1

Socrates.

era; and not the statesmen only, but the great writers also, whose career had run parallel to the tragedy of actual life. Thucydides, the grave recorder of the age, had left its exciting tale unfinished in the middle of a sentence. Euripides, the most philosophical and sceptical of the dramatic poets, had already met a fate stranger than that of his own Pentheus in the huntinggrounds of his royal patron in Macedonia. Sophocles, in the fulness of years, had been called away from the midst of his labors and his honors by an end as peaceful and as glorious as that of his own Coloncan Edipus. One man there still remained to close this funeral procession - he whose death alone, of all the characters of Athenian history, is an epoch in the story not only of Greece but of the world. With the mention of the name of Socrates we seem to pass at once from the student's chamber versality. into the walks of common life - from the glories of Hellenic heathenism into the sanctities of Biblical religion. He, and he alone, of the sons of Javan, finds a place in the Fathers of Christian, as well as in the moralists of Pagan antiquity; in the proverbs of modern Europe, as well as in the oracles of classical Greece. The prayer "Sancte Socrates, ora

His uni

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pro nobis," by whomsoever said, has won a more universal acceptance than that of many a prayer addressed to the dubious saints of the Byzantine or of the Latin Church. If the canonization of Buddha, though formal, was the result of inadvertence, the canonization of Socrates, though informal, has been almost accepted. And the peculiar circumstances of his career, and its contrasts and affinities with the events and characters of the Sacred History both before and after the date of his appearance, make its description

an almost necessary element in the course of the story on which we have been hitherto and shall be henceforth engaged.

It is not on the public stage of Greek events that Socrates is most familiar to us. Yet for that very reason there is a peculiar interest in first approaching him, as in a purely historical point of view we must approach him, on the larger and more complex sphere of war and politics. When we meet such characters at moments where one least expects to find them, especially (as in this case) on occasions which His public illustrate and call forth some of their most re- life. markable qualities, it is the surprise of encountering a friend in a strange country-it is the instruction of seeing a character which we have long known and admired in private put to a public test, and coming through the trial triumphantly. In the winter campaign at Potidæa, when the Athenian army was struck down by the severity of the Thracian frosts, we start with a thrill of pleasure as we recognize, in the one soldier whose spirits and strength continued unbroken by the hardship of that northern climate, the iron frame and constitution of the great philosopher. We survey with renewed interest the confused flight from the field of Delium,1 when we remember that from that flight the youthful Xenophon was borne away on the broad shoulders of his illustrious friend. In the iniquitous condemnation of the Ten Generals - when "the magistrates were so intimidated by the incensed "manifestations of the assembly that all of them, ex

1 For every Englishman the plain of Delium (now Delisi) has a melancholy interest, as the scene of the death of the young Englishmen who

perished there, with a spirit not unworthy of ancient Greeks or of Christian Englishmen, in 1870.

cept one, relinquished their opposition and agreed to "put the question, that single obstinate officer whose "refusal no menace could subdue, was a man in whom "an impregnable adherence to law and duty was only "one amongst many titles to honor. It was the phi"losopher Socrates on this trying occasion, once "throughout a life of seventy years discharging a "political office among the fifty senators taken by lot "from his own native district."1 Once, or it may be twice again, was he allowed to exhibit to the world this instructive lesson. In the Athenian Reign of Terror, after the oligarchical revolution of Lysander, "pursuant to their general plan of implicating unwill"ing citizens in their misdeeds, the Thirty Tyrants "sent for five citizens to the government-house, and "ordered them, with terrible menaces, to cross over "to Salamis, and bring back as prisoner one of the "innocent objects of their resentment. Four out of "the five obeyed: the fifth was the philosopher Socra66 tes, who refused all concurrence, and returned to his own house."

"2

This was the last time that Socrates appeared in the political transactions of the country, unless we may believe the later traditions which represent him as present at that" most striking and tragical scene," when Theramenes sprang on the sacred hearth of the Athenian senate-house for protection against his murderers, like Joab at the horns of the altar of Jerusalem, or Onias in the consecrated grove of Daphne, and when, as we are told, Socrates and two of his friends alone stood forward to protect him, as Satyrus, the executioner, dragged him by main force from the altar.

1 Grote's Greece, viii. 272.

2 Grote, viii. 332.

8 Lectures XXVI., XLVIII.

Such was the political life of Socrates-important in a high degree as proving that, unlike many eminent teachers, his character stood the test of public no less than of private morality-as exemplifying also the principle on which a good man may save the State not by going out of his way to seek for trials of his strength, but by being fully prepared to meet them when they come. Had nothing more been handed down to us of his life than these comparatively trifling incidents, we should still have dwelt with peculiar pleasure on the scenes in which his name occurs, as, in fact, amidst "the naughty world" of Grecian politics we dwell on "the good deeds" of the humane Nicomachus, or of the noble Callicratidas; we should still have desired to know something more of the general character and pursuits of so honest and fearless a citizen.

That desire is gratified almost beyond example in the ancient world, by what is left us of the individual life of Socrates, which even in his own time made him the best known Athenian of his day, and in later times has so completely thrown his political acts into the shade that not one in ten thousand of those to whom his name is a household word has any knowledge whatever of those few passages in which he crossed the path of the statesman or the soldier.

sonal ap

It is not often that the personal appearance of a great man has been so faithfully preserved. In the His perJewish history we have hardly, except in the pearance. case of David, and perhaps of Jeremiah, been able to discern a single lineament or color of outward form or countenance. In the famous picture of the School of Athens we look round on the faces of the other philosophers, and detect them only by their likeness to some ideal model which the painter has imagined to himself.

But the Socrates of Raffaelle is the true historical Socrates of Xenophon and Aristophanes. Could we transport ourselves back to the Athenian market-place during the Peloponnesian War, we should at once recognize one familiar figure, standing, with uplifted finger and animated gesture, amidst the group of handsome youths or aged sophists, eager to hear, to learn, and to refute. We should see the Silenic features of that memorable countenance- the flat nose, the thick lips, the prominent eyes the mark of a thousand jests from friends and foes. We should laugh at the protuberance of the Falstaff stomach, which no necessary hardships, no voluntary exercise, could bring down. We should perceive the strong-built frame, the full development of health and strength, which never sickened in the winter campaign of Potidæa, nor yet in the long plague and stifling heats of the blockade of Athens; which could enter alike into the jovial revelry of the religious festivities of Xenophon and Plato, or sustain the austerities, the scanty clothing, the naked feet, and the coarse fare of his ordinary life. The strong common sense, the humor, the courage of the man, were conspicuous at his very first outset. And every one knows the story of the physiognomist, who detected in his features the traces of that fiery temper which for the most part he kept under severe control, but which, when it did break loose, is described by those who witnessed it as absolutely terrible, overleaping both in act and language every barrier of the ordinary decorum of Grecian manners.1

But we must go back into his inner life, and into his earlier youth, before we can apprehend the feelings with which the Athenians must have regarded this

1 See Fragments of Aristoxenus, 27, 28, as quoted by Grote, viii. 548.