Chapter LXVIII: Sokrates (5)

The sentence of death passed against him, by what majority we do not know. But Sokratês neither altered his tone, nor manifested any regret for the language by which he had himself seconded the purpose of his accusers. On the contrary, he told the dikasts, in a short address prior to his departure for the prison, that he was satisfied both with his own conduct and with the result. The divine sign, he said, which was wont to restrain him, often on very small occasions, both in deeds and in words, had never manifested itself once to him throughout the whole day, neither when he came thither at first, nor at any one point throughout his whole discourse. The tacit acquiescence of this infallible monitor satisfied him not only that he had spoken rightly, but that the sentence passed was in reality no evil to him; that to die now was the best thing which could befall him.[793] Either death was tantamount to a sound, perpetual, and dreamless sleep, which in his judgment would be no loss, but rather a gain, compared with the present life; or else, if the common mythes were true, death would transfer him to a second life in Hades, where he would find all the heroes of the Trojan war, and of the past generally, so as to pursue in conjunction with them the business of mutual cross-examination, and debate on ethical progress and perfection.[794]

[793] Plato, Apol. Sok. c. 31, p. 40, B; c. 33, p. 41, D.

[794] Plato, Apol. Sok. c. 32, p. 40, C; p. 41, B.

There can be no doubt that the sentence really appeared to Sokratês in this point of view, and to his friends also, after the event had happened, though doubtless not at the time when they were about to lose him. He took his line of defence advisedly, and with full knowledge of the result. It supplied him with the fittest of all opportunities for manifesting, in an impressive manner, both his personal ascendency over human fears and weakness, and the dignity of what he believed to be his divine mission. It took him away in his full grandeur and glory, like the setting of the tropical sun, at a moment when senile decay might be looked upon as close at hand. He calculated that his defence and bearing on the trial would be the most emphatic lesson which he could possibly read to the youth of Athens; more emphatic, probably, than the sum total of those lessons which his remaining life might suffice to give, if he shaped his defence otherwise. This anticipation of the effect of the concluding scene of his life, setting the seal on all his prior discourses, manifests itself in portions of his concluding words to the dikasts, wherein he tells them that they will not, by putting him to death, rid themselves of the importunity of the cross-examining elenchus; that numbers of young men, more restless and obtrusive than he, already carried within them that impulse, which they would now proceed to apply; his superiority having hitherto kept them back.[795] It was thus the persuasion of Sokratês, that his removal would be the signal for numerous apostles, putting forth with increased energy that process of interrogatory test and spur to which he had devoted his life, and which doubtless was to him far dearer and more sacred than his life. Nothing could be more effective than his lofty bearing on his trial, for inflaming the enthusiasm of young men thus predisposed; and the loss of life was to him compensated by the missionary successors whom he calculated on leaving behind.

[795] Plato, Apol. Sok. c. 30, p. 39, C.

Under ordinary circumstances, Sokratês would have drunk the cup of hemlock in the prison, on the day after his trial. But it so happened that the day of his sentence was immediately after that on which the sacred ship started on its yearly ceremonial pilgrimage from Athens to Delos, for the festival of Apollo. Until the return of this vessel to Athens, it was accounted unholy to put any person to death by public authority. Accordingly, Sokratês remained in prison,—and we are pained to read, actually with chains on his legs,—during the interval that this ship was absent, thirty days altogether. His friends and companions had free access to him, passing nearly all their time with him in the prison; and Krito had even arranged a scheme for procuring his escape, by a bribe to the jailer. This scheme was only prevented from taking effect by the decided refusal of Sokratês to become a party in any breach of the law;[796] a resolution, which we should expect as a matter of course, after the line which he had taken in his defence. His days were spent in the prison, in discourse respecting ethical and human subjects, which had formed the charm and occupation of his previous life: it is to the last of these days that his conversation with Simmias, Kebês, and Phædon, on the immortality of the soul is referred, in the Platonic dialogue called “Phædon.” Of that conversation the main topics and doctrines are Platonic rather than Sokratic. But the picture which the dialogue presents of the temper and state of mind of Sokratês, during the last hours of his life, is one of immortal beauty and interest, exhibiting his serene and even playful equanimity, amidst the uncontrollable emotions of his surrounding friends,—the genuine, unforced persuasion, governing both his words and his acts, of what he had pronounced before the dikasts, that the sentence of death was no calamity to him,[797]—and the unabated maintenance of that earnest interest in the improvement of man and society, which had for so many years formed both his paramount motive and his active occupation. The details of the last scene are given with minute fidelity, even down to the moment of his dissolution; and it is consoling to remark that the cup of hemlock—the means employed for executions by public order at Athens—produced its effect by steps far more exempt from suffering than any natural death which was likely to befall him. Those who have read what has been observed above respecting the strong religious persuasions of Sokratês, will not be surprised to hear that his last words, addressed to Krito immediately before he passed into a state of insensibility, were: “Krito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: discharge the debt, and by no means omit it.”[798]

