CHAPTER V

Socrates and the Minor Socratics

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THE LIFE OF SOCRATES

From these reformers we now may turn to study the great figure of Socrates. Unlike the thinkers with whom we have hitherto been concerned, who were all foreigners who had settled in Athens because Athens was practically the metropolis of Greece, Socrates was a full Athenian citizen.1 He was born about 470, and met his death in 399; his youth was thus passed in the great Periclean age, and his declining years among the troubles of the Peloponnesian War. He took a full share in the ordinary civic duties of the day. He fought as a hoplite, or heavy-armed soldier, in the Athenian campaigns in Thrace, and he was again engaged in 424, when his steady behaviour won him admiration, at the battle of Delium. At the age of sixty-five he became a member of the Council; and he was a member of the Committee of Council which was presiding in the Assembly on the day on which nine of the Athenian generals were condemned in a body, by a single vote, for their failure to rescue drowning sailors at the naval battle of Arginusae (405). Such a condemnation en masse was contrary to a rule of the constitution, and Socrates, alone among all the members of the Committee, refused to concur in putting to the Assembly such an unconstitutional vote.² A year later, when the Thirty Tyrants were exercising a reign of terror in Athens, he was ordered, with four other citizens, to arrest and bring for execution a citizen whom they had proscribed; and once more he refused to concur in what he regarded as an illegal order. A steady discharge of civic duty, and a steady refusal to go outside the bounds of civic law, are thus the two features which mark his life as an Athenian citizen.

He was the son of a sculptor (and an Athenian sculptor, we must remember, was a craftsman like the mason or potter); and he had learned his father’s craft. Here again he appears as a typical citizen of Athens. But he devoted his life to the study of philosophy, and he consorted with all the thinkers who made Athens their home in the second half of the fifth century. At first, and down to about 435, he was interested in the physical science of the day. He seems to have studied most of the prevalent theories. He found that they only gave a mechanical explanation of how things were made; and what he wanted was a teleological explanation, showing why they are, and what is their raison d’être.1 In other words, he sought to ascend from natural science, and its occupation with matter, to genuine philosophy in the sense of an inquiry into the purpose or final cause of things. This is an immense step, and when it is taken we have passed at a bound from the world of Anaximander and Heraclitus to the world of Plato and Aristotle. The importance of Socrates lies in the fact that he represents this transition. His own diversion from physical studies to a deeper inquiry was due, according to our authorities, to the voice of the Delphic oracle, of old so important in the general life of Greece, and now once more an influence in the life of one of the greatest Greek philosophers. Consulted by one of his friends, the oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Socrates, who had a fund of shrewd common sense combined with a vein of humour, set himself to disprove the oracle by questioning others and proving them by his questions to be wiser men than himself. He succeeded in achieving the opposite of his purpose; for he found that while others were unwise enough to profess to know what they did not know, he himself was wise enough to confess that ‘he nothing knew save that he nothing knew’. Henceforth he gave himself up to a life of service, believing that he had a mission from the Delphic god: he undertook a crusade against sham knowledge, and became the preacher of genuine wisdom.

THE METHOD AND DOCTRINE OF SOCRATES

This account of what may almost be called the ‘conversion’ of Socrates implies two things. It implies a peculiar method; and it implies a peculiar doctrine. The method is the method of dialectic. In place of the Ionic method of adumbration, in cryptic prose or riddling verse, of results already obtained; in place, again, of the sophistic method of ordered arrangement of topics according to a set scheme in an eloquent discourse, Socrates pursued the method of question and answer, and he pursued it everywhere and among all sorts of men. It was a definite method, as much (we may almost say) as the scholastic method of the Middle Ages: there were rules for the adoption of the theme of discussion, and rules for the relevant answering of questions. It was a method unpleasant for the victim, and a method which might become merely eristic, turning to argument in any direction for the sake of argument; but it was, all the same, in the hands of Socrates, a genuine organ of truth. We know its procedure from the dialogues of Plato, of which, indeed, as the very name of ‘dialectic’ shows, it was the parent. If this was the method of Socrates, his doctrine was what we may call a doctrine of the Two Knowledges. He held that there were two kinds of knowledge, one of which was only apparent and only held at the best by an insecure tenure, while the other was real and a permanent possession of the mind. He held that it was the duty of all men to find true knowledge, and that they could do so only if they ‘knew themselves’ – that is to say, if they knew how much they really knew. He held, too, that true knowledge was also true goodness.

So far as we can ascribe any particular doctrine to Socrates, this was his doctrine. It is obvious that the stress laid by Socrates on the value of true knowledge had its affinities with the emphasis laid by the Sophists on the special knowledge they professed to impart. Not only had the Sophists methodized subjects like rhetoric, and offered to impart a technical knowledge of such subjects; they had made human conduct itself into an art, and professed to be able to give a special knowledge of that art, which would result in ‘goodness’ or practical ability (ἀρετή), and would enable its possessors to manage States and families rightly. To the Sophists, therefore, as to Socrates, real goodness depended upon and consisted in a special knowledge; nor can we say that the identification of goodness with knowledge is, in itself, a peculiarly Socratic doctrine. On the contrary, the Sophists, professing as they did to teach goodness, were committed as deeply as Socrates to the proposition that ‘goodness is knowledge’. If it were not, it would not be teachable; and if it were not teachable, the raison d’être of their profession was gone.

To understand the peculiar doctrine of Socrates properly, we must therefore proceed from noting his affinities with the Sophists to trace his fundamental divergence from their views. Here we have, first of all, to notice that he did not believe, as the Sophists did, that goodness was a special art – or, to speak more exactly, was excellence in a special art – which could be mastered, like other such arts, only by the attainment of a special knowledge peculiar to itself. He did not hold that there was a special art of human conduct, or that goodness was special capacity in the practice of such a special art. He held that goodness was a general capacity, and, as such, unique. He believed that it put everything else in its true place and proper perspective; he believed that it was architectonic, determining the due proportion and proper relations of each activity and department of life. In a word, there is no art of human conduct parallel to the art of rhetoric, and no goodness in such an art parallel to excellence in rhetoric; but there is such a thing as goodness, and goodness is a general capacity of the whole soul which issues in a balance and harmony of all its activitiese.1 It follows, upon this view, that the knowledge which is necessary to goodness is not a special and professional knowledge which can be acquired only through special teaching. Socrates did not believe that goodness demanded a new and peculiar and esoteric substance of knowledge which differed in character from the substance of the knowledge of ordinary men. He did not profess to teach men to know the things that belonged to ‘nature’, in order that they might reject, in the strength of such knowledge, the things that belonged to ‘law’. As a matter of fact, he was a firm believer in law; but there was a deeper reason than that for his refusing to hold that goodness consisted in any new substance of knowledge. That deeper reason is to be found in his conviction that what mattered was not so much what you knew, as the way in which you knew it. He wanted not so much knowledge of new things, as a new way of knowledge of old things – not so much knowledge of a ‘nature’ different from the ordinary world, as knowledge of the ordinary world itself, raised to a new power, and translated to a new value, by being a knowledge of the reason why that world was as it was. He accepted the morality of convention, but he sought to make it a higher morality, by making men see the reason of its existence and the ‘idea’ on which it was based. This brings us back to his doctrine of the Two Knowledges, which we can now see in its full bearing. The knowledge men ordinarily possess is not knowledge at all, but opinion (δόξα). They know things, in the sense that they have often heard them said; but they do not know them in the only sense in which we are entitled to speak of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) – they do not know them as the product of a cause, and in relation to the cause by which they are produced. They know, in the sense that they have heard, that they ought to be temperate; but they do not really know it, because they do not know why they ought to be temperate. Here we may see the fundamental reason why Socrates desired a teleological explanation of things. Knowledge was only possible through such an explanation – at any rate knowledge that counted.

