in thought, but still more illustrious in the | its attendance by warnings to him whenever consistency of action by which it was sus- there is danger. Discredited by some of the tained, they saw little more than an eccentric citizens, he gains little by the belief of the old gentleman, poor, and of no great social rest; for they say, "What means this reor civic repute, who was meeting them daily former of his century, who, doubting our at every point and corner of the city with Jupiter and Minerva, believes in some heteroideas and recommendations opposed to their dox little deity of his own?" dearest instincts and oldest prejudices. We For the most part they have settled, to his all live with our fellows under the pressure disadvantage, the question of his claims as a of the external. Their characters with us public citizen. He has shared in two or are chiefly things of outsides, save as tem- three of his country's campaigns, risked himpered by scandal more or less characteristic, self in some of its battles,—with some perand it must be admitted, as to the old philoso-sonal distinction, too, as to courage, for he pher, that both outsides and characteristic obtained the prize of valor; and his two scandal were little in his favor. distinguished pupils, Xenophon and Alci

State he was still more unfortunate. He rarely agreed with the measures of his fellowcitizens, and would rather, it was suspected, see the administration of affairs, and especially of justice, confided to the enlightened few than to the ignorant many. He had shown, it is true, on two or three celebrated occasions, the honesty and fearlessness of his manhood by setting his duty over the dangers threatened him under the passionate impulses of the people, and the crafty policy of the thirty tyrants who had just been enslaving them; but it was remembered that one of the thirty he had thus heroically resisted had been his own pupil, Critias; that another pupil, Alcibiades, had dishonored the religion and compromised the safety of his country; that he himself had chiefly shown his love of the Demos by the freedom of his censures; and that, despite the law of Solon against political indifference, he never meddled with politics when he could escape them.

The picturesque ugliness of his person was biades, are living to attest that he risked his so far from being set off by any of the impos-life to save theirs. But he had never been ing advantages of costume, that in a city general, never in any prominent position as renowned for its fine gentlemen his dress at-chief; and the ill-omen of defeat had come in tracted attention, and disgusted it by its to throw its cold shadow over his obscure homely meanness. It was the same in sum- heroism. In the civic contests of the little mer and winter, and the independence of his spirit had for it the further evidence furnished by the eccentric economy of his going about barefooted in all seasons. The gossip about his home was not all in his favor. He has some independent property; but it affords his family straitened means of living, and while doing nothing to increase it, he is too independent to receive the assistance offered by friends, whom he has attached to him by his teachings and companionship. His wife is young; his three children young,-one of them in arms. The mother's temper is at once the worst and the best known in Athens; and though the philosophic husband claims everywhere that it gives him an admirable aid to practise his superiority over the smaller ills of life, he practically shows how small a sense he has of the obligation, by constantly living in public, and being never so little at home as when at home. Her brawling and vixen treatment of him have made him the laughing-stock of his fellow-citizens, and they remember, among other illustrations of her temper, that on one occasion when she had sequestrated his homely clothing, he could only appear in the public places he loved to haunt by wrapping himself up in the hide of some animal.

The eccentric repute thus suggested is aided by the general knowledge that he claims to be accompanied by a protecting spirit he calls his demon, which, ever near, contents itself with notifying the fidelity of

His great glory with us-his position as a moral teacher-must have been a very equivocal one with them. They must have looked on him much as we do on one of our Sunday preachers in the parks. They were not obliged to recognize the full extent of the extraordinary genius concealed inculto hoc sub corpore. Vindicated only in conversational discussion, it was, after all, but an affair of impression or memory, and could remain little more than an uncertain quantity with the many. They never before had this

It is easy to see, under these circumstances, that whatever he said, or whatever he did, must have suggested to his hearers that he did not look on the phenomena of nature, or the attributes of the deities, or the action of