[796] Plato, Krito, c. 2, 3, _seq._

[797] Plato, Phædon, c. 77, p. 84, E.

[798] Plato, Phædon, c. 155, p. 118, A.

Thus perished the “parens philosophiæ,” the first of ethical philosophers; a man who opened to science both new matter, alike copious and valuable; and a new method, memorable not less for its originality and efficacy, than for the profound philosophical basis on which it rests. Though Greece produced great poets, orators, speculative philosophers, historians, etc., yet other countries having the benefit of Grecian literature to begin with, have nearly equalled her in all these lines, and surpassed her in some. But where are we to look for a parallel to Sokratês, either in or out of the Grecian world? The cross-examining elenchus, which he not only first struck out, but wielded with such matchless effect and to such noble purposes, has been mute ever since his last conversation in the prison; for even his great successor Plato was a writer and lecturer, not a colloquial dialectician. No man has ever been found strong enough to bend his bow; much less, sure enough to use it as he did. His life remains as the only evidence, but a very satisfactory evidence, how much can be done by this sort of intelligent interrogation; how powerful is the interest which it can be made to inspire; how energetic the stimulus which it can apply in awakening dormant reason and generating new mental power.

It has been often customary to exhibit Sokratês as a moral preacher, in which character probably he has acquired to himself the general reverence attached to his name. This is, indeed, a true attribute, but not the characteristic or salient attribute, nor that by which he permanently worked on mankind. On the other hand, Arkesilaus, and the New Academy,[799] a century and more afterwards, thought that they were following the example of Sokratês—and Cicero seems to have thought so too—when they reasoned against everything; and when they laid it down as a system, that, against every affirmative position, an equal force of negative argument might be brought up as counterpoise. Now this view of Sokratês is, in my judgment, not merely partial, but incorrect. He entertained no such systematic distrust of the powers of the mind to attain certainty. He laid down a clear, though erroneous line of distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. About physics, he was more than a skeptic; he thought that man could know nothing; the gods did not intend that man should acquire any such information, and therefore managed matters in such a way as to be beyond his ken, for all except the simplest phenomena of daily wants; moreover, not only man could not acquire such information, but ought not to labor after it. But respecting the topics which concern man and society, the views of Sokratês were completely the reverse. This was the field which the gods had expressly assigned, not merely to human practice, but to human study and acquisition of knowledge; a field, wherein, with that view, they managed phenomena on principles of constant and observable sequence, so that every man who took the requisite pains might know them. Nay, Sokratês went a step further; and this forward step is the fundamental conviction upon which all his missionary impulse hinges. He thought that every man not only might know these things but ought to know them; that he could not possibly act well, unless he did know them; and that it was his imperious duty to learn them as he would learn a profession; otherwise, he was nothing better than a slave, unfit to be trusted as a free and accountable being. Sokratês felt persuaded that no man could behave as a just, temperate, courageous, pious, patriotic agent, unless he taught himself to know correctly what justice, temperance, courage, piety, and patriotism, etc., really were. He was possessed with the truly Baconian idea, that the power of steady moral action depended upon, and was limited by, the rational comprehension of moral ends and means. But