If goodness is knowledge, and there are two sorts of knowledge, there will also be two sorts of goodness. This is what Socrates believed. There is the goodness which is based on opinion, and there is the goodness which is based on knowledge. Opinion is insecure; it is liable to be forgotten, or to be changed by some new impression; and the goodness which is based on opinion is equally insecure. Knowledge is secure, because it is based on reasoning reference to a cause; and the goodness which is based on knowledge is equally secure. Goodness based on opinion is a matter of habit (ἔθоς): goodness based on knowledge is a matter of reasoned conviction and insight (ϕρόνησις). The one is common goodness: the other is philosophic goodness. But though the two may be set in contrast over against one another, we must not forget that both are forms of goodness. They have both the same content; and the difference consists only in a difference of grasp on that content. As far as its content goes, common goodness is real goodness; and Socrates, as we have seen, never sought to revolutionize that content, or to substitute a new substance of morality. His objection to conventional morality in its ordinary form was not that it was based on wrong principles, but that it lacked any consciousness of the principles on which it was based – principles which he held in themselves to be absolutely true. Because there was no such consciousness, ordinary morality suffered from two defects. Since it came, not from grasp of principle, but from the accident of natural disposition, or the chance of upbringing, it was liable to disappear in a new environment; it was unable to respond to new and unprecedented demands. Again – and this was a still greater defect – it could not be communicated. Goodness which rests on principles admits of some definition of those principles; and one can communicate and teach something which can be embraced in a general definition. Socrates was anxious to attain such definitions; they were the object of his dialectic and cross-questioning; and Aristotle speaks of him as the first to introduce general definitions. It is in this sense that he was a moral teacher. And it was just because he sought to be a moral teacher that he was discontented with the goodness which, resting on no principle and incomprehensible in any definition, could not be taught.

On the whole we may say that both in ethics and in politics Socrates was an intellectualist. Heraclitus had said of old: ‘I have researched into myself.’ What Socrates desired was such research, and the expert guidance of life based upon it. He objected, we are told, to the lot, because it made way for incompetence as readily as for competence. He objected to the rule of a sovereign Assembly in which tinker and tailor, cobbler and fuller, had an equal voice in public affairs with those who really understood something of the art of politics. He was even a critic, as we may gather from the Meno and the Gorgias, of the Athenian statesmen who guided the Assembly. At the best, we learn from the Meno, they have a sort of political instinct; but they cannot transmit it to their sons or successors. At the worst, we gather from the Gorgim, they are false shepherds, who fill the city with ‘harbours and docks and walls and revenues’, seeking popularity by indulging the populace, but forgetting the things which belong to justice and temperance (infra, p. 162). In opposition to these things, Socrates taught the need of an expert knowledge, based on first principles, for the conduct of political affairs. Here we may see the germ of that doctrine of specialization which is expounded by Plato in detail in the Republic. Among those who are recorded as occasionally attending the discourses of Socrates there were some who followed the career of professional soldiers; and the need of a system of professionalism based on scientific knowledge may be said to have been the gist of discourses which such men would gladly hear. In the cult of professionalism in politics Socrates was at one with the Sophists, though it is obvious, from what we have already seen, that the training which he desired for the profession of politics went further than that of the Sophists, and meant something of a philosophic education issuing in a firm grasp of the fundamental principles of politics. Here, we gather, the analogy of the arts was often used by Socrates. If goodness was not an art, but something higher and more catholic, politics at any rate must be treated as an art, and the politician must be required to undergo training, and to ‘serve his time’, as much as the craftsman. But we must not too readily or too completely assimilate the politician to the craftsman. If the things of justice and temperance belonged to his care, his first requisite, after all, was a true and philosophic notion of goodness. And that, Socrates always taught, was a matter for something more than an art.

Socrates may be described as an intellectualist; but we cannot rest content with that description. In the first place, intellect never meant to the Greeks, and least of all to Socrates and his disciple Plato, a dry and cold organ of reason. It was something ‘touched with emotion’ – something which issued, not only in knowledge, but also in a direction of the will and in practical action. To know the truth by reason was to love what one knew: to understand things beautiful, by seeing that they were beautiful because they participated in the eternal Idea or Form of Beauty, was to feel the sovereign attraction of true Beauty, and therefore to ensue things beautiful in action and in conduct. And thus we touch a further point. Intellect must not be divorced from will: the test of knowledge is a proved capacity of action.1 Conceiving of intellect in this way, the Greek philosophers sought to act on the world according to their knowledge. They did not regard themselves as discoverers and teachers of intellectual truths, but rather as men who had found a practical gospel, on which they were bound themselves to act and to induce others to act. Socrates was like all other Greek philosophers in seeking to communicate a way of life. Where he differed was in the wide scope of his effort. Other philosophers had sought to found schools and to teach a circle of regular disciples. It has been suggested that Socrates was at the head of a definite philosophical school, and he certainly seems to have had a regular circle of companions (ἑταȋρоι); but his teaching had a range that went far beyond the limits of any school. Unlike the Sophists, who had taught the young nobility, he conversed with his fellow-citizens everywhere: in street or market-place or Assembly, wherever men were gathered together. He talked at large for a general circle of hearers (), as the Greeks loved to do; and he talked without respect of persons. A craftsman himself, he never despised his fellows; and herein he showed himself free from a prejudice from which Plato and even Aristotle are not altogether exempt.

