Section I. Athens in the Time of Socrates.—The Sophists
1. No one doubts that Greece was the country of wisdom and wise men, or that Athens was its capital. There Wisdom was worshipped with all her rites, and wise men had an honour given them nowhere else. The name of the city shaped what its citizens did. Even the meanest of them felt that the Goddess of Wisdom protected him and had given him some endowment.
2. Nobody disputes either that the age of Pericles was when Athens reached the glory she had always aimed at, and her sons’ powers came to manhood. Pericles thoroughly understood the people he ruled. The funeral oration Thucydides gives him may not have been delivered in just this form, but it expresses the exact perception of the Athenian mind which the historian knew Pericles had. If the speech is not a report, it still rightly shows Pericles’s settled purpose: not to restrain the tendencies of this character but to give them full play. He would let no Spartan moroseness interfere with Athenian freedom. Whatever corrections it needed, he believed, must come from itself. To bring in the maxims and habits of another tribe would destroy Athenian energy without giving it the Dorian self-restraint.
3. Right or wrong, this calculation had memorable effects. We think first of the work of sculptors and poets. The sense of beauty and symmetry in the human form that awoke then, and the images of the gods it produced, have been admired and have shaped later generations. But they belong with the processions and temples they were made for. The great tragedies, too, should be pictured as performed at festivals, competing for a popular prize, before delighted or critical crowds. Those that have lasted more than 2,000 years show how deeply some Athenians thought about the destiny of man. But they stood among many other works probably not felt to be inferior. They were judged by their power to amuse at the moment, by their fit with the demands of very clever but probably very impatient spectators. An author’s popularity was measured by how quickly and versatilely he could stir sorrow or mirth, although the man who had thought and felt most would stir the deepest echoes and in the end win the greatest reverence. Aeschylus and Sophocles probably towered over their contemporaries even in the judgment of the many. Still, the qualities we admire in them must largely have been forgotten in the immediate effects they produced. It was for later times to find how much in them no show could exhaust, and that it belonged not to one age or nation but to mankind.
4. Why, it may be asked, do such reflections suit the age of Pericles more than that of James I.? Were not Ben Jonson and Fletcher thought of mainly as makers of masques for the court, and Shakspeare as an actor at the Globe? That is true. But a student of philosophy, above all of the life of Socrates, has special need to remember how all the great men of Athens whose instruments were words appeared to their fellow-citizens. All were practising some kind of wisdom, and addressed it, in the theatre or the agora, to judges who were themselves wise and conscious of wisdom, able to appreciate it and to reward it. The tragedians, with their minds fixed on the heroic ages, kept their wisdom from becoming a creature of the mob’s. A comic writer, whose business was with the present, needed very high genius to resist that influence; he would do so partly by choosing the broadest and most conspicuous conceits and affectations of his age to ridicule. But those who used wisdom for entertainment faced the lesser temptation. Those who used it directly to persuade, who spoke in order to lead citizens to deeds, stood in a far more dangerous position for their honesty and could do greater and more widespread mischief. By degrees their kind of power became the measure of all others. The rhetorician was regarded as the man who had found out the effective use of words. Poets, statesmen, thinkers of every class, even the commonest handicraftsmen, would gradually become rhetoricians, and rhetoric would be looked on as the craft of the wise city.
5. It has commonly been supposed that a class of men, formed in various Greek cities but always counting Athens their headquarters, kept this tendency alive in young Athenians and gave it a dangerous prominence. They are called Sophists; from them the name has taken on its evil sense; and Socrates’s main work has been supposed to be to counteract and undermine their influence. Learned men share this impression with the vulgar, the most modern and critical writers with mere narrators. Recently these notions have been attacked with great skill and apparently with great weight of evidence. The existence of a sophistical system has been flatly denied. Those given the common name, it is said, differed from each other in all their doctrines, pursuits and habits of life. No corrupt purpose or immoral character can be charged against them; proof of their respectability can be had from the books of their greatest opponents. They did not make Athenian society fall from the standard of earlier ages, since the history shows no such decline. The word Sophist was not a term of abuse to the Greeks; it was a synonym for the wise man, and impartial writers gave it to poets, to philosophers, and to the supposed antagonist of sophistry himself. Plato and Aristotle chose to use it badly; they had a right to their own definition, but they cannot give us a right to pass an ex post facto sentence on their contemporaries. Finally, we may hold that the object of Socrates’s life was good without blaming the Sophists whom he or his disciple blames: he aimed at a universal standard of wisdom and truth, while they professed only to teach Athenians how to think, speak and act. These conclusions, if true, must affect our whole later history. So we should consider how far they are borne out by the able arguments and undoubted facts that Mr. Grote has produced.
6. We accept at once Mr. Grote’s definition of the Sophist as Plato’s and the true one: “the professor of wisdom; he taught young men to speak, think, and act.” We want no other and no worse account of him. If modern artists have put darker shades into their picture, they have done him a service rather than an injury, because their clumsy exaggeration hides the essential ugliness that Mr. Grote’s flattering sketch brings out in full relief.