when he looked at the minds around him, he perceived that few or none either had any such comprehension, or had ever studied to acquire it; yet at the same time every man felt persuaded that he did possess it, and acted confidently upon such persuasion. Here, then, Sokratês found that the first outwork for him to surmount, was, that universal “conceit of knowledge without the reality,” against which he declares such emphatic war; and against which, also, though under another form of words and in reference to other subjects, Bacon declares war not less emphatically, two thousand years afterwards: “Opinio copiæ inter causas inopiæ est.” Sokratês found that those notions respecting human and social affairs, on which each man relied and acted, were nothing but spontaneous products of the “intellectus sibi permissus,” of the intellect left to itself either without any guidance, or with only the blind guidance of sympathies, antipathies, authority, or silent assimilation. They were products got together, to use Bacon’s language, “from much faith and much chance, and from the primitive suggestions of boyhood,” not merely without care or study, but without even consciousness of the process, and without any subsequent revision. Upon this basis the sophists, or professed teachers for active life, sought to erect a superstructure of virtue and ability; but to Sokratês, such an attempt appeared hopeless and contradictory—not less impracticable than Bacon in his time pronounced it to be, to carry up the tree of science into majesty and fruit-bearing, without first clearing away those fundamental vices which lay unmolested and in poisonous influence round its root. Sokratês went to work in the Baconian manner and spirit; bringing his cross-examining process to bear, as the first condition to all further improvement, upon these rude, self-begotten, incoherent generalizations, which passed in men’s minds for competent and directing knowledge. But he, not less than Bacon, performs this analysis, not with a view to finality in the negative, but as the first stage towards an ulterior profit; as the preliminary purification, indispensable to future positive result. In the physical sciences, to which Bacon’s attention was chiefly turned, no such result could be obtained without improved experimental research, bringing to light facts new and yet unknown; but on those topics which Sokratês discussed, the elementary data of the inquiry were all within the hearer’s experience, requiring only to be pressed upon his notice, affirmatively as well as negatively, together with the appropriate ethical and political end; in such manner as to stimulate within him the rational effort requisite for combining them anew upon consistent principles.

[799] Cicero, Academ. Post. i, 12, 44. “Cum Zenone Arcesilas
sibi omne certamen instituit, non pertinaciâ aut studio
vincendi (ut mihi quidem videtur), sed earum rerum obscuritate,
quæ ad confessionem ignorationis adduxerant Socratem, et jam
ante Socratem, Democritum, Anaxagoram, Empedoclem, omnes pene
veteres; qui nihil cognosci, nihil percipi, nihil sciri, posse,
dixerunt.... Itaque Arcesilas negabat, esse quidquam, quod sciri
posset, no illud quidem ipsum, quod Socrates sibi reliquisset:
sic omnia latere in occulto.” Compare Academ. Prior. ii, 23, 74;
de Nat. Deor. i, 5, 11.

In another passage (Academ. Post. i, 4, 17) Cicero speaks (or
rather introduces Varro as speaking) rather confusedly. He talks
of “illam Socraticam dubitationem de omnibus rebus, et nullâ
affirmatione adhibitâ, consuetudinem disserendi;” but a few lines
before, he had said what implies that men might, in the opinion
of Sokratês, come to learn and know what belonged to human
conduct and human duties.

Again (in Tusc. Disp. i, 4, 8), he admits that Sokratês had a
positive ulterior purpose in his negative questioning: “vetus et
Socratica ratio contra alterius opinionem disserendi: nam ita
facillime, quid veri simillimum esset, inveniri posse Socrates
arbitrabatur.”