But there is also another point of view, from which we must still further modify any description of Socrates as an intellectualist. If he was an intellectualist, he was also something of a mystic. He preached that men ought to guide their lives by an intelligent grasp of principle; but his own life was often guided by something of a very different kind. We have already seen that it was the voice of the Delphic oracle which conberted him to moral philosophy, and that he believed he had been charged with a mission from the Delphic god. We also learn from Plato that he sometimes fell into a trance; and we are told, both by Plato and by Xenophon (though they give different accounts of its nature), that he had a warning voice (), whose guidance he often followed.1 It has been remarked that the story of the warning voice suggests that there was some defect in Socrates’ philosophy of action. And indeed, if we look closely at that philosophy, we shall find that in some ways it does not carry us very far. He preached the sovereignty of true knowledge: he hardly explained the nature of the principles by which true knowledge must act. He certainly made the presence or absence of a rational purpose the criterion of good and evil, and this led him to believe that evil acts, being evil in the absence of a purpose, were involuntary, and no man, therefore, was voluntarily bad. But it is not so easy to discover what he believed to be the end, to which the rational purpose that constitutes goodness must be in its nature directed. If we assign to Socrates himself the ethical teaching of Plato’s Republic, the end will consist in a harmony of the soul, in virtue of which each element of the soul duly fulfils its allotted function. But it is not clear that we are justified in assigning to Socrates the teaching of the Republic.² If, again, we follow Xenophon (though it is far from clear that we are justified in doing so; for Xenophon had not known Socrates intimately, and the limitations of his own mind afford grave reasons for doubting whether he really understood the mind of Socrates), the end will consist in utility, and rational purpose will in its nature be directed to something useful.1 But what is utility? Is it the utility of individuals, or is it that of society? And if it is the latter, is social utility to be regarded as the utility of a majority of the individuals living in a society, or as a collective utility, which is something different from the utility of any number of individuals? We shall hardly find any answers to these questions in Xenophon; and if we did, we could hardly be sure that they represented the opinion of Socrates. Xenophon’s identification of the Good with the Useful, like his identification of the Just with the Legal, and his further identification of the two identifications, which makes all the four terms synonymous, is perhaps true only for Xenophon.² Being something of a utilitarian, and altogether a law-abiding citizen, he made an image of his master accordingly; and Socrates emerges as a respectable Benthainite, denouncing as impious the man ‘who first divided the Just from the Useful’.

THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

The Athenians would not have condemned to death the Socrates depicted by Xenophon. They put to death the real Socrates. He was accused of refusing to worship the gods whom the State worshipped, of introducing other and new divinities, and of corrupting the youth; and on that accusation he was condemned. The accusation contains two branches. One is religious: the other is apparently based on moral, but is perhaps in reality based on political grounds. The real sting of the accusation lies in the latter. It was the moral teaching of Socrates, and the political implication of that teaching, which was the true gravamen of his accusers. Whether or no he should be described as an intellectualist, he certainly died as a martyr for his intellectualist conception of politics. He had criticized the characteristics of Athenian democracy – the use of the lot; the composition of the Assembly; the ignorance of Athenian statesmen. He had preached, it might seem, that the handling of politics required some esoteric mystery of knowledge; and such preaching, in a democratic State, was at the best incivisme, and at the worst lèse-majesté. Moreover he had made converts by his preaching. Men like Alcibiades and Critias, if they had not been ‘companions’ or disciples, had at any rate been his associates. Alcibiades had tried to subvert Athenian democracy in the revolution of 411: Critias had actually subverted it for a time in the revolution of 404. If these were his fruits, then he had ‘corrupted the youth’, and the orator Aeschines was not far wrong when he said, years afterwards, that ‘Socrates the Sophist was put to death because he was thought to have educated Critias’. We have to remember that Athenian democracy, in the year of Socrates’ death (399), must have seemed to the Athenians themselves to be insecurely based. Men remembered the oligarchical revolutions of 411 and 404: they saw the victorious Spartans establishing oligarchies wherever they could: they knew that there was an oligarchical party in Athens which sympathized with Sparta.1 In such a suspicious temper, they naturally thought of making a great example. Antiphon, who had also professed to teach goodness, had been the leader of the revolution of 411; another teacher of goodness might lead a similar revolution against the newly restored democracy. Socrates talked of knowledge, and the need of experts: that was also the cant of oligarchical circles. Even if it were an accident that Alcibiades and Critias had been his associates, it was an undoubted fact that he had criticized democracy, and had promulgated a doctrine with the suspicious watchword of efficiency.²

Thus Socrates, who would never have been disturbed in the palmy and secure days of Periclean democracy, fell a victim to the weakness and fears of the restored democracy of the years that followed the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was political motives which led to his condemnation; but religious grounds were also alleged, and it remains to determine the exact significance and the relative weight of these grounds. We have already seen (supra, p. 9) that piety consisted for the Greeks in formally worshipping, as a matter of civic duty, the gods received by the State, and that impiety was the crime of omitting such worship; we have seen that Greek religion was thus an aspect of the political life of a political society. From this point of view it is obvious that an accusation of inciuisme might readily be combined with an accusation of religious non-conformity; and it is obvious, again, that the latter accusation is not really a matter of religious persecution, but rather an act of political vengeance. Religious persecution, as such, was unknown to the Greeks; and it would be an error to regard Socrates as a religious martyr. He died because he was supposed to be dangerous to the political order of the State; but since that order was bound up with a formal worship of the civic gods, he was also accused of being an enemy of that worship. The religious accusation was something of an afterthought, or corollary, to the political; and we may even say that it was alleged in order to create an atmosphere of prejudice, in which the real accusation would tell with more fatal effect. In themselves, the religious opinions of Socrates were nothing unusual, and nothing which the usual practice of the Greeks would ever have condemned. He had not committed the ‘impiety’ of refusing formally to ‘worship the gods whom the city worshipped’: on the contrary, in this as in other respects, he had satisfied the demands of civic duty. Even if he had ‘introduced other and new divinities’, this would have been no crime in the ordinary Greek conception, so long as it did not lead to the omission of the regular civic worship of the civic deities. But it can hardly be said that he had introduced such divinities. In the early period of his life, indeed, before his ‘conversion’, he may have been imbued with the notion of the physicists, that the real ‘gods’ were the physical forces of Nature; and the Clouds of Aristophanes, which, though produced in 423, seems to refer to this early period, certainly suggests that Socrates was a scientific agnostic. But the real religious convictions of Socrates, during the whole of the latter period of his life (from about 435 to 399), were those of a mystic rather than of an agnostic. He believed, if we may follow the indications to be found in Plato, in the Orphic doctrine of the transmigration of souls and their reward and punishment in a future life. The Orphic mysteries were nothing new: they were generally diffused in Greece; and there was nothing to prevent the combination of a belief in those mysteries with a formal worship of civic deities. It is true that the mysteries were extra-civic, or even supra-civic, and that they might be held to contain deeper and more spiritual elements than any of the civic worships. But they never menaced civic stability; they never became, as freemasonry has sometimes become in modern times, a political organization; and even if Socrates were a believer in them, it is hard to see that his belief had anything to do with his condemnation.1

