The Life of Greece

  Gorgias of Leontini carried on this skeptical revolution, but had the good sense to spend most of his life outside of Athens. His career was typical of the union between philosophy and statesmanship in Greece. Born about 483, he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Empedocles, and became so famous in Sicily as an orator and a teacher of oratory that in 427 he was sent by Leontini as an ambassador to Athens. At the Olympic games of 408 he captivated a great crowd by an address in which he appealed to the warring Greeks to make peace among themselves in order to face with unity and confidence the resurrected power of Persia. Traveling from city to city, he expounded his views in a style of oratory so euphuistically ornate, so symmetrically antithetical in idea and phrase, so delicately poised between poetry and prose, that he had no difficulty in attracting students who offered him a hundred minas for a course of instruction. His book On Nature sought to prove three startling propositions: (1) Nothing exists; (2) if anything existed it would be unknowable; and (3) if anything were knowable the knowledge of it could not be communicated from one person to another.*95 Nothing else remains of Gorgias’ writings. After enjoying the hospitality and fees of many states he settled down in Thessaly, and had the wisdom to consume most of his great fortune before his death.96 He lived, as all authorities assure us, to at least one hundred and five; and an ancient writer tells us that “though Gorgias attained to the age of one hundred and eight, his body was not weakened by old age, but to the end of his life he was in sound condition, and his senses were those of a youth.”97

  If the Sophists together constituted a scattered university, Hippias of Elis was a university in himself, and typified the polymath in a world where knowledge was not yet so vast as to be clearly beyond the grasp of one mind. He taught astronomy and mathematics, and made original contributions to geometry; he was a poet, a musician, and an orator; he lectured on literature, morals, and politics; he was an historian, and laid the foundations of Greek chronology by compiling a list of victors at the Olympic games; he was employed by Elis as an envoy to other states; and he knew so many arts and trades that he made with his own hands all his clothing and ornaments.98 His work in philosophy was slight but important: he protested against the degenerative artificiality of city life, contrasted nature with law, and called law a tyrant over mankind.99 Prodicus of Ceos carried on the grammatical work of Protagoras, fixed the parts of speech, and pleased the elders with a fable in which he represented Heracles choosing laborious Virtue instead of easy Vice.100 Other Sophists were not so pious: Antiphon of Athens followed Democritus into materialism and atheism, and defined justice in terms of expediency; Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (if we may take Plato’s word for it) identified right with might, and remarked that the success of villains cast doubt upon the existence of the gods.”101

  All in all, the Sophists must be ranked among the most vital factors in the history of Greece. They invented grammar and logic for Europe; they developed dialectic, analyzed the forms of argument, and taught men how to detect and practice fallacies. Through their stimulus and example reasoning became a ruling passion with the Greeks. By applying logic to language they promoted clarity and precision of thought, and facilitated the accurate transmission of knowledge. Through them prose became a form of literature, and poetry became a vehicle of philosophy. They applied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down, among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellas. “The common opinion” of his time, says Plato, derived “the world and all animals and plants . . . and inanimate substances from . . . some spontaneous and unintelligent cause.”102 Lysias tells of an atheistic society that called itself the kakodaimoniotai, or Devils’ Club, and deliberately met and dined on holydays set apart for fasting.103 Pindar, at the opening of the fifth century, accepted the oracle of Delphi piously; Aeschylus defended it politically; Herodotus, about 450, criticized it timidly; Thucydides, at the end of the century, openly rejected it. Euthyphro complained that when in the Assembly he spoke of oracles, the people laughed at him as an antiquated fool.104

  The Sophists must not be blamed or credited for all of this; much of it was in the air, and was a natural result of growing wealth, leisure, travel, research, and speculation. Their role in the deterioration of morals was likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism and stoicism. But within these modest limits the Sophists unwittingly quickened disintegration. Most of them, barring a thoroughly human love of money, were men of high character and decent life; but they did not transmit to their pupils the traditions or the wisdom that had made or kept them reasonably virtuous despite their discovery of the secular origin and geographical mutability of morals. Their colonial derivation may have led them to underestimate the value of custom as a peaceful substitute for force or law in maintaining morality and order. To define morality or human worth in terms of knowledge, as Protagoras did a generation before Socrates,105 was a heady stimulus to thought, but an unsteadying blow to character; the emphasis on knowledge raised the educational level of the Greeks, but it did not develop intelligence as rapidly as it liberated intellect. The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul. The distinction between “Nature” and convention, and the willingness of minor Sophists to argue that what “Nature” permitted was good regardless of custom or law, sapped the ancient supports of Greek morality, and encouraged many experiments in living. Old men mourned the passing of domestic simplicity and fidelity, and the pursuit of pleasure or wealth unchecked by religious restraints.106 Plato and Thucydides speak of thinkers and public men who rejected morals as superstitions, and acknowledged no right but strength. This unscrupulous individualism turned the logic and rhetoric of the Sophists into an instrument of legal chicanery and political demagogy, and degraded their broad cosmopolitanism into a cautious reluctance to defend their country, or an unprejudiced readiness to sell it to the highest bidder. The religious peasantry and the conservative aristocrats began to agree with the common citizen of the urban democracy that philosophy had become a danger to the state.