Tennemann (Gesch. der Philos. ii, 5, vol. ii, pp. 169-175) seeks
to make out considerable analogy between Sokratês and Pyrrho.
But it seems to me that the analogy only goes thus far, that
both agreed in repudiating all speculations not ethical (see the
verses of Timon upon Pyrrho, Diog. Laërt. ix, 65). But in regard
to ethics, the two differed materially. Sokratês maintained that
ethics were matter of science, and the proper subject of study.
Pyrrho, on the other hand, seems to have thought that speculation
was just as useless, and science just as unattainable, upon
ethics as upon physics; that nothing was to be attended to except
feelings, and nothing cultivated except good dispositions.

If, then, the philosophers of the New Academy considered Sokratês either as a skeptic, or as a partisan of systematic negation, they misinterpreted his character, and mistook the first stage of his process—that which Plato, Bacon, and Herschel call the purification of the intellect—for the ultimate goal. The elenchus, as Sokratês used it, was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment.[800]

[800] Plato, Apol. Sok. c. 7, p. 22, A. δεῖ δὴ ὑμῖν τὴν ἐμὴν
πλάνην ἐπιδεῖξαι, ὥσπερ τινὰς πόνους πονοῦντος, etc.

There are two points, and two points only, in topics concerning man and society, with regard to which Sokratês is a skeptic; or rather, which he denies; and on the negation of which, his whole method and purpose turn. He denies, first, that men can know that on which they have bestowed no conscious effort, no deliberate pains, no systematic study, in learning. He denies, next, that men can practise what they do not know;[801] that they can be just, or temperate, or virtuous generally, without knowing what justice, or temperance, or virtue is. To imprint upon the minds of his hearers his own negative conviction, on these two points is, indeed, his first object, and the primary purpose of his multiform dialectical manœuvring. But though negative in his means, Sokratês is strictly positive in his ends; his attack is undertaken only with distinct view to a positive result; in order to shame them out of the illusion of knowledge, and to spur them on and arm them for the acquisition of real, assured, comprehensive, self-explanatory knowledge, as the condition and guarantee of virtuous practice. Sokratês was, indeed, the reverse of a skeptic; no man ever looked upon life with a more positive and practical eye; no man ever pursued his mark with a clearer perception of the road which he was travelling; no man ever combined, in like manner, the absorbing enthusiasm of a missionary,[802] with the acuteness, the originality, the inventive resource, and the generalizing comprehension, of a philosopher.

[801] So Demokritus, Fragm. ed. Mullach, p. 185, Fr. 131. οὔτε
τέχνη, οὔτε σοφίη, ἐφιστὸν, ἢν μὴ μάθῃ τις....

[802] Aristotle (Problem. c. 30, p. 953, Bek.) numbers both
Sokratês and Plato (compare Plutarch, Lysand. c. 2) among those
to whom he ascribes φύσιν μελανχολικὴν, the black bile and
ecstatic temperament. I do not know how to reconcile this with
a passage in his Rhetoric (ii, 17), in which he ranks Sokratês
among the _sedate_ persons (στάσιμον). The first of the two
assertions seems countenanced by the anecdotes respecting
Sokratês (in Plato, Symposion, p. 175, B; p. 220, C), that he
stood in the same posture, quite unmoved, even for several hours
continuously, absorbed in meditation upon some idea which had
seized his mind.

His method yet survives, as far as such method can survive, in some of the dialogues of Plato. It is a process of eternal value and of universal application. That purification of the intellect, which Bacon signalized as indispensable for rational or scientific progress, the Sokratic elenchus affords the only known instrument for at least partially accomplishing. However little that instrument may have been applied since the death of its inventor, the necessity and use of it neither have disappeared, nor ever can disappear. There are few men whose minds are not more or less in that state of sham knowledge against which Sokratês made war: there is no man whose notions have not been first got together by spontaneous, unexamined, unconscious, uncertified association, resting upon forgotten particulars, blending together disparates or inconsistencies, and leaving in his mind old and familiar phrases, and oracular propositions, of which he has never rendered to himself account: there is no man, who, if he be destined for vigorous and profitable scientific effort, has not found it a necessary branch of self-education, to break up, disentangle, analyze, and reconstruct, these ancient mental compounds; and who has not been driven to do it by his own lame and solitary efforts, since the giant of the colloquial elenchus no longer stands in the market-place to lend him help and stimulus.