7. They have, I think, been especially wrong in trying to blacken the age of Pericles, as though it were inherently worse than any earlier age. In many respects it was much better. Not only were the people’s intellectual energies more developed, but their great writers showed a moral insight and purpose not found in older times or in their immediate predecessors. Who can deny that Thucydides has a much higher tone than Herodotus? That the Oedipus Tyrannus recognises principle much more deeply than the Odyssey? That even Aristophanes (though I agree with Mr. Grote in refusing him the dignity of a moral teacher) tacitly admits, in his satires on bad citizens, a standard that poets and audiences in the times of Solon and Pisistratus would not so readily have perceived? The better men had certainly progressed in moral perception, and that progress could not have been found in them unless their contemporaries were capable of the same. The Athenians’ political training and discipline must have contributed greatly; their experience of society and government led them to practical distinctions that would otherwise have been hidden from them.
8. Whatever we think of the Athenian democracy, it clearly did this great service to the eminent men who lived under it, and through them to the world. Its corrupt maxims and practices are known to us through the emphatic protests against them preserved in historical reflections and prophecies, in lessons from the past and ridicule of the present. But the protests also show what the Athenians’ peculiar temptation was, why they were more prone to it now than before, and what influences most surely fostered it. We have seen that most of the Greek wise men were tyrants (or despots, as Mr. Grote prefers). The natural use of their wisdom was to gain power, to fit them for governing fools. Every Greek was inclined to this opinion, and it grew with his faculties. Democracy gave him an obvious chance to exercise them in this direction. The Peloponnesian war suggested thoughts, latent in the Persian war, of rivalry between Greeks, of Athenian ascendancy, of the difference between forms of government. The passionate impulses of patriotism, with their own dangers, gave way to deliberate schemes and calculations about winning rule and wielding it. There may not have been more evil-doing in one time than the other, but there must have been more consciousness of it, more inward wickedness, and a greater readiness to bring crimes under a theory and defend them by it. This is what the Melian controversy inevitably suggests. Allow what you please for the writer’s aristocratic leanings: an experienced and wise man credits his fellow-citizens with a distinct understanding of an evil purpose and its principles such as we meet nowhere else. Yet we would have attributed such an understanding to a people of Athenian wit and subtlety even without his authority.
9. To give this wit and subtlety full play, all that was needed was for a set of men to appear who started from the same maxim as the wise men in general, but had instruments those men lacked, and who were ready to teach the skill that others had used in a narrower sphere for their own advantage. The professors I am speaking of fit this description exactly. They had all the respectability Mr. Grote claims for them; many were aged and grave; they were men of uncommon sagacity and penetration. They had studied in different schools, some under Empedocles, some under Zeno. Some gave themselves to physical studies, some to moral, some directly to political. Each had some sort of wisdom and undertook to teach it. Each held out the winning of political power as the prize. That was their common point of agreement, and possibly their only one. Young Athenians wanted to learn how to think, act and speak on all subjects so that they might guide the people as they pleased, and for this they sought a Sophist or Professor.
10. The Athenians certainly needed to learn to think. What was the teaching for that? They had to be told about natural, moral and political subjects by men who had taken pains to learn what Thales, Pythagoras and Parmenides said of them. They had to be told the views of ancient cosmogonists about the world and the gods, and of modern thinkers and allegorists on the same subject. They had to hear of the Heraclitan flux and the Parmenidean One; of how cities were said in former days to be built by the lyre of Apollo, and how they were held together by the skill or legislation of recent despots. They were taught to compare all these views, to see the strength of one and the weakness of another, or to combine and reconcile them. Thus the Sophist taught his pupils to think. But all thinking is for the sake of action. These professors are thoroughly practical men; they do not come to draw us away from the world’s business, and what would we care for them in Athens if they did? We want to know about men, not stars. We want to defeat Brasidas, or support our party at home against Nicias, or rival Cleon, much more than to know anything of Heraclitus, Parmenides or Zeno. Yet the one learning is the road to the other. Remember what lies between thinking and acting; remember Homer’s “winged words,” which have always been with Greeks “the great engines of government, the proximate cause of obedience.” If we teach you to speak, we teach you in the most efficient way to act. These physical, metaphysical and moral theories will furnish you with topics, they will be the tools of your trade, and they will give you a wonderful power to embarrass, confute and overawe an uninstructed opponent. Any of them may serve. Theories of 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 on government, human or divine, from Protagoras. All supply topics; all are instruments of persuasion. And see what power Zeno has put into our hands! Words may mean the most opposite, contradictory things. Would it not be invaluable lore to be taught the secret of this contradiction and how to turn it to account?
