Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/488

 466 HISTORY OF GREECE. In truth, the mission of Sokrates, 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 know- ing, 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 con- ditions 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 Xeno- phon, that many, who underwent this first pungent thrust of his dialectics, never came near him again : he disregarded them as laggards, 1 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 Sokrates 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 ; tho?e 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 Sokrates could have gone on so long standing in the market-place to aggravate it, and that the indictment of Meletus could have been so long postponed ; since it was just as applica- ble earlier as later, and since the sensitive temper of the people, as to charges of irreligion, was a well-known fact. 2 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 1 Xen. Mem. iv, 2, 40. IToA/lot fj.lv ovv TUV OVTU 6ia--&evTuv iiirb 2u OuroDf ouKen airu Trpoayeaav, oi)f not /3/.aKurepovf EVOJU^EV. rode
 * Plato, Euthyphron, c. 2, p. 3. C. (Jwf ort t>Jw/?oA.a TU rotavra irpd