Division II.—Greek Philosophy from Socrates to Aristotle

Section I. Athens in the Time of Socrates.—The Sophists

1. The city of Wisdom. If Greece was the country of wisdom and wise men, no one has ever doubted that Athens was in this sense the capital of Greece; that there Wisdom was worshipped with all her rites; that there wise men had an honour which was bestowed upon them in no other part of the world. The name of the city affected all the acts of the citizens; the meanest of them had some sense that the Goddess of Wisdom was his protectress, and that he had received some endowments from her.

2. As there is no dispute about this fact, so there is none that the age of Pericles was that in which Athens attained the glory she was always aiming at, that it was then all the powers of her sons reached their manhood. The great statesman thoroughly understood the character of the people whom he ruled. The funeral oration which Thucydides puts into his mouth, may not have been delivered by him in the very form in which we receive it, but it expresses exactly that accurate perception of the Athenian mind which the historian knew that he possessed. Pericles: his idea of Athenian life. With the same dramatical propriety, if the speech be not a report, he exhibits it as the settled purpose of Pericles, not to restrain the tendencies of this character, but to give them their full play and development. He would suffer no Spartan moroseness to interfere with Athenian freedom. The corrections which it needed, so he believed, must be supplied from itself. Any attempt to introduce the maxims and habits of another tribe would destroy the Athenian energy without really imparting to it the Dorian self-restraint.

3. Whether this calculation were a right or a wrong one, the effects of it are memorable in the history of the world. The sculptors and poets: how they were viewed by their contemporaries. Those to which we most naturally recur are the creations of the sculptors and poets. The perception of the beauty and symmetry of the human form which was awakened at that time, the images of the gods to which it gave birth, though they may have won the admiration and influenced the character of future generations, must be considered in connexion with the processions and the temples of the people for whose use they were immediately designed. So again the works of the great tragedians, however much they may deserve the attention of solitary students, ought to be thought of as represented at the festivals, as rivals for a popular prize, as acted before delighted or critical crowds. Those which have lasted through all the changes of much more than 2,000 years, show with what deep thoughts concerning the destiny of man the minds of some Athenians were exercised. But they were mixed with multitudes of other works which were probably at the time not felt to be inferior to them; they themselves were judged by their fitness to confer present amusement, by their adaptation to the varying demands of exceedingly clever, but also probably very impatient, spectators. The quickness and versatility of an author in creating that which should excite their sorrow or their mirth, would be the measure of his popularity, even though on the whole he who had thought and felt most would call forth the deepest echoes in their minds, and would ultimately obtain the greatest reverence. Aeschylus and Sophocles towered above their contemporaries probably even in the judgment of the many, but the qualities which we admire in them must have been to a great degree forgotten in the contemplation of the immediate effects which they produced. It was for after-times to discover how much there was in them which could not be exhausted in any shows, and which did not belong to one age or to one nation, but to mankind.

4. Why, it may be asked, are such reflections more appropriate to the age of Pericles than to the age of James I.? Were not Ben Jonson and Fletcher regarded chiefly as men who produced masques for the entertainment of the court—Shakspeare as an actor in the Globe Theatre? Such a remark is true in itself; but there is a special need for a student of philosophy, most of all for a student of the life of Socrates, to recollect in what light all the great men in Athens, whose main instruments were words, appeared to their fellow-citizens at this time. They professed a particular kind of wisdom. They were all exercising some kind of wisdom; that wisdom was addressed in the theatre, or the agora, to a class of judges who were themselves wise and conscious of wisdom; able to appreciate it, able to bestow the rewards of it. The great tragedians, fixing their minds on the heroic ages, were able to preserve themselves from making their own wisdom the creature of the mob wisdom. It required very high genius in a comic writer, whose business was with the present, to resist that influence; such a man would try to do it in a measure by choosing the most broad and conspicuous conceits and affectations of his age as objects of his ridicule. But the strongest temptation could not after all beset those who were using their wisdom for purposes of entertainment. Those who employed it for the direct object of persuasion, those who uttered words for the sake of leading their fellow-citizens to deeds, would be in a far more dangerous position for their own honesty, might be instruments of greater and more wide-spreading mischief. By degrees the kind of power which they exercised would become the measure of all others. The rhetorician would be regarded as the man who had ascertained the effectual use of words. Poets, statesmen, thinkers of all classes, even the commonest handicraftsmen, would gradually become rhetoricians; it would be looked upon as the craft of the wise city.

