AUTHORITIES. The Memorabilia' of Xenophon; Plato's Dialogues,' especially the 'Apologia,' the 'Crito,' and the 'Phædo,' in Professor Jowett's excellent edition of Plato. The narrative has, wherever it was possible, been taken from the eighth volume of Grote's 'History of Greece,' which appeared by the keenness of its insight and the vividness of its representation to supersede all other accounts. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. THE GRECIAN PERIOD. LECTURE XLVI. SOCRATES. WE have arrived at the point when the influence of Greece is to make itself felt so deeply on the history both of Judaism and of the religion which sprang from Judaism as to compel us to pause for a time, in order to bring clearly before our minds the strong personality and the quickening power of the one Grecian character who, beyond dispute, belongs to the religious history of all mankind, and whose example and teaching -unlike that of the Eastern sages whom we have just noticed -struck directly on the heart and intellect, first of Hebrew Palestine, and then of Christian Europe. The solemn pause at which the last utterances of Malachi leave us in Jerusalem corresponds, in some respects, to the pause which meets us in Grecian history when we transport ourselves to the same period in Athens. It was not merely that at the close of the Peloponnesian war the long struggle between the contending States had just been brought to an end, but that the eminent men who bore their part in it had been themselves called away from the scene. It is the Grecian Morte of heroes.' Every one of the great statesmen of Athens had passed away by the close of the fifth century before the Christian era; and not the statesmen only, but the great writers also, whose career had run parallel to the tragedy of actual life. Thucy Socrates. His universality. dides, 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 hunting-grounds of his royal patron in Macedonia. Sophocles in the fulness of years had been called away from the midst of his labours and his honours by an end as peaceful and as glorious as that of his own Colonean Edipus. One man there still remained to close this funeral processionhe whose death alone of all the characters of Athenian history is an epoch in the annals 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 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 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 canonisation of Buddha, though formal, was the result of inadvertence, the canonisation 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 life. 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 remarkable 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 recognise, 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,' 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 Gene-. rals-when the magistrates were so intimidated by the 'incensed manifestations of the assembly that all of them, except 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 impreg'nable adherence to law and duty was only one amongst many 'titles to honour. It was the philosopher 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.' 2 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 6 6 6 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 un- 2 Grote's Greece, viii. 272. |