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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter V}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{gods
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$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Greece
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter V

Poetry And Philosophy

     The Higher Religion of Greece - Influence of the Literature - The Poets -
Pindar - Aeschylus - Sophocles - Euripides - Aristophanes - The Philosophers -
Socrates - Plato - Aristotle.

     The higher religion of the Greeks is represented by the poets and the
philosophers.  It was they, not the priests, who conceived and set forth purer
and loftier ideas of the gods and their dealings with men; they who affirmed
the essentially moral character of true religion and the nature of true piety;
they who, from different sides, advanced toward monotheism.

     The priesthoods conserved the traditional forms of religion; but, if they
contributed little to progress except the enrichment of liturgy - a sacerdotal
predilection in all ages - they were at least no bar to progress.  They had no
sacred scriptures investing cult, myth, and doctrine with the infallible and
unchangeable authority of divine revelation; the sacred legends were rehearsed
at the festivals in a traditional form, but in variant forms at different
temples; there was no dogma and no ecclesiastical authority.  Innovations that
seemed detrimental to the religion of the city were prosecuted by the civil
authorities under laws passed like any others by the assembly.

     Thus the literature which embodies the advancing religious thought of the
Greeks is a secular literature in form and freedom, and this is its prime
distinction.  It may be that the philosophy of the Upanishads originated and
was first cultivated among laymen; but it attached itself to an eminently
hieratic literature, the Brahmanas; and as soon as it gained any acceptance it
was appropriated by the priests and Brahmanised into orthodoxy, as they
Brahmanised even the more indigestible dualism of the Sankhya.  The
metaphysics of Buddhism are borrowed from the Brahmanic systems, and its
literature is completely scholastic.  These philosophies are thus not only
historically the development of particular religions, but have the character
indelebilis of sacred philosophies.  That they have never exerted any
considerable influence outside is not due solely to the geographical and
historical isolation of the East; a deeper-lying cause is this inveterate
religious particularism.  And it is, on the other hand, just because the
religious thinking of the Greeks was secular that its influence has been
unlimited.

     Therein lies its great and permanent interest.  These thinkers not only
restored religion to intellectual respectability; they made of religious
philosophy a religion for thinking men.  This was their service in their own
day, but their influence was vastly greater in after ages. Jewish, Christian,
and Moslem theology is built on the foundations laid by the Greek
philosophers, and its structural lines mainly follow theirs - it is only
necessary to think of Plato and Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Theism,
mysticism and theosophy, ethics, and eschatology, in all these theologies have
a woof of scripture and tradition, but the warp is Greek. A fuller
presentation of the Greek thinkers is therefore in place, not merely as the
culmination of Greek religion, but as the foundation of the religions that
succeeded it.

     The immediate influence of the poets was far greater than that of the
philosophers, for they reached, not a small circle of students, but all
classes of men.  Without deliberate intention of reform, they show what
elevation a religion like that of the Greeks was capable of - how noble a
conception of God and of the relations between God and man.  More than this,
while the philosophers before them had sought to reduce to unity the physical
order or to penetrate the meta-physical unity of being, Aeschylus and
Sophocles reveal the unity of the moral order and its essential righteousness.
The truths the poets uttered were the more impressive by the form and
circumstance of their presentation.  The Olympian or Pythian games whose
victors are celebrated in Pindar's Odes were not mere athletic contests, they
were solemn acts of worship to Zeus or Apollo, surrounded by imposing
ceremony, and inspiring reverent awe as well as noble joy. The Attic drama was
the crown of the worship of Dionysos, who, beyond any other god, appealed to
the soul.

     The epinician ode or the tragedy gave no room for didactic theologising
or moralising; the poet's task was to exhibit in word or action the ways of
God with men.  Subject and story were drawn from the wealth of myth and heroic
legend, familiar to all his hearers, and sacred to him as well as to them.
The poets did not use these myths as the vehicle for lessons they wished to
convey, nor the characters as mouth-pieces of their own philosophising and
moralising; ^1 but they penetrated the hidden causes and underlying laws, the
ineluctable concatenation of deed and event, that necessitated the tragic
action and its issue.

[Footnote 1: Euripides does this, and it is one of his most significant
departures from the old way.]