11. In the last paragraph I hinted at the modern meaning of the word Sophist, which Mr. Grote so indignantly rejects. It is certainly not the meaning; the one he has put in its place is far more comprehensive and satisfactory. But by the necessity of his calling, the man who taught thinking, acting and speaking would come to see the last as including the other two. He would become a rhetorician and a teacher of rhetoric. For that he must deal with the subtle meanings of words, honestly as Zeno did or treacherously, depending on his aim. If his aim was to sway the mind of a mob, he was at least in considerable danger of leading his pupils to give sophistry the force with which we are most familiar.
Note. Since I have admitted the Sophists’ general respectability, I need not examine Mr. Grote’s arguments for it in each case. But one statement he relies on needs a short notice. He thinks Prodicus can be shown by more than negative evidence to have been a highly moral teacher, because the story of the Choice of Hercules, as we usually read it, names him as its author. What better proof, he asks, that Prodicus urged on Athenian youth a severe, even ascetic, self-restraint? I have no wish to dispute the beauty or worth of that fable; it was surely full of instruction for that age, since all ages have found it so. But I submit that its lesson does good or harm according to the reader’s aim. If he wants the power to drain marshes and kill noisome beasts, all must bless him for not yielding to the Goddess of Pleasure. If he merely wants to be the strongest of men by resisting the enchantress, it might have been better for the world and for himself if he had yielded. Mr. Grote surely remembers Gibbon’s paradox about the clergy: “Their virtues are more dangerous to society than their vices.” On Gibbon’s presumed hypothesis, that the order divides into those who deny themselves to gain dominion over their fellows and those who give way to animal indulgence, the saying is easily granted. The monk who restrains his appetites to be followed and idolised as a confessor does more harm to others, and is probably more evil in himself, than the sleek abbot given up to hawks and hounds. The principle applies universally. Before we can call Prodicus a useful teacher for telling his pupils how to get the bone and nerve of Hercules, we must know whether he departed from the general rule of his class by not holding out political power as his prize.
12. I cannot think, then, that accomplished scholars and honest men like Ritter and Brandis are fairly accused of imposing on less-instructed readers when they use a phrase like “Die Sophistik” to express their sense that all the different professors of wisdom in the age of Pericles practised one art. That view does not conflict at all with the fact that the word Sophist may have been applied to a poet, or to anyone who exercised influence through words rather than swords—to Thales, to Pythagoras, to Socrates. Astrology has an undoubted meaning, which most people think a bad one; yet is an astrologer any more than one who studies the stars? Why should the man who studied them with the full aim of finding the laws governing their courses not have been called an astrologer, as much as any of the countless doctors who foretold political events from the stars? These traders in natural knowledge were no more one school or guild than the Athenian professors; they had different maxims, were rivals, were enemies; yet it has been usual to think they had a common work that a common name can denote. And every man who claimed to be an astronomer, not an astrologer, had to make good his claim by the labours of a life and show how he differed from the caster of nativities. In doing so he must put a stigma on a name not necessarily evil before, and gain for himself a name in some sense new. His eventual compensation will be to vindicate the fame of many worthy predecessors who were not distinctly conscious of their own end but honestly sought for light while others boasted that they possessed it and could turn it to account. Till he has finished his task he must bear the same reproach as those he most opposes, and from whom he is trying to deliver his fellows.
13. Many at this time scorned and ridiculed the young men of Athens for attending one Sophist or another, and for showing 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 and imaginations as well as their teachers’. In doing so he perhaps expected to restore the habits of an older and, as it seemed to him, simpler method.
Neither reason nor evidence allows us to believe that his success matched his zeal or genius. He may have abated some of the nuisances infesting Athens; he may have thinned the race of sycophants, made the vulgar kinds of mob-persuasion less effective, even done something to curb his fellow-citizens’ litigious spirit. But he can have done very little to root out the real cancer of the nation’s being, which fed on the hearts not of the worst but of the best, noblest and most promising of the Athenian youth. No one could apply a sound remedy to this evil who despised the age he was born into, who saw only the effects of the sophistical poison without understanding its nature and the constitutions it worked on. Only he could hope to reform the young men of Athens who sympathised with them heartily and affectionately; who did not show 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 his purpose of finding his way back to realities, could fearlessly grapple with the most shadowy and impalpable abstractions. Such a man would have sore difficulties, through which only a clear perception of his object could lead him unhurt. His inward conflicts, before he was fit for his task, must be severe. The greatest of his outward ones would perhaps be this: those who were aiming, with very different instruments, to resist the same evils would infallibly misconstrue his purpose. He would inevitably pass with them for a Sophist, perhaps the subtlest and most mischievous of them. Because he sought to make men feel 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 ground to stand on if they would seek it, he would be accused of undermining the ground their forefathers stood on. Because he tried to look through the clouds drawn up from the earth into the serene heaven behind them, it would be fancied that he invoked the clouds’ protection and did them homage.
Such a man was Socrates, and this was his fate. Sophists hated him, and he was ridiculed as the worst of them. He treated his country’s diseases by a method exactly opposite to Aristophanes’s, and so Aristophanes denounced him as their chief promoter. We have now to consider what his method was, how it affected his own age, and what traces it has left of itself for later generations.