5. The Sophists It has been commonly supposed that there was a certain class of men, formed in the different cities of Greece, but always esteeming Athens as their head-quarters, who helped to keep alive this tendency in the minds of young Athenians, and to give it a very dangerous prominence. These men have been called Sophists; from them especially the notion of the name as an evil name has been derived; it has been supposed that the main work of Socrates was to counteract and undermine their influence. Mr. Grote’s arguments. Learned men have shared this impression with the vulgar; the most modern and critical writers with mere narrators. Recently these notions have been impugned with great skill, and apparently with a great weight of evidence. The existence of a sophistical system has been distinctly denied. Those who are designated by the common name were unlike each other, it is said, in all their doctrines, pursuits, habits of life. They were not men to whom any corrupt purpose or an immoral character can be imputed; proofs of their respectability may be obtained from the books of their greatest opponents. They did not cause Athenian society to degenerate from the standard of past ages, for no such degeneracy is visible in the history. The opprobrious epithet Sophist was not such at all in Greek apprehension; it was only a synonym for the wise man; it was conferred by impartial writers upon poets, upon philosophers, upon the supposed antagonist of sophistry himself. Plato and Aristotle have chosen to use it in a bad sense; they had a right to their own definition; but they cannot give us a right to pronounce an ex post facto sentence upon their contemporaries. Finally, we may hold the object of the life of Socrates to be a decidedly good object, without blaming the different Sophists whom he or his disciple blames. He aimed at a universal standard of wisdom and truth; they professed only to teach Athenians how to think, speak, and act. These conclusions, if they are true, must affect the whole course of our after history. It becomes us therefore to consider how far they are borne out by the able arguments and undoubted facts which Mr. Grote has produced.¹

6. The Sophist a professor of general wisdom. We at once accept Mr. Grote’s definition of the Sophist as the Platonical and the true one. He was “the professor of wisdom; he taught young men to speak, think, and act.” We wish for no other and no worse account of him. If modern artists have thrown any darker shades into their picture, we believe they have done him a benefit instead of an injury. Their clumsy exaggeration hides the essential ugliness which Mr. Grote’s flattering sketch brings out in full relief.

7. The age of the Sophists: in what respects better than former ages. They have, we conceive, been especially wrong in their attempts to blacken the age of Pericles, as if it was, essentially and inherently, worse than any previous age. In many respects it was assuredly much better. Not only were all the intellectual energies of the people more developed, but their great writers displayed a moral insight and purpose which are not to be found in the older times or in their immediate predecessors. Who can deny that the tone of Thucydides is much higher than that of Herodotus? that there is a much deeper recognition of principle in the Œdipus Tyrannus than in the Odyssey—that even Aristophanes (though we may quite agree with Mr. Grote in refusing him the dignity of a moral teacher) yet tacitly acknowledges a standard in his satires upon bad citizens, which would not have been as readily perceived by poets or recognised by their audiences in the times of Solon and Pisistratus? There had been a progress unquestionably in the minds of the better men in moral perceptions and apprehensions, a progress which could not have been found in them unless their contemporaries had been capable of the same. The political training and discipline of the Athenians must have greatly contributed to this result; their experience of society and government led them to practical distinctions which, without it, would have been hidden from them.

8. Whatever we may think of the Athenian democracy, we cannot doubt that it rendered this signal service to the eminent men who lived under it, and through them to the world. Its corrupt maxims and practices are made known to us by the emphatic protests against them which have come to us in historical reflections and prophecies—in lessons from the past, in ridicule of the present. In what respect worse. But the protests show us what the peculiar temptation of the Athenians was; why they were more prone to it in this than in any former time; what kind of influences were most certain to foster it. We have seen that a majority of the Greek wise men were tyrants (or despots, as Mr. Grote prefers to call them). The natural use of their wisdom was to obtain power—to make them fit for governing fools. Every Greek was inclined to hold this opinion. It grew in him with the growth of his faculties. Democracy afforded him an obvious opportunity of exercising them in this particular direction. The Peloponnesian war suggested thoughts (which had been latent in the Persian) of rivalry between Greeks, of Athenian ascendancy, of the difference between forms of government. The passionate impulses of patriotism, which had their own characteristic dangers, had yielded to deliberate schemes and calculations respecting the method of obtaining rule and wielding it. There might not be more of evil-doing in the one time than in the other. There must have been more consciousness of evil-doing; more internal wickedness; a greater readiness in bringing crimes under a theory, and in defending them upon that theory. This is the inference which the Melian controversy inevitably suggests. Make what allowance you please for the aristocratical tendencies of the writer: it cannot be denied that an experienced and wise man imputes to his fellow-citizens such a distinct understanding of an evil purpose and principles as we do not meet with elsewhere, and yet such an understanding as we should, without his authority, have attributed to a people possessing the Athenian wit and subtlety.