     The mythology had been an offence to many religious spirits; we have
heard the outcry against gods who do everything that is disreputable among
men, or against the epic poets who told such scandalous stories about them.
It was not enough, however, that gods should be respectable and set a good
example, they must be righteous, and rule the world in righteousness, nor
could right mean one thing among men and another for gods.  Some, therefore,
rejected the objectionable myths as libels on the gods; others rationalised
the myths, as Euripides (after the repentant Stesichoros) does the story of
Helen, or gave expurgated versions of them, as Pindar does in the story of
Pelops and his ivory shoulder; still others treated the strife and violence as
belonging to a bygone age, when the gods of the present order were fighting
their way to a supremacy which they now exercise with justice.

     In the forty-four extant Odes of Pindar, celebrating athletic victories,
there is an inexhaustible wealth of mythical recital and allusion; no small
part of his felicity lies in the choice of myths apt to the occasion and the
person of the winner and in the ingenuity with which he adapts them to his
use.  There is piety, too, in his selection; what is not worthy of the gods is
not to be told of them.  If he introduces such a tale, he makes no scruple of
changing it so as to eliminate the offensive features.

     Pindar was a member of the old Boeotian nobility, a conservative by
tradition and temper.  A sincerely pious soul, too, he represents the
ancestral religion at its culmination.  To a superficial reading it might seem
that the Odes stood very close to the epics.  The same deities appear in both,
with the same functions and attributes; they move before us in the same vivid
personality, very real and living gods, as they were in the myth and popular
imagination.  Upon a more attentive consideration, however, differences appear
which evince the progress religion had made between Homer and Pindar.  The
rejection of crude and immoral stories about the gods is not merely a tribute
to a more refined taste, but an avowed religious principle - it is blasphemy
to attribute such deeds to gods.  The expurgation of the mythology is only the
negative consequence of a purer conception of godhead; Pindar's gods are not
only powerful and beautiful, but consistently wise and good, and that in a
divine manner and degree.  Their rule of the world and dealing with mortals is
righteous and just.  These virtues, which may easily be prosaic in gods as in
men, are crowned in Pindar by nobility - the word that best characterises his
conception.

     The ascription of all divine perfections to every deity obliterates those
individual traits which their imperfections - their passion and partisanship
and strife - give to the Homeric gods; the distinct figures of the several
gods begin to recede before the idea of the godhead.  The will of Zeus, in
Homer crossed by the conflicting though unequal wills of other gods, is in
Pindar the law of the world.  The world is the realm of Zeus; he distributes
good and evil, for he is lord of all.  Call it Destiny, Justice, or, as it
will presently be named, Providence, Zeus personifies the moral order of the
world not merely because he is sovereign over gods and men, but because in him
is the fullness of the godhead.  Once, indeed, in a fragment preserved by
Clement, the pantheistic word is spoken out as roundly as by Xenophanes: "What
is God? The All."

     The Odes contain many prayers invoking the favour and protection of the
gods and the blessings they bestow on those with whom they are well pleased.
But by the side of these are petitions of a more spiritual character, as when
in the eighth Pythian he prays to Apollo that he may always govern his conduct
in accordance with the laws of the god and be his obedient servant.  To be
well-pleasing to the gods, it is before all things necessary that man should
recognise the limitations of humanity and keep within his bounds.  The warning
against self-exaltation is addressed with peculiar point to the fortunate
winners in the games - such as the dust of the Olympic course,

     metaque fervidis
     Eviata rotis palmaque nobilis
     Terrarum dominos evehit ad deos.

"Do not strive to become a Zeus," Pindar cautions; let all thoughts, desires,
and hopes be befitting a mortal; aspire not beyond thy capacity. Audacity and
arrogance the gods do not forgive.  To revere the gods, to honour parents, to
deal justly and fairly with one's fellows, to be true, generous, kind, and
gentle; to shun envy, to forgive injuries, to hate flattery; to be temperate
in pleasures, and to bear ill with equanimity - these are the virtues
constantly commended.

     The state of man after death is commonly pictured in Pindar as it was in
the popular religion, a shadowy existence beneath the earth, such as it is
described in the original Nekyia of the Odyssey.  There are, to be sure,
heroes promoted to the fellowship of the gods, but the common man can gather
no hope from their fortune.  "None, by ship or by land, can find the wonderful
way that leads to the feasts of the Hyperboreans." This is one of man's
limitations, to which he must bow.  The brief, vain life of mortals is a theme
that recurs with singular frequency in these triumphal lyrics: "Creatures of a
day, what are we?  What are we not?  The dream of a shadow, that is man."