  Some of the philosophers themselves joined in the attack upon the Sophists. Socrates condemned them (as Aristophanes was to condemn Socrates) for making error specious with logic and persuasive with rhetoric, and scorned them for taking fees.107 He excused his ignorance of grammar on the ground that he could not afford the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus, but only the one-drachma course, which gave merely the rudiments.108 In an ungenial moment he used a merciless and revealing comparison:

  It is believed among us, Antiphon, that it is possible to dispose of beauty or of wisdom alike honorably or dishonorably; for if a person sells his beauty for money to anyone that wishes to purchase it, men call him a male prostitute; but if anyone makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be an honorable and worthy admirer, we regard him as prudent. In like manner those who sell their wisdom for money to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it were, prostitutes of wisdom; but whoever makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be deserving, and teaches him all the good that he knows, we consider him to act the part which becomes a good and honorable citizen.109

  Plato could afford to agree with this view, being a rich man. Isocrates began his career with a speech Against the Sophists, became a successful professor of rhetoric, and charged a thousand drachmas ($1000) for a course.110 Aristotle continued the attack; he defined a Sophist as one who “is only eager to get rich off his apparent wisdom,”111 and accused Protagoras of “promising to make the worse appear the better reason.”
112

  The tragedy was deepened by the fact that both sides were right. The complaint about fees was unjust: short of a state subsidy no other way was then open to finance higher education. If the Sophists criticized traditions and morals it was, of course, with no evil intent; they thought that they were liberating slaves. They were the intellectual representatives of their time, sharing its passion for the free intellect; like the Encyclopedists of Enlightenment France they swept away the dying past with magnificent élan, and did not live long enough, or think far enough, to establish new institutions in place of those that loosened reason would destroy. In every civilization the time comes when old ways must be re-examined if the society is to readjust itself to irresistible economic change; the Sophists were the instrument of this re-examination, but failed to provide the statesmanship for the readjustment. It remains to their credit that they powerfully stimulated the pursuit of knowledge, and made it fashionable to think. From every corner of the Greek world they brought new ideas and challenges to Athens, and aroused her to philosophical consciousness and maturity. Without them Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would have been impossible.

  V. SOCRATES

  1. The Mask of Silenus

  It is pleasant to stand at last face to face with a personality apparently so real as Socrates. But when we consider the two sources upon which we must rely for our knowledge of Socrates we find that one of them, Plato, writes imaginative dramas, that the other, Xenophon, writes historical novels, and that neither product can be taken as history. “They say,” writes Diogenes Laertius, “that Socrates having heard Plato read the Lysis, cried out, ‘O Heracles! what a number of lies the young man has told about me!’ For Plato had set down a great many things as sayings of Socrates which he had never said.”113 Plato does not pretend to limit himself to fact; probably it never occurred to him that the future might have scant means of distinguishing, in his work, imagination from biography. But he draws so consistent a picture of his master throughout the Dialogues, from Socrates’ youthful timidity in the Parmenides and his insolent loquacity in the Protagoras to the subdued piety and resignation of the Phaedo, that if this was not Socrates, then Plato is one of the greatest character creators in all literature. Aristotle accepts as authentically Socratic the views attributed to Socrates in the Protagoras114 Recently discovered fragments of an Alcibiades written by Aeschines of Sphettos, an immediate disciple of Socrates, tend to confirm the portrait given in the earlier dialogues of Plato, and the story of the philosopher’s attachment to Alcibiades.115 On the other hand, Aristotle classes Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Banquet as forms of fiction, imaginary conversations in which Socrates becomes, more often than not, a mouthpiece for Xenophon’s ideas.*116 If Xenophon honestly played Eckermann to Socrates’ Goethe we can only say that he has carefully collected the master’s safest platitudes; it is incredible that so virtuous a man should have upset a civilization. Other ancient writers did not make the old sage into such a saint; Aristoxenus of Tarentum, about 318, reported, on the testimony of his father—who claimed to have known Socrates—that the philosopher was a person without education, “ignorant and debauched”;117 and Eupolis, the comic poet, rivaled his rival Aristophanes in abusing the great gadfly.118 Making due discount for polemic vitriol it is at least clear that Socrates was a man, hated and loved beyond any other figure of his time.

