Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/562

556 is due in no small degree to the fact that his style is ponderous enough to prevent popularization of his works and to conceal defects in his system of social morals; he will continue to be read by only a few and the verdict of four centuries ago is likely to remain unchallenged. But his enduring reputation is due quite as much to his influence on Christian theology as to his profundity of thought.

Socrates, as described by his disciples, was a picturesque but by no means a wholly inviting personality. A careless sloven, of unattractive face and figure, a lounger at street corners, neglectful of obligations to his family, casting slurs publicly on his burdened wife, he was able, in spite of all, to hold the admiration of a thoughtful dreamer like Plato, of a young rake like Alcibiades, of brilliant young men about town like Xenophon and Critias. His range of thought was wide and his versatility remarkable; he could discuss lofty and commonplace topics with equal ease; he was able to speak with authority respecting the immortality of the soul and with equal authority he could advise the fashionable prostitute, Theodote, as to the best methods of coaxing and of retaining her lovers. Socrates was unquestionably a man of great intellect and through his disciples he has exerted great influence on the world; in his personal morals, he was far superior to his surroundings; but he was very far from being the ideal sage.

The essays by Cicero and Seneca are so lofty in tone that the reader is puzzled to determine whether they were written under the influence of a stinging conscience or simply to prove that high thinking may survive low living. Too many moralists then, as in later days, were like guide posts on a wagon—pointing in one direction while traveling in another. It is absurd to look to Greece and Rome for models of purity and devotion. The condition of Greece, literary Greece, was gross beyond conception; it was utter foulness. The lyric poets were dainty indeed, but their daintiness too often was exhausted in admiration of the basest vices. Epictetus, in praising the virtue of Socrates, tells incidentally the whole story of Greek morals; while the high esteem in which the Homeric poems were held shows that, beneath the veneer of civilization, there still existed the savage, even among the scholars. And this was evidenced equally by the glorification of physical perfection; they could not plead the excuse of American college presidents, that it gave them free advertising. In Rome, gross immorality had gained full sway even during the golden age of literature; while, in later times, the moral conditions were so bad that men and women, who would be ordinary mortals in our day, became by contrast with those about them the immortal models of purity and devotion; the dreary platitudes of a Marcus Aurelius shine amid the moral darkness as diamonds in a pile of rubbish.

The models of honor to be found among Grecian statesmen are such