     There are other passages, however, in which the new doctrines of the
mysteries and the mystical philosophies find expression.  In Eleusinian form
this hope has already met us in a fragment of an elegy for an Athenian,
presumably an initiate. ^1 In others the Orphic or Pythagorean note is
unmistakable. ^2 The soul is an impalpable double of the body, but it is of
divine extraction, and therefore immortal.  It dwells in the body in expiation
of an "ancient wrong" - a fallen spirit.  At death, forthwith, the helpless
souls receive their retribution, and deeds done in the realm of Zeus are
judged beneath the earth by one who gives sentence by dire necessity
(inexorable law).  In the abode of the good the sun shines by night as
brilliant as by day; they are rewarded with a toilless life, neither vexing
the earth with strength of arm nor the water of the sea for a meagre living,
but, in company of the honoured of the gods, such as on earth rejoiced in
faithful oaths spend a tearless age.  The others have to endure ills too
horrible to look upon.  Those who thrice have preserved in both states ^3 to
keep the soul clear of every wrong pursue the way of Zeus to the court of
Kronos.  There sea-breezes blow over the islands of the blest; golden flowers
gleam, some on land from splendid trees, some growing in the water, with
wreaths of which they entwine their arms and crown their heads with garlands.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 454.]

[Footnote 2: It has been noted that these are odes for Sicilian victors.]

[Footnote 3: The dwelling of the good described above is not the final state;
twice the soul must be reborn on earth before it may traverse the "way of
Zeus," no more to return.]

     The notion of transmigration appears more distinctly in a fragment (Frg.
133): The souls whose expiation of the ancient guilt Persephone receives, she
sends back at the end of nine years to the upper light, where they are
re-embodied as kings, or mighty men of valour, or sages. After this last
earthly existence they are released from the round of rebirth, and are
honoured among men as heroes, i.e., as superhuman spirits.

     Almost contemporary with Pindar is Aeschylus, born at Eleusis in 525 B.
C., of a noble Attic family.  In the prime of his manhood, he fought against
the Persians at Marathon and Salamis and Plataea.  He died at Gela, in Sicily,
in 456, and his tomb bore the epitaph: "Beneath this monument lies Aeschylus
son of Euphroion, the Athenian, dead in wheat-growing Gela.  Of his famous
prowess the grove of Marathon can tell, and the thick-haired Mede, who made
experience of it." It is a fair surmise that the verses were composed by
himself; another would hardly have failed to give him the poet's title to
fame.

     The great contribution of the Greek poets to religion, as has been
remarked above, is the revelation of the unity of the moral order of the
world, or, in more theological phrase, the unity of the divine rule in the
world, which naturally leads to the exaltation of Zeus to a supremacy of kind
rather than merely of degree.  Nowhere does this faith in the sovereignty of
Zeus find nobler utterance than in Aeschylus.  He is not merely a god, the
greatest of gods, but God.  A fragment, the genuineness of which appears
incontestable, declares: "Zeus is the ether, Zeus the earth, Zeus the heaven,
Zeus is the universe and what is beyond the universe."

     It was the general belief that the sins of the fathers were visited upon
the children to the third and fourth generation.  The tragedy of the house of
Atreus, which is the subject of the Orestean trilogy, was a conspicuous
example.  The whole train of crimes that wrought the ruin of the house was set
going by the initial crime, and fulfilled itself with dire necessity.
Aeschylus exhibits this fatal concatenation of crimes, showing how each
followed with grim inevitableness on the other.  But they do not, therefore,
cease to be crimes which the agent commits in full knowledge and set purpose.
There is no mechanical world-necessity that constrains, no judicial madness
that blinds.  Clytemnestra justifies her deed by the wrongs she had suffered
from her lord; she declares herself but the instrument by which the ancient
fury of the house, insatiate for blood, has again gratified its craving - it
is the vengeance for Atreus' crime.  The Chorus refuses the sophistries: This
is indeed from Zeus, the cause and doer of all, for naught is decreed for
mortals except by Zeus, none of these things but is ordained of God.  But
neither divine purpose nor demonic nemesis exculpates the murderess; the
hereditary avenging spirit is only an accessory.  So it is with Orestes: He
knows that his mother deserves death; in killing her to avenge the murder of
his father he is fulfilling the express command of Apollo, yet he is conscious
that neither the justice of her doom nor the divine sanction relieves him of
the crime of matricide.  The closing scene of the Choephori, in which before
Orestes' staring eyes the avenging spirits appear, grey-gowned, gorgon-like,
serpents twined in their tresses, blood oozing in gouts from their eyeballs,
the "mother's spiteful hounds," is one of the most moving in Greek tragedy.