On the whole, therefore, the religious accusation would seem to have been intended, if we may adapt a phrase of Cicero, tenebras offundere judicibus in causa Socratis. It was for raison d’état that he was tried: and it was for raison d’état that he was condemned. It is on the death of Socrates, rather than on his life, that the thought and imagination of the centuries have fastened. Indeed, we may almost say that the greatest lesson of his life was his death. He taught thereby (and Plato has elicited the lesson for us in the Apology and the Crito) that for the sake of conscience a man may rise up against Caesar, but that, in all other matters, he must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, even to the debt of his life. If he were promised acquittal, Plato makes him say, on condition of silence and of refraining from his mission, he could not obey. Greater than the command of the Athenian State was the command of the god; and greater than civic duty was his service. This is the temper of the martyr; nor is it a mistake to enrol Socrates in the ranks of the martyrs. He was faced, after all, by a conflict of duties: and by his death he sealed his witness to the choice he had made. On the one side stood his duty to the Athenian State which throughout his life, and even in his death, he lcyally acknowledged. On the other side stood his duty to the god, to testify at all times and to all men – old as well as young, foreigners as well as citizens, but above all to the men of his own blood and his own State – the gospel of Knowledge. He made his choice, and he abode the consequence.²

Yet he was always, and never more than in his death, a loyal son of Athens. He had served in her army, he had been a member of her Council, even though he must have passed to his membership through the avenue of the lot. Her laws were to him only less sacred than the commands of the god, and not to be disobeyed except for righteousness’ sake; nor would he leave the prison where he lay doomed, even when escape was easy, lest the laws should rebuke his flight. If he taught that politics was an art, that teaching after all had two sides; and if on one of its sides, by leading to an insistence on efficiency and the rule of the expert, it might seem undemocratic and revolutionary, on its other side it was far from being either. Just because it was an art, Socrates held, politics required not only knowledge, but also unselfish devotion. Every artist and craftsman, when he is engaged in the pursuit of his specific craft, is seeking not his own good or betterment, but the good of the subject of his art, and the betterment of the stuff with which he deals. If the politician, too, is a craftsman, then he, too, must seek not his own advantage, but the advantage of the fellow-citizens with whom he deals, and with whose betterment his craft is concerned. This is the conception inherited by Plato, and enforced by him in the Republic. It is a conception exactly contrary to that of those radical Sophists, who had taught that right was the interest of the stronger, and that it was therefore right for a government, seeing that it was the stronger, to pursue and promote its own interest. It is a conception which no advocate of the democratic cause could do otherwise than endorse.

But Socrates had preached the sovereignty of knowledge; and the doctrine of the sovereignty of knowledge might easily become, in its political application, a doctrine of enlightened despotism. This, indeed, is what it became, at any rate for a time and during the middle period of his life, in the hands of Plato. Such a theory of enlightened despotism was necessarily inimical to democracy; it might also become inimical to the rule of law. If knowledge is sovereign, it may be held that law becomes subordinate, or even supererogatory; and it may be urged that the living knowledge of the wise ruler transcends the dead letter of the law. This again is a conclusion which, for a time at any rate, Plato was ready to draw. Monarchical, and even absolutist, philosophies might thus draw their inspiration from Socrates; and in that sense he was the enemy of democracy. Nor was he, in the issue, altogether the friend of the city-state itself, in any form or under any kind of government. The outburst of philosophic thought which flowed from him was, at any rate in one of its channels, too broad for civic bounds. The Cynics were descended from Socrates; and the Cynics were cosmopolitans, who found their own reason and knowledge sufficient for their needs, and, craving no guidance or instruction from any city, took the world to be their home.

Politics is a matter for thought, and government is a concern of the wise. But wisdom is not the conclusion of the whole matter; nor can we afford to forget – what Socrates, and Plato after him, too, often tended to forget – those elements of will and of instinct which count for so much in political affairs. For the proper guidance of the State it is necessary that the wise should rule; but for its safety and its unity it is also necessary that the will of the people should be attuned to their rule. Both are necessary; and both are equally necessary. Mere will means ochlocracy – the government of ignorance in the interest of selfishness; but mere knowledge means in the long run an intellectual despotism – a Strafford and the rule of Thorough. And as the element of will must count in the conduct of human affairs, so, too, must the element of instinct. There is necessarily much that is incalculable by reason in all human action; and the right instinct which springs from experience must always command a hearing.1 It is true that in the Meno Plato makes Socrates discover, and admit, the existence of this instinct; but it is rejected almost as soon as it is discovered, on the ground that it cannot be transmitted by instruction, and avails no man except its possessor. Yet in criticizing Socrates, as in criticizing his disciple Plato, we must remember their environment. They spoke of knowledge to a people which already recognized, and more than recognized, the elements of will and instinct. They spoke to an Athenian democracy, where the popular will expressed itself in temporary decrees like that which Socrates refused to put to the vote in 405, and where statesmen pleaded instinct because they had nothing else to plead. Little wonder if they spoke of knowledge, and the sovereignty of knowledge, in such an environment. They stated the half of the truth which seemed to them neglected: they omitted the complementary truth which seemed to them over-emphasized.

Note.—In the preceding sections I have followed, to a large extent, the interpretation of Socrates adopted by Professor Burnet (Greek Philosophy, c. viii.–x.). Professor Burnet holds that the genuine Socrates can be found only in the dialogues of Plato (and not in the Memorabilia of Xenophon); and he goes still further. He believes that the Platonic dialogues, down to and including the Republic (with the exception of the programme of studies for the guardians, which he holds to be Plato’s own), are historical statements of the views of Socrates. He admits that the dialogues are not records of actual discussions (though they probably contain fragments of such discussions), and that they present Socrates as Socrates appeared to Plato; but he holds that Plato was no less an historian than an artist, and that in his dialogues he was stating the views of his master rather than using his master’s name as a cover for his own. It is for this reason, he considers, that the Republic, for instance, is concerned not with the figures and controversies of Plato’s day, but with the figures (such as Thrasymachus) and the controversies (such as that about the relation of Right and Might) of the days of Socrates. This view involves the ascription to Socrates of almost all that is ordinarily regarded as Platonic – the doctrine of ideas, the advocacy of communism, and the political theory of the three classes and the rule of the class of philosophers. I have not been able to go to this length; and while holding that the germinal ideas of Plato’s political philosophy are Socratic, I have assumed that the unfolding of those ideas in their full form is Platonic.1 I have thus referred to Socrates the doctrine of the sovereignty of knowledge, and the conception of statesmanship as an art, which are expounded in the Meno and Gorgias – just as I have referred to Protagoras the outline of an educational theory of the State which is sketched in the dialogue that bears his name. On the other hand, I have ascribed to Plato himself the further and detailed conclusions, drawn from these assumptions, that for the sake of the sovereignty of knowledge and the proper practice of the art of statesmanship there should be three specialized classes, that two of these should live under a system of communism, and that one of these two should rule in virtue of its philosophic training. In other words, the political theory of the Republic seems to me to start from Socratic conceptions, and to issue in Platonic conclusions.

It is part of Professor Burnet’s theory that Socrates was the head of a definite philosophic ‘school’ at Athens; that he taught a definite doctrine in that school; and that it was this doctrine, regularly taught in the school, which Plato was naturally led to report. The main principles of the Socratic ‘school’, Professor Burnet suggests, were Pythagorean; and Socrates was practically the head of the Pythagoreans in Greece. It seems at any rate certain that Plato was influenced by Pythagorean tenets, and it is natural to ascribe the transmission of that influence to Socrates, if Socrates was connected with the Pythagoreans.