9. The professors all of different schools. All that was wanting to give this wit and subtlety their full play, was, that a set of men should appear, starting from the same maxim as the wise men in general had started from, but furnished with a set of instruments which had not belonged to them, and ready to teach the skill which they had used in a narrower sphere for their own advantage. The professors of whom we are speaking exactly answer to this description. They possessed all the respectability which Mr. Grote claims for them; were many of them aged and grave; were men of uncommon sagacity and penetration. They had studied in different schools. Some had learnt under Empedocles, some under Zeno. Some devoted themselves to physical studies, some to moral, some directly to political. Each possessed some sort of wisdom. Each undertook to teach that wisdom. Each held out the acquisition of political power as the prize to be obtained. There was their common point of agreement; possibly there was no other. The young Athenians wanted to learn how to think, act, and speak upon all subjects, that they might guide the people according to their pleasure. For this purpose they sought the aid of a Sophist or Professor.

10. How they taught to think, speak, and act. It was very needful that the Athenians should learn to think. What was to be their teaching for this end? They must be told about natural subjects, about moral subjects, about political subjects, by men who had been at the pains to learn what Thales said about them, what Pythagoras said about them, what Parmenides said about them. They must be told about the views of ancient cosmogonists respecting the world and the gods; about the views of modern thinkers and allegorists upon the same subject. They must hear about the Heraclitan flux, and the Parmenidean One: they must hear about the way in which cities were said to be built by the lyre of Apollo in former days, about the way in which they had been held together by the skill or legislation of recent despots. All these different views they were taught to compare together—to see the greater strength of the one and feebleness of the other, or to combine and reconcile them. Thus the Sophist taught his pupils to think. But all thinking is for the sake of action. Our professors are thoroughly practical men. They do not come to withdraw us from the business or work of the world at all. What should we care for them in Athens if they did? We want to know about men, not about the stars. We want to defeat Brasidas, or to support our party at home against Nicias, or to make ourselves rivals to Cleon, much more than to know anything about Heraclitus, or Parmenides, or Zeno. Well! But the one learning is the way to the other; for remember what comes between thinking and acting; remember what Homer says of “winged words;” remember that these have been with Greeks always “the great engines of government, the proximate cause of obedience.” If we teach you to speak, we teach you in the most efficient manner to act. These different physical, and metaphysical, and moral theories, will furnish you with topics for speaking; they will be the tools of your trade; they will give you a wonderful power of embarrassing, confuting, overawing an uninstructed opponent. All may serve this end. Theories about the order and formation of the world in the skilful hands of Hippias may make as good a rhetorician as direct moral teaching from Prodicus, or speculations upon government, human or divine, from Protagoras. All will supply topics; all will be instruments of persuasion. And then see what power Zeno has put into our hands! Words you see may mean the most opposite, the most contradictory, things. If you could be taught the secret of this contradiction, and how to turn it to account, would not this be invaluable lore?