     Nor is retribution limited to this life.  The Eumenides threaten Orestes:
"I'll cling thee and drag thee down living to pay the penalty of thy mother's
murder.  Thou shalt see every man who impiously wronged a god or a guest or
his loving parents suffering each his just deserts; for Hades is a great judge
of men beneath the earth, observing all things with retentive mind." Similarly
in the Suppliants: "Not even in Hades' realm after death can a man who has
done such things escape the penalty of his profane deed.  There, as they say,
another Zeus among the shades passes final judgment on men's sins."

     The Chorus in the Choephori quotes an ancient saying, "What a man has
done, that shall he suffer." The words might be made a motto for Aeschylus'
belief.  He does not deny the fatality that forms the very theme of the
tragedy, but the sin is in the end man's own act, and for that he suffers, not
by sheer fate or blind necessity to expiate the sins of his fathers - so the
conscience of the guilty is fain at the last to confess.

     Sophocles is less concerned than Aeschylus to vindicate the righteousness
of the divine rule.  "Justice, renowned of old, sits assessor to Zeus by
ancient constitution"; sin is punished by suffering. But sin and retribution
do not solve the problem of suffering.  In the Oedipus Rex the poet shows us a
man who, without any fault of his own, does the most horrible deeds and
suffers the direst consequences.  Nor is this a reversion to the point of view
of the legend itself which Aeschylus rejects; Sophocles does not represent
Oedipus as the heir of the ancestral curse, nor as the victim of chance or
fate.  He did what any man might have done, with the best counsel and will in
the world, but the very means which he took to escape the prediction fulfilled
it.

     "Sophocles is profoundly impressed with the woes of humanity - woes which
may be due to no fault of a man's own.  Yet he firmly believes in the goodness
and the justice of the gods.  He does not fall back on a half-mystic doctrine
of nemesis.  He leaves the problem unsolved.  But he contributes at least one
inestimable thought towards its solution.  He teaches that suffering is not
necessarily an evil.  Suffering may educate and ennoble the character, as in
the case of Oedipus.  It may bring the victory of a cause which the sufferer
prizes above life, as in the case of Antigone.  Or, even if there can be
nothing of comfort or compensation for the individual victim, his suffering
may still have been ordained, in the hidden wisdom of just gods, for the good
of mankind. . . . He saw the evil and sorrow that are in life as part of a
divine scheme, which may, indeed, appoint such discipline for the good of the
individual, but which also subordinates the welfare of the individual to the
welfare of the race." ^1

[Footnote 1: Jebb, Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, p. 183.]

     In accepting such a statement of the matter, it should be borne in mind
that Sophocles was not attempting to solve a problem in theodicy. His interest
was in the characters themselves: not who is responsible for the tragic
situation, but how those who are involved in it bear themselves, how their
character reveals itself in the action or shapes the issue.

     The piety of Sophocles is closer to the traditional type than that of
Aeschylus.  Perhaps for that reason, perhaps because he does not habitually
envisage the lot of mortals from the point of view of justice, he is not so
strongly disposed to unify the divine rule of the world by exalting Zeus to a
godhead apart; the monotheistic-sounding phrases of Aeschylus cannot be
matched in Sophocles.  The other gods, especially Apollo and Athena, are not
overshadowed by the head of the pantheon.  The conservatism of Sophocles may
be recognised also in his references to the nether world, which hardly differ
from the Homeric notions.  Of reward or punishment there is no word, though he
alludes to the peculiar blessedness which the initiates of Eleusis are
promised.  The assumption of Oedipus in the Oedipus at Colonos is a miracle
which throws no light on human destiny.