XENOPHON

The future progress of Greek political thought was to follow the lines laid down by Socrates. Plato is thoroughly his disciple: Aristotle builds on Plato’s foundations. But before we turn to Plato, we may clear the way by first considering the political doctrines of the minor successors and followers of Socrates, some of whom carried his teaching to conclusions very different from those of Plato. In Xenophon the master found an exponent of his views who extended the gospel of capacity to such matters as horsemanship, generalship, and domestic economy. Like Plato, Xenophon was biased against Athenian democracy for its lack of capacity: unlike Plato, he sought a remedy not in a new and ideal government, but in making Athens conform to an existing type of government, nominally Persian, but in reality Spartan. This type he sketched in the Cyropaedia, an historical novel, in which the career of Cyrus is made a vehicle for the exposition of Socratic ideas. The State, according to Xenophon, must be like an army, if it is to be as efficient as an army: it must be based on a proper system of grades and a thorough division of labour. Over all things the wise man must rule, and under him each must do the thing which he knows. The Cyropaedia enunciates many ideas which appear again in Plato and Aristotle. Laws must not aim at merely preventing crime: education must not be left to mere private enterprise. It was not so in Ancient Persia. There law was positive and creative: it gave the citizens a spirit of righteousness, so that they had no inclination to commit an evil or dishonourable deed. There education was given by the State, and lasted all life long. ‘The Persian boys went to school to learn justice, as ours go to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic’; and the mentors whom the State appointed for their training were the older citizens, who had gone through their own course with honour. Somewhat in the same way as Plato does in the Republic, Xenophon sketches the four stages of the life-long education of the Persians in moral and military excellence; and then he shows how in such an environment was developed the ideal ruler, Cyrus – a man who was wiser and better than any of his people, and made his people wiser and better than they had ever been before. Thus, in Xenophon, the Greek idea of the State as a moral and educational association is re-stated in the light of Socratic ideas; and the result is the conception of an education in moral wisdom given by the State and the rule of an ideally wise man produced by that education. These are also Platonic conclusions; and indeed the Republic may be termed a Cyropaedia without the historical setting of Xenophon, a Cyropaedia informed instead by a deep philosophy of man and the world.1

Like Plato (at one stage of his development), Xenophon is a monarchist: unlike Plato, he is a military monarchist. He was himself a soldier, who had fought against Persia both under Cyrus and under Agesilaus; and he lived in days which witnessed the growth of professional armies in the place of the old civic militia, and the rise, on the basis of these armies, of military monarchies like that of Dionysius I (405–367) at Syracuse. In a dialogue called the Hiero, which is generally attributed to his pen, Xenophon represents Hiero, a precursor of Dionysius as tyrant of Syracuse (478–467), in the act of discussing with the poet Simonides the problem of absolute government; and he seems to conclude that the absolute ruler is not only enviable, but may also be a public benefactor. The trend towards monarchism which Xenophon shows, alike in the Cyropaedia and the Hiero, is a trend which seems characteristic alike of the practical politics and of the political theory of the age. It appears in Plato: it appears, to some extent, in Aristotle, who in the third book of the Politics discourses in some detail of the or absolute ruler, and in the fifth book devotes his attention to the methods of ensuring the stability of tyranny. It appears again, in a close conjunction with actual politics, in the writings of Isocrates.

ISOCRATES

Isocrates has many affinities with Xenophon. Both may be described as thinkers of the second class, who, while not attaining to any philosophic grasp of politics, have enough of philosophic tincture to express in general terms the prevalent tendencies and opinions of their generation. Both had come under the influence of Socrates; but the Socratic influence on both is that of Socrates dimidiatus – of Socrates deprived of all his profundity, and reduced to the level of the commonplace. Born in 436, and dying in 338, Isocrates overlaps, at both ends, the life of Plato, and even exercised an influence on Aristotle, who was his junior by more than fifty years. In his youth he had come in contact with Socrates; and while the effects of that contact may be traced in his attempt to bring to bear on civic life the ‘philosophy’ which he professed to teach, his failure to grasp the true teaching of Socrates may also be traced in his somewhat arid conception of the nature of philosophy. He had also felt the influence of the teaching of the Sophists, more especially of Prodicus, who taught the nice use of language, and, indirectly, of Gorgias the rhetorician. His attention was turned to rhetoric; and about 392 he opened a school, which lasted for more than fifty years, for the teaching of philosophy, by which he really understood something of the nature of political oratory. He sought to distinguish the teaching of his school from that of the Sophists;1 and in the effort to establish that distinction he gave currency to the sense of the word Sophist, as a teacher of sophisms and a master of the tricks of disputation, in which it is generally used today. Professing to teach philosophy, he seems to belong to the company of Plato and Socrates. But there are fundamental differences between the Socratic school and the school of Isocrates. Unlike Socrates, he held that opinion was a better guide in practical affairs than science; ‘it is better to form probable opinions about useful things than to have an exact knowledge of useless things’.² Unlike Plato, who found the kernel of education in scientific and mathematical studies, he held that education consisted in the attainment of the faculty of forming right opinions on political subjects, and more especially of the faculty of giving just expression to those opinions. His philosophy begins and ends in ‘the art of speaking and writing on large political subjects, considered as a preparation for advising or acting in political affairs’.³ But if there was a great gulf between Plato’s conception of philosophy and that of Isocrates, there seems no reason to speak of a feud between the two. On the contrary – at any rate in some of their political ideas – they are allies rather than enemies. Both have the same monarchical trend. Plato, who had a keen sense of Greek unity, as the fifth book of the Republic shows, may well have approved of the scheme of Isocrates for a union of Greece against Persia. Isocrates, who believed, in his way, in the training of statesmen, can hardly have frowned on the attempts of Plato to train the young Dionysius of Syracuse.⁴

Isocrates may be regarded as both an educationalist and a political essayist. In the former capacity he trained, for over fifty years, not only all the rhetoricians of his day, but also a number of statesmen, philosophers, and historians: in the latter he handled all the current topics of politics in the fifty years between the peace of Antalcidas and the victory of Philip at Chaeronea (387–338). The two activities were closely connected. His education was an education in rhetoric: his political essays were intended to show how rhetoric should be used. He was a great stylist; but he regarded rhetoric less as a study of form than as a preparation for politics. As such, he believed that it was superior to the art of legislation, with which Plato and Aristotle were both concerned. That was an art easily mastered, and concerned only with the internal affairs of the State; but rhetoric, as he conceived it, dealt with the higher questions of the relation of State to State, and was at once the parent and child of the higher statesmanship. The real problem which occupies Isocrates is thus the problem of the mutual relations of Greek States. It is a problem which to some extent occupies Aristotle in the Politics. He urges that Plato in the Laws, and Phaleas of Chalcedon in the political scheme he proposed, have both neglected to consider the foreign relations of the States they sought to establish; and in two passages in the seventh book he discusses the proper attitude of a State to its neighbours.1 But Isocrates is nevertheless the one Greek writer who really concentrates his attention on this problem; and it is not unfair to say that he transcends the internal politics of the city-state, and realizes that the actual contemporary problem is to find the proper basis for the relations between each city-state and the rest.