11. Speech the chief thing. In the last paragraph we have just hinted at the modern meaning of the word Sophist, which Mr. Grote so indignantly repudiates. Unquestionably it is not the meaning. The one which our historian has substituted for it is far more comprehensive and satisfactory. But by the necessity of his calling, he who taught to think, to act, to speak, would come to regard the last part of his profession as that which included both the others. He would become a rhetorician and a teacher of rhetoric. For that purpose he must deal with the subtle meanings of words; whether honestly, as Zeno did, or treacherously, would depend upon the object which he proposed to himself. If that object was to influence the mind of a mob, he was at least in considerable danger of leading his pupils to give the word sophistry that force with which we are most familiar.²

12. We cannot think, then, that accomplished scholars and honest men, like Ritter and Brandis, are fairly charged with imposing upon their less-instructed readers when they use such a phrase as “Die Sophistik” to express their feeling that there was an art which was practised by all the different professors of wisdom in the age of Pericles. Such an opinion does not in the least interfere with the fact that the word Sophist may have been applied to a poet, to any person who exercised an influence through words rather than swords,—to Thales, to Pythagoras, to Socrates. Astrology has an undoubted meaning,—most persons think a bad meaning; yet, is an astrologer more than one who studies the stars? Why should not the man who studied them with the most ample intention of ascertaining the laws by which their courses are regulated have been called an astrologer as well as any one of the innumerable doctors who determined from the stars the events which were to occur in the political world? These traders in natural knowledge did not form one school or guild, any more than the Athenian professors; they had their different maxims; they were rivals; they were enemies: yet it has been usual to think that they had a common work, which may be denoted by a common name. And every man who claimed to be an astronomer, and not an astrologer, was bound to make good his claim by the labours of a life, to show wherein he differed from him who cast nativities. By doing so, he must put a stigma upon a name which was not necessarily evil before; he must acquire a name for himself which was in some sense new. He will have the ultimate compensation of vindicating the fame of many a worthy predecessor who had not been distinctly conscious of his own end, but who had honestly sought for light when others were boasting that they possessed it and could turn it to account. Till he has accomplished his task he must be content to bear the same reproach with those whom he is most opposing; from whom he is seeking to deliver his fellows.

13. The denouncers of the Sophists —Aristophanes, &c. There were many at this time who scorned and ridiculed the young men of Athens because they frequented the teaching of one or another Sophist, and because they exhibited the effects of the teaching in their self-conceited words and acts. Aristophanes, above all, could teach these young men to laugh at themselves—at their own thoughts, speculations, imaginations as well as at those of their teachers. In doing so, he expected perhaps to restore the habits of an older, and, as it seemed to him, a simpler method.

Neither reason nor evidence warrant us in believing that his success was proportioned to his zeal or to his genius. He may have abated some of the nuisances which were infesting Athens; he may have diminished the race of sycophants, have made the vulgar kinds of mob-persuasion less effectual, have even done something to abate the litigious spirit of his fellow-citizens; but he can have helped very little to root out that which was the real cancer of the nation’s being,—that which fed upon the hearts, not of the worst, but of the best, and noblest, and most promising of the Athenian youth. No one could apply any sound remedy to this evil who despised the age into which he was born,—who merely saw the effects of the sophistical poison, without understanding its nature and the constitutions on which it was working. The true Reformer. He only could hope to reform the young men of Athens who could heartily and affectionately sympathise with them, who did not express his contempt or indignation for their favourite teachers, but was ready to follow them through all their windings and subtleties,—who, without for a moment forgetting the purpose of finding his way back to realities, could yet grapple fearlessly with the most shadowy and impalpable abstractions. A man of this kind would have sore difficulties to encounter, through which nothing but the clear perception of his object could possibly lead him unhurt. His inward conflicts, before he could be fitted for his task, must be severe; of his outward, the greatest, perhaps, would be this: that his purpose would be infallibly misconstrued by those who were aiming, with very different instruments indeed, to resist the same evils. It would be inevitable that he would pass with them for one, perhaps the subtlest and most mischievous, of the sophistical class. Because he sought to make men feel that there was no resting-place in any of their theories or opinions, he would be suspected of universal scepticism; because he led them to feel that they were not without a ground to stand upon, if they would seek for it, he would be accused of undermining the ground on which their forefathers stood; because he endeavoured to look through the clouds which had been drawn up from the earth, into the serene heaven that lay behind them, it would be fancied that he invoked their protection and did them homage.

Such a man was Socrates, and this was his fate. He was hated by Sophists, and ridiculed as the worst of them. He treated the diseases of his country according to a method exactly the opposite of that which Aristophanes adopted, and therefore he was denounced by Aristophanes as the great promoter of them.—We have now to consider what his method was, how it affected his own age, and what traces it has left of itself for subsequent generations.