Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/486

 464 HISTORY OF GREECE. sional 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 Sokrates 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 Sokrates, " for if he does, he will himself be the greatest loser." ' "We may notice in this doctrine of Sokrates the same imperfec- tion as that which is involved in the ethical doctrine ; a dispo- sition to make the intellectual conditions of political fitness stand for the whole. His negative political doctrine is not to be mis- taken : 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 " Cyropaedia" of Xenophon. In describing the persevering activity of Sokrates, 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 Ar- ginusae, 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 Aristophanes were brought on the stage, is certain : he may have been, and probably was, conspicu- ous 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. 1 Xcn. Mem. iii 9, 12: compare Plato, Gorgias c. 5G. pp. 469, 470.