We must judge the rhetoric of Isocrates from his own speeches, which are really political pamphlets rather than speeches. Some of these are concerned, it is true, with the internal politics of Athens. The Areopagiticus, which belongs to the year 346, is devoted to an advocacy of the ‘ancestral democracy’ of Athens. The term was one which had long been used (cf. supra, p. 51), and to which different senses had been attached. To Isocrates the age of Solon represents the ideal past to which Athens ought to return. The use of the lot, which is contrary to the true or proportionate equality which distinguishes worth from worthlessness, should be abolished; and the fittest should be picked by election for each office. The old Council of the Areopagus, which had been shorn of its powers, should resume them once more; and, recognizing that the education of the citizen does not end with youth, it should act as a general censor of morals and a guardian of public discipline. Isocrates professes to be a democrat; but he desires a tempered democracy, ‘like that of Sparta’, in which office falls to the most competent, and liberty is not interpreted as licence. These are commonplaces which recur in Aristotle; and in the same way the argument of the De Pace (355), which is directed against the retention by Athens of an Empire, which she had never held in the good old days, would seem to be also re-echoed by Aristotle, when he discusses the dangers of imperialism in the seventh book of the Politics.

As far as internal politics are concerned, Isocrates thus advocates for Athens, as the cure of her disorders, a return to ancestral democracy and a surrender of the vestiges of her Empire. But he felt that the true cure for internal disorders was really external, and could be found only in the sphere of foreign policy. Disorders would disappear of themselves from the city-states of Greece, if they were once leagued together in a ‘grand design’ for the conquest of the East. Isocrates was more than a citizen of Athens: he was a citizen of Greece.1 He saw that Greece had one culture; and he himself had rendered no small service to the promotion of the unity of that culture. He believed that this culture was the real differentia between the Greek and the barbarian;² and he urged that unity of culture should be turned into unity of policy, and that this policy should be directed against the barbarian. Thus would Greece gain cohesion, and her cities be cured of their disorders; and not only so, but Asia would gain liberty, and her peoples would be freed from their slavery.

Isocrates was not the first to preach this policy. Gorgias, in a speech at Olympia, where the Greek world assembled every four years for the great national games, ‘had become a counsellor of concord, seeking to turn the Greeks against the barbarians’.³ The orator Lysias, in 388, had delivered an Olympic oration, in which he exhorted the Greeks to abandon civil strife, and to liberate both the Greeks of Ionia from the rule of the barbarian Artaxemes and the Greeks of Sicily from the rule of the tyrant Dionysius.1 Eight years later, in 380, Isocrates wrote his Olympic oration, the Panegyricus, which he never delivered, but which he gave to the world as a pamphlet. The gist of his discourse was the need for a union between Athens and Sparta in a common campaign against Persia. Such a union was impossible, and the discourse of Isocrates fell on deaf ears. Two other alternative lines of policy remained, either of which Isocrates might have advocated. One was the union of the Greek cities in a federal State. Thebes, which attained a brief supremacy in 371, might have been the nucleus of a Greek federation: the old Boeotian league, which had been dissolved in 387, might have served as a model for an Hellenic league; and Epaminondas, who showed that he could rise to the conception of a citizenship of Greece, might well have been its statesman. But Thebes failed to use, and Isocrates failed to see, the opportunity. He turned to the alternative policy, and tried to find some ruler who might be, not the statesman of a federal Greece, but the general of an alliance of city-states. Federation was beyond the scope of his political vision; he was too much tied to the city-state to advocate any union higher than a loose confederation or military alliance under a single general.

He sought to find such a general for many years, and in various quarters of the Greek world. First he set his hopes on Jason of Pherae, the Tagus of the Thessalians: after his death in 370, he turned to Dionysius of Syracuse; and finally he found the man of destiny in Philip of Macedonia, to whom, between 346 and 338, he addressed a speech (the Philippus) and two epistles.² In the speech (written in 346) he urged Philip to bring into amity the Greek city-states; to place himself at the head of a united Greece as its president, and lead it to war against the barbarian; in a word, to show himself at once the benefactor of Greece, the true King of Macedon, and the master of Asia. Isocrates is thus concerned to find an ‘hegemonical authority’ to conduct the great war which will save Greece from internal disorder, and spread Greek culture in Asia – a policy which has found a curious analogy in modern times. We may call him a monarchist; but he is a monarchist within limits. What he really desires is only a military hegemony in Greece, and that only for the one purpose of war in the East. He may, it is true, in addressing a ruler of Cyprus, praise tyranny as ‘the noblest of all things’; but in the Philippus itself, addressed as it is to a king, he speaks of monarchy as little suited to the Greeks. The truth is that Isocrates can hardly be said to have a political theory, or to be a political theorist. He has a political policy, and he is a political journalist. As a political journalist, he has his qualities; and he may remind a modern reader of the editor of some great newspaper, who steadily advocates a line of policy in his leaders. But being a great journalist, he was debarred from being a great theorist or a great man of action. Living in the dubious border-land between theory and action,1 he failed to attain the glories of either. He was neither a Demosthenes nor an Aristotle. Professing to be an orator and a good citizen, he was destitute of the fiery eloquence and the generous civic patriotism of Demosthenes: professing to teach ‘philosophy’, and a philosophy which was political, he had no such grasp of the philosophy of politics as men have always found in Aristotle. Yet, when all is said, he had an insight into the trend of contemporary history which was denied to Demosthenes and Aristotle. He transcended the inner politics of the city-state as they failed to do: he realized the problems of the foreign policy of Greece as they never did. And when in 337 Philip of Macedon was made by the Congress of Corinth general of Greece, with full powers for the prosecution of the war with Persia, Isocrates might almost be said to be justified at last of all his teaching.