open-air preaching about new views of society | magistrates by lot, and made the most imor morals forced upon them, whether they portant national decisions depend on the sudwould or no, in whatever corner they hap- den votes of excited crowds? Did he lecture pened to find themselves, by a shabby-look- on morals, and they not see that the mutual ing, eccentric man, who did nothing else, kindness and mutual justice he was forever and whose suggestions were not those which preaching offered the most striking contrast harmonized with the opinions of the day, or to the qualities they were enduring in nearly the traditional teachings of their country's every action of their lives? The truth is, religion. It was easier to laugh at him with there could be no such practical antithesis as Aristophanes than admire him with Xeno- that offered during the last years of his life phon, when he explained or referred to such by Socrates and the Athenian people. His homely topics in natural or domestic science whole intellectual and moral being was at as the extraordinary buzz of the gnat, or war with theirs; in systematic revolt against extraordinary leap of the flea, compared with their prejudices, against their opinions, their size; the intermediate action of the against their belief, against their practices, clouds rather than the immediate action of against all their institutions, political, social, Jupiter, in giving rain, or causing thunder and religious, at the same time that it was and lightning; the comfort of lying in a his enforced mission-as he held it—to be hammock, or suspended cradle; the useful everlastingly opening their eyes for them, and lesson suggested by the fact that the wonder-everlastingly revealing the immense gulf that ful State of Athens was only a point on the stood beneath them and between them. surface of the globe; and, finally, the advantage to everybody of his opening a shop" where he could help the people to think, and to dress their minds with as much care as a stable-boy attends to his horses, or a sculptor shapes his marble. What recommendation the State, as they did, and that if he were to them was it that he had what they called the atheistic opinions which a man of genius must have formed even in that day on such subjects as the sky, the earth, and the things under the earth, in their relations to the mundane economy; that he was ever and anon suggesting that the fables of the poets on gorgons, sphinxes, centaurs, hypogriffs, harpies, and other wonders of pagan mythology, had an easy and natural explanation? How must their opinions have tended when, worshipping the most vindictive of deities, as the protecting power of Athens, they heard him enlarge on the duties of humanity, brotherly forbearance, and mutual forgiveness?—when, respecting as the chief of gods the adulterous Jupiter, they found him enforcing respect for the rights of married life?—when sacrificing of their abundance to uphold the worship of Mercury, the thief par excellence,-they heard Socrates enlarging on the baseness and cruelty of despoiling one's neighbor? Did the sage glance at politics, and they not divine that he condemned a system which appointed

*See the charges against him on his trial, and the imputations made on him in "The Clouds" of Aristophanes.

not an atheist and seditious citizen,—by secret principle, at all events,—it was difficult to discover the little link which kept him bound to the common faith and patriotism of his country. It was in vain that he offered sacrifices at home, and paid his devotions in the temples like the rest. It was to little purpose that he made large verbal concessions on the points of divination and the consulting of oracles. It was something for his peace, but not enough for his safety, that he abandoned in later years the teaching of natural philosophy, and notwithstanding the commandment of Solon, kept himself aloof from the public business of his country. It was remembered that he had been the friend and pupil of Aspasia, who, tried for atheism and irreligion, had barely escaped, and of Prodicus, who had been tried for the like offence and been condemned; that he had been the preceptor of Critias, their tyrant, and of Alcibiades, their worst traitor. Whatever he said, whatever he did, it was felt that his inner convictions did not go along with those of the rest of the world, and so far, despite the enthusiasm of his personal friends, he stood condemned in the general opinion of his fellow-citizens, long before the Heliastic

tribunal ordered him to drink the fatal poi-| the early recluses of Christianity.

son.

There

was no urging men to an almost celestial exemption from earthly attachments and mundane enjoyments, like that so eloquently advocated by Thomas à Kempis and sought

the ten thousand sermons he must have given his fellow-citizens, and the total would amount to no more than that men are the work of a divine Maker; and that, as they can only find their happiness in a reasonable use of all the gifts he has given them, they should avoid everything that breeds useless action or causes uneasy feeling, and look for the true end of their being in doing nothing

them.

Nor should it be forgotten, that there was so little prudery in the morals of Socrates, and that, as a practical moralist, he was so little distinguishable from the fellow-citizens by the philosophers of Port Royal. Sum up he sought to reform that the stranger would probably have provoked ridicule who should have pointed him out as the founder of a new system of morals, and held him up as the man, above all others, who, in following it, exalted our common nature, and showed best what it is capable of. It was known that during the brighter days of Athens, he had spent much of his time with the enchantress, whose easy morals and lax faith had brought but good to themselves and those about .her into the trouble we have just noticed, and whose charms of person and mind had The acknowledgment is to be added, to enabled her to reign over the powerful genius complete our explanation, that the long and who was so long the master of Greece. His busy mission of Socrates proved, after all, a customary society were young men of good failure, so far as it concerned his fellow-citifamily, sharing too commonly in the luxurious zens. The months and later years that previces of the time; and a narrative left us by ceded his death were a melancholy time both one of the most cager of his admirers almost for him and Athens. He was living the surwarrants the belief that on one occasion he vivor of his country's greatness, and about took no shame to spend the night, with the him was nothing that did not remind him of early hours of the morning, amid the revels the double adversity. He had seen Athens of some of the wildest of the companions in its day of highest glory and greatest of Alcibiades, testing against them, in the power. His youth and early manhood were course of his customary exercitations, his passed in the sunshine of her prosperity. success in resisting the power of their wine. The great age of Themistocles, with all its To be only real is an element of personal celebrity of peace and war, had shone on his happiness, but even in social affairs must cradle and early boyhood with the gentle often involve some cost of public influence. and elevating influence of some brilliant sunSocrates felt, no doubt, like Dr. Johnson on rise; and as the ascent of Pericles, and of a like occasion, that he had neither right nor his surrounding glories, threw Attica into a power to interfere with the entertainment of noonday blaze of light, more dazzling in the his hosts, and that, while the young men proportion that it was less safe, the young could do him no harm, his presence could philosopher entered on that scene of high only be of use to them; but where exists a studies and manly duties he was to quit only state of popular opinion in which the knowl- with his life. He had seen Phidias use his. edge of such an incident would not have dis- chisel on the immortal works of the Parcredited among his fellow-citizens one who thenon; might have banqueted again and had no mission except to enforce on them the again with the rival painters Zeuxis and decencies and duties of social life? Parrhasius; had heard Herodotus read his history to the Athenians; helped Euripides to write some of his immortal tragedies; and seen many a first night of the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes. He had gossiped belles-lettres with Aspasia, discussed statesmanship with Pericles, studied music with Cosenus, philosophy with Anaxagoras and Prodicus. He might have personally consulted Hippocrates; have furnished Thucydides materials for history; and enjoyed again

