox teaching, and to repress what contradicts its own views. Now all the Grecian states, including Athens, held this principle[804] of interference against the dissenting teacher. But at Athens, though the principle was recognized, yet the application of it was counteracted by resisting forces which it did not find elsewhere; by the democratical constitution, with its liberty of speech and love of speech, by the more active spring of individual intellect, and by the toleration, greater there than anywhere else, shown to each man’s peculiarities of every sort. In any other government of Greece, as well as in the Platonic Republic, Sokratês would have been quickly arrested in his career, even if not severely punished; in Athens, he was allowed to talk and teach publicly for twenty-five or thirty years, and then condemned when an old man. Of these two applications of the same mischievous principle, assuredly the latter is at once the more moderate and the less noxious.

Secondly, the force of this last consideration, as an extenuating circumstance in regard to the Athenians, is much increased, when we reflect upon the number of individual enemies whom Sokratês made to himself in the prosecution of his cross-examining process. Here were a multitude of individuals, including men personally the most eminent and effective in the city, prompted by special antipathies, over and above general convictions, to call into action the dormant state-principle of intolerance against an obnoxious teacher. If, under such provocation, he was allowed to reach the age of seventy, and to talk publicly for so many years, before any real Melêtus stood forward, this attests conspicuously the efficacy of the restraining dispositions among the people, which made their practical habits more liberal than their professed principles.

Thirdly, whoever has read the account of the trial and defence of Sokratês, will see that he himself contributed quite as much to the result as all the three accusers united. Not only he omitted to do all that might have been done without dishonor, to insure acquittal, but he held positive language very nearly such as Melêtus himself would have sought to put in his mouth. He did this deliberately,—having an exalted opinion both of himself and his own mission,—and accounting the cup of hemlock, at his age, to be no calamity. It was only by such marked and offensive self-exaltation that he brought on the first vote of the dikastery, even then the narrowest majority, by which he was found guilty: it was only by a still more aggravated manifestation of the same kind, even to the pitch of something like insult, that he brought on the second vote, which pronounced the capital sentence. Now it would be uncandid not to allow for the effect of such a proceeding on the minds of the dikastery. They were not at all disposed, of their own accord, to put in force the recognized principle of intolerance against him. But when they found that the man who stood before them charged with this offence, addressed them in a tone such as dikasts had never heard before and could hardly hear with calmness, they could not but feel disposed to credit all the worst inferences which his accusers had suggested, and to regard Sokratês as a dangerous man both religiously and politically, against whom it was requisite to uphold the majesty of the court and constitution.

In appreciating this memorable incident, therefore, though the mischievous principle of intolerance cannot be denied, yet all the circumstances show that that principle was neither irritable nor predominant in the Athenian bosom; that even a large body of collateral antipathies did not readily call it forth against any individual; that the more liberal and generous dispositions, which deadened its malignity, were of steady efficacy, not easily overborne; and that the condemnation ought to count as one of the least gloomy items in an essentially gloomy catalogue.

Let us add, that as Sokratês himself did not account his own condemnation and death, at his age, to be any misfortune, but rather a favorable dispensation of the gods, who removed him just in time to escape that painful consciousness of intellectual decline which induced Demokritus to prepare the poison for himself, so his friend Xenophon goes a step further, and while protesting against the verdict of guilty, extols the manner of death as a subject of triumph; as the happiest, most honorable, and most gracious way, in which the gods could set the seal upon a useful and exalted life.[805]

It is asserted by Diodorus, and repeated with exaggerations by other later authors, that after the death of Sokratês the Athenians bitterly repented of the manner in which they had treated him, and that they even went so far as to put his accusers to death without trial.[806] I know not upon what authority this statement is made, and I disbelieve it altogether. From the tone of Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” there is every reason to presume that the memory of Sokratês still continued to be unpopular at Athens when that collection was composed. Plato, too, left Athens immediately after the death of his master, and remained absent for a long series of years: indirectly, I think, this affords a presumption that no such reaction took place in Athenian sentiment as that which Diodorus alleges; and the same presumption is countenanced by the manner in which the orator Æschinês speaks of the condemnation, half a century afterwards. I see no reason to believe that the Athenian dikasts, who doubtless felt themselves justified, and more than justified, in condemning Sokratês after his own speech, retracted that sentiment after his decease.