THE CYNICS AND CYRENAICS

As we turn from Xenophon and Isocrates to the Cynics and Cyrenaics, we enter upon an absolutely different line of thought. While previous thinkers had entertained and expanded the old Greek idea of the State, the schools which go by these names abandoned it altogether. While Isocrates rose to the conception of Hellenic citizenship, the Cynics advanced to a conception of citizenship of the world. In them we see the conscious apostles1 of a cosmopolitan tendency which was perhaps inherent in the philosophical schools, composed as they generally were of teachers and disciples drawn together from all the quarters of the Greek world. The Cynics² based their position partly on the life, partly on the teaching of Socrates. If Socrates had gone barefoot, and had talked with every man, high or low, so did the Cynics. If Socrates had taught that a man should know himself, and act according to his knowledge, the Cynics pushed his teaching further, and taught that the wise man, who had attained unto knowledge, was sufficient unto himself. Following and exaggerating the life of Socrates, they developed into mendicant beggars, something after the pattern of the early Franciscans, but with this great difference, that they embraced poverty not because they loved the kingdom of heaven, but because they hated the kingdoms of the earth. Socrates had criticized some of the institutions of democracy: they revolted against the whole of society, with all its grades and its institutions. They were the antinomians of the Greek world – the enemies of property, family, city, and whatever else involved degree, priority, or place. One man was as good as another, and one place as was good as another: ‘Why should I be proud of belonging to the soil of Attica with the worms and slugs?’ Denationalized by this spirit of revolt – ‘professing no city, or home, or country’, they fortified themselves in their incivisme by their interpretation of Socrates’ teaching. ‘Virtue is knowledge’: it is an inward thing, and only an inward thing. External things are not the aids of virtue: they are of the nature of hindrances. A man must leave all things and follow virtue: she alone is free. ‘External institutions are obstructions: all social interests are distractions.’ ‘He taught me,’ said Diogenes, speaking of Antisthenes, the founder of the school, ‘that the only thing that was mine was the free exercise of my own thoughts.’ The wise man, self-poised in his own thus became their ideal: the Cynic was sufficient to himself, and independent of everything outside himself. To him all things were indifferent; and the State was a meaningless thing. If he acknowledged any citizenship, it was citizenship of the world; and that was no citizenship. Hence, it was said by Plutarch, ‘Alexander realized the Cynic ideal on its political side by the foundation of his universal empire’.1

Thus was the city-state sapped, both by the radical assertion that every man was as good as every other man, whatever his political status, and by the no less radical conception of the wise man as sufficient for himself, and contented with his membership in the life of the universe. The old idea that life must be lived in the graded hierarchy of a civic community – that only in such a community, and only through the social training which it gives, can men attain the full measure of humanity – is dwindling and dying. Two new ideas are entering the world, both destined to a long history – the idea that all men are naturally equal, and the idea that they are all by nature brothers in a single human society. We seem close to Christianity and the Church Universal; and indeed a continuous line of thought can be traced from Cynics to Stoics, from Stoics to the early fathers – a line of thought along which the conception of the independence of the individual soul goes together with that of a world-association of souls. The idea of a world-association was certainly present to the Cynics. A number of political treatises are assigned to their founder Antisthenes, a contemporary of Plato: he is said to have written a work Concerning Law or the State; and two treatises, a Menexenw, or Concerning Rule, and a Cyrw, or Concerning Monarchy, are also ascribed to his pen. Apparently he held that the wise man would not live in a State according to its enacted laws, but would live by the law of virtue, which is universal; while he believed that the nearer man approached to ‘the nature of animals’ (a subject on which he also wrote), the better it would be for human life. As it is used by Antisthenes, the parallel of animal life serves to point the cry – Back to Nature: abandon cities, laws, and artificial institutions for all that is simple and primitive. It is the cry of the Radical Sophists: it is the cry of Rousseau in his youth. When we come to Diogenes, the greatest of the Cynics, we find a greater moderation, and a different atmosphere. In his Republic (if the accounts of its views which have been preserved are not coloured by Platonic reminiscences) he taught that the only right State was that of the world (). He advocated community of wives and children: he mocked at the illusions of noble birth and slavery. Advocating the destruction of the family, he must also (though we are not told that he did) have advocated the abolition of private property. But on the other hand he believed in the necessity of law, and he held that law was of no avail without a State. It would seem as if here we were confronted with the idea of a world-state, with a world-law (like the Roman jus naturae) – a world-state in which all were equal, bond and free, Greek and barbarian,1 and which must have been governed, because it was so wide and universal, by a single autocratic head. When we remember that Diogenes was the contemporary of Aristotle (dying the year before him), we cannot but feel that in his teaching (if it is correctly recorded) there is more of a sympathy for the contemporary movement of politics than we find in the pages of Aristotle. While the city-state lay dying, and while Aristotle busied himself with medicines and dietaries, Diogenes lifted up his voice, and cried: the King is dying, is dead: long live the new King of the world.

At the beginning of the Politics we find something which looks like an attack on the Cynics: the man who thinks he can exist without a city is either a beast or a god. In truth the Cynics figured alternately as either – sometimes as gods, creatures of pure reason, untroubled by passion, sufficing to themselves; sometimes as beasts, in the squalor and indecency into which they flung themselves in order to point their protest against the ‘conventional’ character of all clean living and decency. But while Aristotle attacks the Cynics, he seems also to use their language. His watchword too is or self-sufficiency, exactly as that of the Cynics was. But the Cynics believed in the of an isolated self: Aristotle believed in that of a social individuality.² Man is only sufficient to himself in Aristotle’s eyes when he is a citizen, and it is just in order to attain self-sufficiency that he widens himself out into a citizen. In Plato, as in Aristotle, there is something of a Cynic element. The community of children and wives is a Cynic tenet; and there are many points of contact between the Cynic ideal and the ‘city of Swine’ described in the second book of the Republic, even if there is no allusion to the Cynics, and even though Plato does not intend either to satirize or to eulogize their views.

The Cynics made individualism the centre of their system: they believed that the individual was sufficient of himself to do his own duty. The Cyrenaic School, equally descended from Socrates, pursued the same individualistic direction. Knowledge, in their view, was sufficient for salvation; but salvation lay, according to their tenets, in the pursuit of pleasure. Finding the goal of life in the cult of a wise pleasure, the Cyrenaics no longer needed the State to supply any rule of action. Philosophy was good, Aristippus is reported to have said, ‘to enable the philosopher, supposing all laws were abolished, to go on living as before’. Having attained a height where law was unnecessary, the Cyrenaics found it easy to regard law as conventional, and to hold that right and wrong existed by custom and enactment, not by Nature.1 Yet they did not abolish the law to make room for a private pleasure which was its enemy. On the contrary, they conceived that a man might find pleasure in the welfare of his friend or of his country. ‘The prosperity of our country, equally with our own, is of itself enough to give us joy.’ But the joy of which they spoke was that of the ‘pleasurable moment’ (), which, if it might be found in patriotism, might equally be found in art or any other ecstasy.

The conclusion of the whole matter is thus the same for the lover of pleasure as it is for the zealot for duty. Both regard the individual as sufficient, whether to measure his own pleasure, or to discern his own duty. Both regard a wise indifference to externals as necessary for the attainment of the desired end. If a man gives to fortune the hostages of a living interest in anything save the end of life, he may fail to attain it. Both, therefore, deny to the individual any real interest in a civic unit; and both leave man with the negative residuum of an interest in the world, and the world alone. A full and active life which realized all possibilities was to Aristotle the result of life in the city. Along with citizenship of the world-state went the ideal of the calm of a solitude (), in which there was none of the struggle and strife, and none of the vigour and life, of the . Such a temper may partly have prepared the decay of the city and the coming of ‘Alexandrinism’: on the other hand, it is also its expression and its result.

