The Historians' History of the World 04

In the sphere of morals the breach with that Nomos

of which we have spoken was a great danger: the whole edifice of the Apolline organisation fell to pieces. Democracy fairly challenged man to translate his theory into practice, and the mental attitude of the time was so political that people thought Anaxagoras a crank, because of his own free will he devoted himself to the

vita contemplativa

and refused to mingle in the political hurly-burly. They declined to believe in his good faith, and political suspicion allied with the principle of established authority, which always naturally opposes a tendency so novel, banished him from Athens. And from the very fact that, in all other fields, this principle was so strong among the Greeks, the age that dared express and pursue every thought that rose in the mind acquires its peculiar significance. The activity, inventiveness, and audacity of the period of the sophists, with its superabundance of talent, sowed seeds without number, many of which, unproductive at the time, have been left for the modern world rightly to appreciate. Thus a science of jurisprudence would have been developed, had not the fall of the empire destroyed the sphere in which alone a uniform system of law could prevail: the practice of the legal profession thus falling into the hands of pettifoggers, while the theory of jurisprudence was left to philosophers, who were honest in their quest of the principle of justice.

Modern speculation has gradually outgrown the tendency to regard the sophists through the eyes of Plato, and to impute to them moral and intellectual indifferentism. One thing, however, is incontestable: the whole movement, coming, as it does, from Ionia, is rationalistic through and through; the intellect will acknowledge nothing on a par with itself. A prophet like Empedocles, who was a doctor, a philosopher, and a poet to boot, besides cherishing the proud conviction of being as good a sophist as any other, could go about extolling his revelation in the Peloponnesus; in Athens he would have found no place. The port of Athens, on the other hand, was laid out by a Milesian diagrammatically in the dreary chess-board style then in vogue for buildings on new sites, although it can only be satisfactory on paper, inasmuch as it neither takes account of the character of the landscape nor consists with the artistic feeling of the Greeks. Rationalistic in his teaching, again, was the only Athenian whose sophist doctrines gave offence to his compatriots, especially because instead of making a fortune like the teachers of wisdom from abroad, he neglected his affairs. We, ourselves, should hardly except Socrates from the category of sophists on account of his merits as a dialectician, had not the reactionary democracy of the restoration executed him as a person dangerous to the common weal. He chose to die rather than do the least thing that ran counter to his consciousness of rectitude, his Logos, the belief in the reality of the Good which he was not able to demonstrate by rationalistic methods; and the moral grandeur of his death has reared for the faith of the human race an image which bears eternal witness that man is free and happy if he can but base his actions on belief in the Good; he needs no future world of punishment and reward. This eccentric Silenus-faced Athenian did not aspire to become a god like Hercules, he would have been more at home in a pedantic than a heroic atmosphere: he merely did nothing which he did not think right. The claim that the will obeys the reason—in most cases such a pitiful brag!—was a truth with him. Socrates was Athenian to the core, and therefore a loyal citizen of the democratic state; but, like Solon, he combines the Ionian and the Doric temperament; and, in common with the law-giver, he is devoid of feeling for mysticism and the whole sphere of the Unknown. His life is only intelligible as an outgrowth of the history of Athens; his death makes him a type of man as he can and should be. So long as the human race survives on our planet it will be a master experience of our moral education to live through the dying hours of this old and ugly plebeian.