To hear of any man,[803] especially of so illustrious a man, being condemned to death on such accusations as that of heresy and alleged corruption of youth, inspires at the present day a sentiment of indignant reprobation, the force of which I have no desire to enfeeble. The fact stands eternally recorded as one among the thousand misdeeds of intolerance, religious and political. But since amidst this catalogue each item has its own peculiar character, grave or light, we are bound to consider at what point of the scale the condemnation of Sokratês is to be placed, and what inferences it justifies in regard to the character of the Athenians. Now if we examine the circumstances of the case, we shall find them all extenuating; and so powerful, indeed, as to reduce such inferences to their minimum, consistent with the general class to which the incident belongs.

[803] Dr. Thirlwall has given, in an Appendix to his fourth
volume (Append. vii, p. 526, _seq._), an interesting and
instructive review of the recent sentiments expressed by Hegel,
and by some other eminent German authors, on Sokratês and his
condemnation. It affords me much satisfaction to see that he has
bestowed such just animadversions on the unmeasured bitterness,
as well as upon the untenable views, of M. Forchhammer’s treatise
respecting Sokratês.

I dissent, however, altogether, from the manner in which Dr.
Thirlwall speaks about the sophists, both in this Appendix and
elsewhere. My opinion, respecting the persons so called, has been
given at length in the preceding chapter.

First, the sentiment now prevalent is founded upon a conviction that such matters as heresy and heretical teaching of youth are not proper for judicial cognizance. Even in the modern world, such a conviction is of recent date; and in the fifth century B.C. it was unknown. Sokratês himself would not have agreed in it; and all Grecian governments, oligarchical and democratical alike, recognized the opposite. The testimony furnished by Plato is on this point decisive. When we examine the two positive communities which he constructs, in the treatises “De Republicâ” and “De Legibus,” we find that there is nothing about which he is more anxious, than to establish an unresisted orthodoxy of doctrine, opinion, and education. A dissenting and free-spoken teacher, such as Sokratês was at Athens, would not have been allowed to pursue his vocation for a week, in the Platonic Republic. Plato would not, indeed, condemn him to death; but he would put him to silence, and in case of need send him away. This, in fact, is the consistent deduction, if you assume that the state is to determine what _is_ orthodoxy and orthodox teaching, and to repress what contradicts its own views. Now all the Grecian states, including Athens, held this principle[804] of interference against the dissenting teacher. But at Athens, though the principle was recognized, yet the application of it was counteracted by resisting forces which it did not find elsewhere; by the democratical constitution, with its liberty of speech and love of speech, by the more active spring of individual intellect, and by the toleration, greater there than anywhere else, shown to each man’s peculiarities of every sort. In any other government of Greece, as well as in the Platonic Republic, Sokratês would have been quickly arrested in his career, even if not severely punished; in Athens, he was allowed to talk and teach publicly for twenty-five or thirty years, and then condemned when an old man. Of these two applications of the same mischievous principle, assuredly the latter is at once the more moderate and the less noxious.

[804] See Plato, Euthyphron, c. 3, p. 3, D.

Secondly, the force of this last consideration, as an extenuating circumstance in regard to the Athenians, is much increased, when we reflect upon the number of individual enemies whom Sokratês made to himself in the prosecution of his cross-examining process. Here were a multitude of individuals, including men personally the most eminent and effective in the city, prompted by special antipathies, over and above general convictions, to call into action the dormant state-principle of intolerance against an obnoxious teacher. If, under such provocation, he was allowed to reach the age of seventy, and to talk publicly for so many years, before any real Melêtus stood forward, this attests conspicuously the efficacy of the restraining dispositions among the people, which made their practical habits more liberal than their professed principles.