1 Archelaus of Athens was the first Athenian citizen to turn to philosophy. Socrates had been his disciple, and he may have succeeded him as the head of the school which he had founded.

² According to some accounts, Socrates was not only a member of the presiding Committee of Council, but was also the president for the day () of that Committee, and as such, president for the day of the Assembly. If this was the case, it fell to Socrates personally to put the vote, and he took the personal responsibility of refusing to do so.

¹ Burnet, Greek Philosophy, p. 133.

¹ One of Socrates’ reasons for holding that goodness was not an art was that it had not, like the arts, a Rhetoric can help both just and unjust causes; the physician can both cure and kill. Goodness is capable of only one effect, and therefore it is not an art; cf. infra, p. 178.

¹ The conception of Glaube in Luther’s writings affords a parallel to which it is perhaps worth while to draw attention. To Luther, ‘faith was no mere intellectual acceptance of Christ and His atoning death, even if that acceptance were of a strictly personal kind: it was such a spiritual incorporation of the soul with its Saviour as involved a changed individuality, a renewed and strengthened nature, out of which all the fruits of righteousness naturally grew…. There is a dynamic force in faith, especially if it be conceived as inseparable from love; but what strength of change and renewal in mere belief?’ (Beard, The Hibbert Lectures (1883), p. 131–2). Just as Luther held that faith necessarily involved action, Socrates held that knowledge necessarily involved conduct; and hence he believed that it was impossible to know the right and voluntarily to do the wrong.

¹ According to Plato, the voice always came to warn him not to do something he was intending to do. According to Xenophon, the voice was a voice of command as well as of prohibition. (See the Appendix on the subject in Riddell’s edition of the Apology.)

² See the note on pp. 112–13.

¹ Memorabilia, IV. 6, § 8; III. 9, § 4.

² For the identification of and see Mem. IV. 4, § 18. Justice being, according to Xenophon (III. 9, § 5), part of Goodness, the Just is a branch of the Good, and therefore of the Useful.

¹ The gist of the discourse mentioned on pp. 90–1, if it really be longs to the year 404, and is really intended for Athens, is the need of an alliance with Sparta and the introduction of a moderate oligarchy.

² There is a passage in the Politicus (299 B.C.) in which the allusion is obviously to Socrates, which supports what is said in the text. Any man who preaches the sovereignty of wisdom in any art, and the superiority of wisdom to the letter of law, is sure to receive condemnation, on the ground that he corrupts the youth by persuading them to attempt autocratic government.

¹ The mysteries current in Athens were the Elcusinian. There had been a good deal of trouble about these mysteries in 415 (though the matter is very obscure), and the trouble was recrudescent in 399. In view of this trouble Professor Burnet is inclined to suggest that the connexion of Socrates with the Orphic mysteries may have helped to create a prejudice against him at his trial.

² According to Xenophon (Mem. I. 2, § 31–8), he had been commanded before, in 404, by Critias and his fellow-tyrants, to stop his teaching and his conversations with the young. We are not told that he obeyed; but it was perhaps fortunate for him that the power of the Thirty Tyrants soon collapsed.

¹ Lord Morley writes of ‘the intuitive instinct that often goes farther in the statesman’s mind than deliberate analysis or argument’. He quotes Bismarck: ‘I have often noticed that my will had decided before my thinking was finished’ (Notes on Politics and History, pp. 57–43).

¹ Since this book was written, and while it was in the printer’s hands, an article on Professor Burnet’s views, by Professor Stewart, has appeared in the issue of Mind for October 1917.

¹ For the Cyropaedia cf. Henkel, Studien, pp. 136 sqq. Xenophon also wrote two treatises, one on the Lacedaemonian Constitution, and one on the Revenues of Athens, which advocated the nationalization of merchant shipping and of inns and lodging-houses.

¹ Isocrates is referring to the Sophists of the fourth century, and not to those of the Hth.

² Helenae Encomium, § 5 (quoted in Jebb, Attic Orators, II. 49).

³ Jebb, Attic Orators, II. 38–9.

⁴ Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 215–19.

¹ Politics, II. 6, § 2 and § 14: VII. 2–3 and 14–15. It should be said at once, however, that Plato, in the fifth book of the Republic, and again in the last book of the Laws, certainly discusses the problem of foreign relations.

¹ The orator Lysias had already spoken of himself as ‘a citizen of Greece’ in his Olympic oration of 388 (Jebb, Attic Orators, I. 156).

² Pawgyricus, § 50; De Antidosi, § 293. It is interesting to compare the Panhellenism of Isocrates with that of Plato in the fifth book of the Republic, on which cf. infra, pp. 307–311.

³ Philostratus, quoted in Jebb, Attic Orators, I. 203–4.

¹ Lysias is an interesting figure, who touches the history of political theory at another point. His father Cephalus was a friend of Socrates; and the scene of the Republic is laid in the house of Cephalus, while Cephalus himself, and Polemarchus, the elder brother of Lysias, are both persons in the dialogue. Lysias wrote a defence of Socrates in 392, in reply to a pamphlet against Socrates published in that year by the Sophist Polycrates.

² The second of the epistles is written after Philip’s victory over Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea, and urges Philip to crown his glory by making the barbarians helots of the Greeks. The old tradition that the news of Chaeronea ‘killed with despair the old man eloquent’ is the reverse of true. It filled him with new hopes of the future.

¹ Plato alludes to this border-land, cf, infra, p. 166 n. 2.

¹ Prodicus is already represented by Plato, in the Protagoras, as regarding all men as ‘by nature’ fellow-citizens; and Antiphon the Sophist, as we have seen (supra, p. 79)’ was already enunciating a definite doctrine of cosmopolitanism at the end of the fifth century. It may be added that the cosmopolitanism of the Cynics, like that of Antiphon, but unlike that of the Stoics, is negative rather than positive in character. They disliked the ‘city of Cecrops’ more than they liked the ‘city of Zeus’.

² Cf. McCunn, Intern. Journ. Eth., XIV. 185 sqq.

¹ Gomperz, Creek Thinks, E.T., n. 161.

¹ Antisthenes was a Thracian; Diogenes came from Sinope. This perhaps suggests one reason of the attack on the Greek city; and it explains the Cynic teaching omrus homines natura asquales sunt.

² It is possible that there is some reference to the Cynics in the discussion of the theoretic life at the end of the Ethics. It is possible, too, that Plato is thinking of the Cynics when he speaks of the philosopher retiring from the world’s storm ‘to live his own life’ (Republic, 496 E). But Plato adds at once that such a man ‘will not do his greatest work unless he finds a suitable State, where he will have a larger growth and be the saviour of his own country as well as of himself’ (497 A).

¹ We have already seen (p. 81) that Democritus perhaps combined an hedonistic philosophy with a doctrine of the origin of the State and its law in contract.