Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XV.djvu/156

 148 SOCRATES the city, within which alone he found instruc- tion, and beyond the walls of which he never went, except once to a public festival, and again to serve as hoplite at Potideea (about 431), on the outbreak of the Peloponnesian struggle, at Deliura (424), and at Amphipolis (422). At Potideea he went barefoot over ice and snow, surpassed all other soldiers first in the cheerful endurance of hunger and then in the apparent enjoyment of plenty, and saved the life of Alcibiades, to whom, instead of himself, his own request caused the prize of valor to be awarded. His composure and bravery were alike distinguished at Delium and Amphipolis. He sought influence neither as a soldier nor statesman, and once only dis- charged a political office. In 406 he was one of the five prytanes of the senate, when the illegal sentence of death was proposed against the victors at the Arginusse ; and he, being epistates for that day, refused to put the ques- tion to vote, despite the menaces of the peo- ple and the assembly. With four other citi- zens he was summoned by the thirty tyrants to go to Salamis and bring back Leon to pun- ishment ; and he alone refused. Engaged as a missionary in the service of truth and virtue, he was warned from participating in public affairs by what he called a 6aifj6vtov, i. e., an internal voice, which he professed to hear from childhood in the way of restraint, but never in the way of instigation, and which he was ac- customed to speak of familiarly and to obey implicitly. This demon or genius of Socrates, which was not personified by himself, was re- garded by Plutarch as an intermediate being between gods and men, by the fathers of the church as an evil spirit, by Le Clerc as one of the fallen angels, by Ficino and Dacier as a good angel, and by later writers as a personi- fication of conscience, or practical instinct, or individual tact. Nor was this the only way in which he thought he received the spe- cial mandates of the gods. By divinations, dreams, and oracular intimations, he believed his peculiar mission to be imposed upon him ; and when the Pythian priestess pronounced him to be the wisest of men, he was perplexed between the decision of an authority which he deemed worthy of all respect and his own estimate that he had no wisdom whatsoever on any subject. With this sanction, he struck out the original path of an indiscriminate pub- lic talker for the sake of instruction. His disinterestedness, poverty, temperance, easy affability, and unrivalled sagacity, as well as his plausible and captivating voice and man- ner, commended his conversation. He spent the whole day in public, in the walks, the gym- nasia, the schools, the porticoes, the work- shops, and the market place at the hour when t was most crowded, talking with every one without distinction of age, sex, rank, or con- dition, discussing with politicians, sophists, military mon, artists, and ambitious youths, eager to get self-knowledge and to awaken the moral consciousness, striving to win now Alci- biades and now Theodota to virtue, never ac- cepting money in return for wisdom, attract- ing listeners during his later years even from the remoter cities of Greece, but founding no school, teaching in no fixed place, and writing no books. His custom was by systematic cross examination to convict every distinguished man whom he met of ignorance. Thus, after hearing the oracular eulogy from Delphi, as reported by Plato in his "Apology," he set out to examine the men whom he deemed wiser than himself. The politicians, the poets, and the artificers were in turn affronted as he attempted to demonstrate their conceit of knowledge without its reality, their skill with- out wisdom. His irony, or assumption of the character of an ignorant learner, till he in- volved his opponent in contradictory answers, added zest to his discussions. But he differed from the sophists, though he was ridiculed as the chief of them, in that, whether serious or humorous, he was ever seeking a positive basis for truth, while they for the most part denied the possibility of truth, and could ply the so- phistical art with entire indifference to it. In his conception, virtue was as intellectual as vice, and he let slip no opportunity to engage with the masters of sophistry, to follow them through their subtleties, to unravel their cap- tious inquiries, and to wield the weapons of rhetorical adroitness in the interest of truth. He exhibited undisguised contempt for the ru- lers, proclaiming that government was a most difficult science, and that men, who would not trust themselves in a ship without an experi- enced pilot, not only trusted themselves in a state with untried rulers, but even sought to become rulers themselves. He thus naturally and necessarily made for himself enemies in every direction and among all classes. At- tached to none of the political parties, ridi- culed in turn as a buffoon and as a moral cor- rupter, at once satirized by Aristophanes and hated by the thirty, especially odious from his intimate connection with Critias and Alcibi- ades, only a decent pretext was wanted to bring upon him the vengeance of power, and this was found in a charge of impiety. An orator named Lycon and a poet named Meletus united with the demagogue Anytus in impeaching him for despising the tutelary national gods, for intro- ducing other and new deities, and also for cor- rupting the youth. The details of the accusers were, that he worshipped a demon unknown to the mythology, that he contemned the existing political constitution by ridiculing the practice of choosing archons by lot, that he taught young men the habit of depreciating the entire mode of life of their fathers, and that he quoted and perverted passages from the poems of Homer and Hesiod to favor aristocratic doc- trines. He approached his trial with no ex- pectation of acquittal, though he had always obeyed the laws, and even in religious opinions was identified with the public mind of Athens.