  His father was a sculptor, and he himself was said to have carved a Hermes, and three Graces that stood near the entrance to the Acropolis.119 His mother was a midwife: it was a standing joke with him that he merely continued her trade, but in the realm of ideas, helping others to deliver themselves of their conceptions. One tradition describes him as the son of a slave;120 it is improbable, for he served as a hoplite (a career open only to citizens), inherited a house from his father, and had seventy minas ($7000) invested for him by his friend Crito;121 for the rest he is represented as poor.122 He paid much attention to the training of the body, and was usually in good physical condition. He made a reputation for himself as a soldier during the Peloponnesian War: in 432 he fought at Potidaea, in 424 at Delium, in 42 2 at Amphipolis. At Potidaea he saved both the life and the arms of the young Alcibiades, and gave up in the youth’s favor his claim to the prize for valor; at Delium he was the last Athenian to give ground to the Spartans, and seems to have saved himself by glaring at the enemy; even the Spartans were frightened. In these campaigns, we are told, he excelled all in endurance and courage, bearing without complaint hunger, fatigue, and cold.124 At home, when he condescended to stay there, he worked as a stonecutter and statuary. He had no interest in travel, and seldom went outside the city and its port. He married Xanthippe, who berated him for neglecting his family; he recognized the justice of her complaint,125 and defended her gallantly to his son and his friends. Marriage disturbed him so little that he seems to have taken an additional wife when the mortality of males in the war led to the temporary legalization of polygamy.128

  All the world knows the face of Socrates. Judging precariously from the bust in the Museo delle Terme at Rome, it was not typically Greek;129 its spacious spread, its flat, broad nose, its thick lips, and heavy beard suggest rather Solon’s friend of the steppes, Anacharsis, or that modern Scythian, Tolstoi. “I say,” Alcibiades insists, even while protesting his love, “that Socrates is exactly like the masks of Silenus, which may be seen sitting in the statuaries’ shops, having pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and there are images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You will not deny, Socrates, that your face is that of a satyr.”130 Socrates raises no objection; to make matters worse he confesses to an unduly large paunch, and hopes to reduce it by dancing.131

  Plato and Xenophon agree in describing his habits and his character. He was content with one simple and shabby robe throughout the year, and liked bare feet better than sandals or shoes.132 He was incredibly free from the acquisitive fever that agitates mankind. Viewing the multitude of articles exposed for sale in the market place, he remarked, “How many things there are that I do not want!”133—and felt himself rich in his poverty. He was a model of moderation and self-control, but all the world away from a saint. He could drink like a gentleman, and needed no timid asceticism to keep him straight.* He was no recluse; he liked good company, and let the rich entertain him now and then; but he made no obeisance to them, could get along very well without them, and rejected the gifts and invitations of magnates and kings.135 All in all he was fortunate: he lived without working, read without writing, taught without routine, drank without dizziness, and died before senility, almost without pain.

  His morals were excellent for his time, but would hardly satisfy all the good people who praise him. He “took fire” at the sight of Charmides, but controlled himself by asking if this handsome lad had also a “noble soul.”136 Plato speaks of Socrates and Alcibiades as lovers, and describes the philosopher “in chase of the fair youth.”137 Though the old man seems to have kept these amours for the most part Platonic, he was not above giving advice to homosexuals and hetairai on how to attract lovers.138 He gallantly promised his help to the courtesan Theodota, who rewarded him with the invitation: “Come often to see me.”139 His good humor and kindliness were so unfailing that those who could stomach his politics found it simple to put up with his morals. When he had passed away Xenophon spoke of him as “so just that he wronged no man in the most trifling affair. . . so temperate that he never preferred pleasure to virtue; so wise that he never erred in distinguishing better from worse . . . so capable of discerning the character of others, and of exhorting them to virtue and honor, that he seemed to be such as the best and happiest of men would be.”140 Or, as Plato put it, with moving simplicity, he “was truly the wisest, and justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.”141

  2. Portrait of a Gadfly

  Being curious and disputatious he became a student of philosophy, and was for a time fascinated by the So
phists who invaded Athens in his youth. There is no evidence that Plato invented the fact as well as the content of Socrates’ meetings with Parmenides, Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and Thrasymachus; it is likely that he saw Zeno when the latter came to Athens about 450, and that he was so infected with Zeno’s dialectic that it never left him.142 Probably he knew Anaxagoras, if not in person then in doctrine; for Archelaus of Miletus, pupil of Anaxagoras, was for a time the teacher of Socrates. Archelaus began as a physicist and ended as a student of morals; he explained the origin and basis of morals on rationalistic lines, and perhaps turned Socrates from science to ethics.143 By all these avenues Socrates came to philosophy, and thenceforth found his “greatest good in daily converse about virtue, examining myself and others; for a life unscrutinized is unworthy of a man.”* So he went prowling among men’s beliefs, prodding them with questions, demanding precise answers and consistent views, and making himself a terror to all who could not think clearly. Even in Hades he proposed to be a gadfly, and “find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise and is not.”144 He protected himself from a similar cross-examination by announcing that he knew nothing; he knew all the questions, but none of the answers; he modestly called himself an “amateur in philosophy.”145 What he meant, presumably, was that he was certain of nothing except man’s fallibility, and had no hard and fast system of dogmas and principles. When the oracle at Delphi, to Chaerephon’s alleged inquiry, “Is any man wiser than Socrates?” gave the alleged reply, “No one,”146 Socrates ascribed the response to his profession of ignorance.