     A man of another spirit, and, although contemporary, a man of another
time, was Euripides. ^1 It was thought worthy of note that he took no part in
public affairs, but lived, by Athenian standards, an unsocial life, liking
better to pore over books in his library than to mingle in the busy marts of
men.  Into the new intellectual life, however, with which Periclean Athens was
all astir, he plunged eagerly.  Anaxagoras, the last great philosopher of the
Ionian school, and Protagoras, called the first of the sophists, were long
resident in Athens; other such lights of the new education as Gorgias and
Prodicus came and went.  By personal association with these men and,
doubtless, by the perusal of the writings of others which he gathered in his
library, Euripides acquainted himself with the thought of his times on nature,
man, and god.  It does not appear from his plays - here our only authority -
that he addicted himself to any one school; he had the poet's mobile
intelligence rather than the co-ordinating mind.  Tradition and dramatic
propriety often demanded that his characters should speak and behave with
antique piety, nor should we assume that Euripides was so completely
sophisticated that he did not himself feel the beauty and power of the faith
in which he was brought up. Again, the outbursts of passion against the gods
are sometimes inevitable to the character and the situation - as when
Bellerophon exclaims: "Does any one say there are really gods in heaven?
There are none, there are none!" - and must not be mistaken for the reflective
opinion of the poet.

[Footnote 1: It was a pleasant fancy of the Greeks to make Salamis connect the
three great tragic poets: Euripides, it is said, was born on the island and on
the day of the great sea-fight; Sophocles, fifteen or sixteen years old, led
the boy chorus in the celebration of the victory; Aeschylus was a man of
thirty-five when he took part in the battle. Euripides and Sophocles died
within a few months of each other in 407-6. The extant plays of both poets
belong to their later years.]

     But when all subtractions are made, it remains undeniable that Euripides
himself often enough speaks through his characters and in his choruses, and in
language that leaves no doubt of his meaning.  Sometimes it is the agnosticism
of Protagoras, in such expressions as, "the gods, whatever they may be,"
"Zeus, whoever he may be," whose vagueness is accentuated by analysis, as in
Hecuba's prayer: "O thou support of the earth, whose seat is also on the
earth, whosoe'er thou art, hard to know by our conjectures, Zeus, whether that
mean the inexorable law of nature or human intelligence, thee I address in
prayer; for, moving by a noiseless path, thou guidest all mortal destinies
according to justice." The audience may well have echoed Menelaus'
exclamation, "What a new-fangled prayer!" From the lips of the same Hecuba
Euripides lets fall an opinion like that of Critias - the gods and morals are
conventions; men believe in them because the law bids so: "We are slaves, and
feeble, too, but the gods are strong, and the law which has power over them;
for by law we believe in the gods, and distinguish wrong from right in human
conduct." Such utterances explain how Aristophanes should have accused
Euripides of convincing men that there are no gods.  At least, if it pleases
the philosophers to call natural law or human reason god, the gods of religion
do not recognise themselves under these names.

     The attitude of Euripides toward the gods of the popular religion was in
truth not the calm suspense of philosophic agnosticism.  The unwritten law of
the stage constrained him to take his themes from the myths and heroic
legends, many of which - and those the most tragic - were morally repugnant to
him.  He does not hesitate to avow his disbelief, as when he lets Herakles
say: "I do not believe that the gods love beds that are not lawful to them,
nor have I ever deemed, nor will I be persuaded, that they fasten fetters on
other gods' hands, nor that one god is master of another; for a god, if he is
truly god, has need of naught.  These are blasphemous fictions of epic poets."
He does worse than deny: he lets the gods exhibit themselves on his stage in
actions and passions that destroy all respect, or work such injustice from
behind the scenes that sympathy for the victim turns into indignation against
the divine wrong-doer.  Such a self-exposure, so long as it followed the
familiar myth, doubtless made far less impression on an Athenian audience than
it does on the modern reader, and the exaggerated pathos of Euripides tended
to fix attention on the sufferer and distract it from the gods.  The poet
takes pains, therefore, that perfidy, vengefulness, jealousy, cruelty,
licentiousness, shall get their right names when gods are the doers.  A single
example must suffice for many; let it be Amphitryon's frank speech to Zeus in
the Herakles:

     "O Zeus, in vain I shared my wife with thee, in vain I called thee father
of my son; thou hast not proved the friend thou dost pretend to be. Mortal
that I am, I am much better than thou, a great god!  For I did not betray
Herakles' children, but thou understandest how stealthily to find thy way to
men's beds, taking possession of others' couches without their consent, but
how to save thine own friends thou dost not know.  Thou art a stupid god, if
not an honest one!"