Thirdly, whoever has read the account of the trial and defence of Sokratês, will see that he himself contributed quite as much to the result as all the three accusers united. Not only he omitted to do all that might have been done without dishonor, to insure acquittal, but he held positive language very nearly such as Melêtus himself would have sought to put in his mouth. He did this deliberately,—having an exalted opinion both of himself and his own mission,—and accounting the cup of hemlock, at his age, to be no calamity. It was only by such marked and offensive self-exaltation that he brought on the first vote of the dikastery, even then the narrowest majority, by which he was found guilty: it was only by a still more aggravated manifestation of the same kind, even to the pitch of something like insult, that he brought on the second vote, which pronounced the capital sentence. Now it would be uncandid not to allow for the effect of such a proceeding on the minds of the dikastery. They were not at all disposed, of their own accord, to put in force the recognized principle of intolerance against him. But when they found that the man who stood before them charged with this offence, addressed them in a tone such as dikasts had never heard before and could hardly hear with calmness, they could not but feel disposed to credit all the worst inferences which his accusers had suggested, and to regard Sokratês as a dangerous man both religiously and politically, against whom it was requisite to uphold the majesty of the court and constitution.

In appreciating this memorable incident, therefore, though the mischievous principle of intolerance cannot be denied, yet all the circumstances show that that principle was neither irritable nor predominant in the Athenian bosom; that even a large body of collateral antipathies did not readily call it forth against any individual; that the more liberal and generous dispositions, which deadened its malignity, were of steady efficacy, not easily overborne; and that the condemnation ought to count as one of the least gloomy items in an essentially gloomy catalogue.

Let us add, that as Sokratês himself did not account his own condemnation and death, at his age, to be any misfortune, but rather a favorable dispensation of the gods, who removed him just in time to escape that painful consciousness of intellectual decline which induced Demokritus to prepare the poison for himself, so his friend Xenophon goes a step further, and while protesting against the verdict of guilty, extols the manner of death as a subject of triumph; as the happiest, most honorable, and most gracious way, in which the gods could set the seal upon a useful and exalted life.[805]

[805] Xen. Mem. iv, 8, 3:—

“Denique Democritum postquam matura vetustas
Admonuit memores motus languescere mentis,
Sponte suâ letho sese obvius obtulit ipse.”

(Lucretius, iii, 1052.)

It is asserted by Diodorus, and repeated with exaggerations by other later authors, that after the death of Sokratês the Athenians bitterly repented of the manner in which they had treated him, and that they even went so far as to put his accusers to death without trial.[806] I know not upon what authority this statement is made, and I disbelieve it altogether. From the tone of Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” there is every reason to presume that the memory of Sokratês still continued to be unpopular at Athens when that collection was composed. Plato, too, left Athens immediately after the death of his master, and remained absent for a long series of years: indirectly, I think, this affords a presumption that no such reaction took place in Athenian sentiment as that which Diodorus alleges; and the same presumption is countenanced by the manner in which the orator Æschinês speaks of the condemnation, half a century afterwards. I see no reason to believe that the Athenian dikasts, who doubtless felt themselves justified, and more than justified, in condemning Sokratês after his own speech, retracted that sentiment after his decease.

[806] Diodor. xiv. 37, with Wesseling’s note; Diog. Laërt. ii.
43; Argument ad Isokrat. Or. xi, Busiris.

* * * * * *

Transcriber's note:

* Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected, after
comparison with a later edition of this work. Greek text has
also been corrected after checking with this later edition and
with Perseus, when the reference was found.

* Original spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been kept,
but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant
usage was found.

* Some inconsistencies in the use of accents over proper nouns
(like “Euthydemus” and “Euthydêmus”) have been retained.

* At Page 409, note 649, the word “οὐδαμοῦ” has been inserted in
the sentence “οὔτ᾽ ἐν τῷ λόγῳ οὐδαμοῦ μέλλοντί τι ἐρεῖν·”, as
suggested by modern editions of Plato.