Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/280

 58 HISTORY OF GREECE. of teachers or professors, above the rank of the elementary teacher of letters, or grammatist. If such an edict could have been maintained in force for a generation, combined with the other mandates of the Thirty, the city out of which Sophokles and Euripides had just died, and in which Plato and Isokrates were in vigorous age, the former twenty-five, the latter twenty- nine, would have been degraded to the intellectual level of the meanest community in Greece. It was not uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those assemblies wherein youths came together for the purpose of common training, either intel- lectual or gymnastic ; as well as the public banquets and clubs, or associations, as being dangerous to his authority, and tending to elevation of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the citizens. 1 The enormities of the Thirty had provoked severe comments from the philosopher Sokrates, whose life was spent in conversa- tion on instructive subjects with those young men who sought his society, though he never took money from any pupil. These comments had been made known to Kritias and Charikles, who sent for him, reminded him of the prohibitive law, and peremp- torily commanded him to abstain for the future from all conversa- tion with youths. Sokrates met this order by putting some ques- tions to those who gave it, in his usual style of puzzling scrutiny, destined to expose the vagueness of the terms ; and to draw the line, or rather to show that no definite line could be drawn, between that which was permitted and that which was forbidden. But he soon perceived that his interrogations produced only a feeling of disgust and wrath, menacing to his own safety. The tyrants ended by repeating their interdict in yet more peremp- tory terms, and by giving Sokrates to understand, that they were not ignorant of the censures which he had cast upon them. 2 Though our evidence does not enable us to make out the pre- cise dates of these various oppressions of the Thirty, yet it seems probable that this prohibition of teaching must have been among their earlier enactments ; at any rate, considerably anterior to the death of Theramenes, and thr general expulsion out of the walls of all except the privileged Three Thousand. Their 1 Axistot. Polit. v, 9, 2. * Xenoph. Mvmorab. i, 2, 33-.19