Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/516

 494 HISTORY OF C7KEECE. First, the sentiment now prevalent is founded upon a coavio lion 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 cen- tury B.C. it was unknown. Sokrates himself would not have agreed in it ; and all Grecian governments, oligarchical and democratical alike, recognized the opposite. The testimony fur- nished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the treatises " De Republics. " and " De Legibus," we find that there is noth- ing about which he is more anxious, than to establish an unre- sisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Sokrates was at Athens, would not liave 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 1 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 govern- ment of Greece, as well as in the Platonic Republic, Sokrates 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 mis- chievous principle, assuredly the la'ter is at once the more moderate and the less noxious. Secondly, the force of this last consideration, as an extenuatir/g circumstance in regard to the Athenians, is much increased, when we reflect upon the number of individual enemies whom Sokrates made to himself in the prosecution of his cross-examining process, 1 See Plato, Euthyphron, c. 3, p. 3, D.