It was, perhaps, small set-off to this account, that the morals he taught were not more transcendental than the practice with which he thus illustrated them. There were none of those recommendations of extraordinary self-sacrifice which have since made men seek opportunities of laying down their lives for an abstract principle. There were no encouragements to an unexampled austerity of moral conduct, like that shown by

men who were not permitted to act except
under concerted arrangements independent of
their own voliation; and if we would under-
stand the full force of his courage, we have
only to reflect that every foe his frankness
made among the members of these secret
societies commanded against him, probab-

men, thus excited and organized, that
brought Socrates to trial. The all-potent
master of the weapons of rhetoric and logic
had avenged, on the corrupt men who traf-
ficked in the vices and weaknesses of their
and virtue; and, cut to the heart by rebukes
fellow-citizens, all the superiority of his genius
that discredited their influence, they pursued
him with all the malignity of natures that
had been accustomed to look to the indul-
gence of their lowest instincts for the source
of
their pleasures. Strong, and numerous
as they were strong, they chose the appropri-
ate moment. The people, engaged in pleas-
had no interest in his morals, and detested
ures so far as they could command them,
his politics. They knew all his stops, and,
bored with his illustrations from homely life
of truths they would have nothing to do with,
were ready to do more than to surrender
their friend,-to help to hunt him to the
death. It was on this point that his three
tions of poets, Anytus, supported by an or-
enemies-Melitus, backed by an organiza-
ganization of government people, and Lycon,
helped by an organization of rhetoricians or
orators-brought him into court as a dis-
loyal citizen and unbelieving worshipper.

and again the conversation of a couple of score or more of celebrities whose aggregate brilliancy has not, perhaps, been rivalled in any later era of human greatness. But a change has come over the spirit of this glorious vision. All that is left of this brilliancy of genius and achievement remains with himself and the few disciples, such as Plato, Xen-ly, the hostility of the rest. They were the ophon, Antisthenes, Aristippus, and Zeno, who a reto perpetuate and extend his school of thought for the education of all future ages. 'The splendid power of Pericles had set in a sea of carnage and disaster; and a foreign conquest, an unexampled plague, and a tyranny upheld by foreign swords, had brought down to the dust the splendid queen of civilization, and unrivalled mistress of the nations. It was true that the tyranny had in its turn been conquered; that the spirited little State had once again vindicated its freedom; and once again a sovereign was now pluming its eagle wings to reassert some of its old claims to Greek ascendency. But everywhere around in the defences and monuments of the city, but, above all, in the morals of its inhabitants, were the signs that the victorious enemy had been there, and had left behind them the seeds of a sure national decay. No more depraved population had ever troubled themselves or their neighbors with their bad practices or worse principles than that which had emerged from this extraordinary series of successes and adversities. A last excess of general licentious- known the ground he stood on—was a definess, dating from the plague, had taken he welcomed it, and spoke for his honor, ance and a despair. Foreseeing his doom, possession of men's minds; might was ac- not his life. The secret societies were too cepted as the test of right; oaths had lost much for him, the moral feeling of his countheir sanctity; there was no obligation that trymen not enough. The evil element he could bind men, except mutuality in some had been battling with all his life had consecret and terrible crime; secret revenge did quered, and he surrendered with the woundthe work of private malice or public jus- ed feeling but conscious honor of a beaten tice, by new and terrible punishments; and In his death, as in his life, admiral of the fleet who gives up his sword. he marched Athens, like the other States of Greece, lay with a victorious and triumphant pace, in honeycombed by secret brotherhoods, that pomp and at his ease, without opposition or made all the relations of kindred and all the disturbance." No suppliant voice left his ties of morals subordinate to obligations of lips: "That lofty virtue of his did not strike membership that were enforced by unheard- sail in the height of its glory."* But enough. of cruelties.* As he wrapped his face in his robe, as the The principle that made Socrates decline to do its work, we, who share their nature best gift his countrymen had for him began imitation in the Eleusinian mysteries proba- without being exempted, it may be, from bly kept him aloof from these secret organi- their weaknesses, will withdraw our eyes zations. He stood alone, therefore, among from a survey which can only be continued under a sentiment of sorrow and humiliation.

* See the description which Thucydides gives of Greek manners in the narrative of the siege of Corcyra.

The defence of Socrates-who must have

* Montaigne.