     If we reflect that Euripides kept at this for half a century, not in a
schoolroom to pupils who paid for sophistication, but before all Athens in the
theatre on a high religious festival and in the religious forms of tragedy, it
is not strange that he should be thought to have contributed even more than
the sophists to the decay of faith and the decadence of morals; for what they
spoke in the ear in closets he proclaimed upon the housetops.  Yet he kept
within the liberty of the theatre, and does not appear to have been molested
by heresy trials, though the pious Aeschylus had been driven from Athens by
one in the preceding generation, and in Euripides' own circle the process had
been invoked against Anaxagoras and Pheidias, while, but a few years after
Euripides' death, Socrates fell a victim to malevolent orthodoxy.  The
inquisitores hoereticoe pravitatis in all ages seem to have been blind tools
of a tragic irony.

     The last year or two of Euripides' life was spent at Pella in Macedonia,
at the court of King Archelaus; and there he wrote his last play, the Bacchae.
The Dionysiac religion in the public cult of Greece had long been civilised
out of all semblance to its original, and in the Orphic conventicles its
mystical communion had degenerated into sacramental magic.  In Macedonia,
however, it had kept its old character; there Euripides could see genuine
maenads in the frenzy of Bacchic possession, not tame Attic citizens' wives in
their sober senses playing the wild women.  The spectacle seized his
imagination, and he yielded himself to the inspiration, the sophist for once
forgetting himself in the poet.

     The myth of Pentheus, the Thessalian king who set himself against the
strange god and his religion of madness, and for his despite done to the god
was torn to pieces by the wild women led by his own mother, furnished the
theme. ^1 Did Euripides, weary of a lifelong rationalism which had nothing to
give to the religious soul but reasonable doubts, really surrender himself to
enthusiasm?  Such things have happened, but all we can say for certain is that
the poet threw his soul more unreservedly into his subject than was his wont
to do.  The fragments of the "Cretans" show, it may be added, that the
enthusiasms of other orgiastic cults had interested him before he went to
Macedonia.

[Footnote 1: Aeschylus had made a cognate myth the subject of his Lycurgia,
the loss of which cannot be too much regretted.]

     Aristophanes had a strong dislike for the new education and its
professors and for the new generation of poets.  His lash fell on Euripides
with double vigour as a sinner on both counts.  Of the sincerity of his
dislike there is no question; but it is taking the comic poet too solemnly to
make him a defender of the faith pursuing the neologists with holy zeal, just
as it is a mistake to think of him as an aristocrat by conviction and
principle because he lampoons Creon, burlesques the sovereign Demos, and
exposes the rottenness of that "bulwark of democracy," trial by jury.  The
calling of the poet in the Old Comedy, for which he had the licence of the
state and the authority of religion, was to be the censor of the times, to
find fault boldly and roundly with everything he saw amiss in Athens, and to
lay the blame where it belonged, on high or low.

     Aristophanes did not put tendencies or policies on the stage in abstract
or allegorical form; he saw them incorporated in persons, the leading men of
his time, and he used his privilege to make them odious, contemptible, above
all, ridiculous.  To get dark shadows in his picture he had need of light; to
show how bad the times were it was necessary to contrast the present
degeneracy with the good old days, and nothing, as our own experience
confirms, was surer to make an effect in the pit.  He was, therefore, a
laudator temporis acti by his very profession.  Add to this, that he had an
undisguised personal animosity toward Euripides, and it becomes clear that
religious conservatism is not the whole explanation of his attitude.  It is,
in fact, only in later plays, notably in the Frogs, written after the death of
Sophocles and Euripides, that Euripides' theology is a main point of attack,
though for a quarter of a century he had been making a butt of him as a poet.

     As for the new education, in his first venture on the stage, the lost
Daitales (427 B. C.), Aristophanes showed up the modern son, who cut school
and learned nothing that a properly brought-up Athenian ought to know, but
frequented the courses of the sophists and acquired their art of word-juggling
and legal subterfuges, despising work and leading a life of luxury,
contrasting him with the manly product of the old-fashioned training - the
kind that made the men who fought at Marathon.  The Clouds (produced in 423 B.
C.) assails the new education from every side - its methods, its eristic, its
natural science, its sophistication of morals, its perversion of justice, its
subversion of religion, its implicit or explicit atheism.  All these sins of
the sophists are personified in Socrates.

     There is no reason to think that, in presenting Socrates as the sum of
all sophistry, Aristophanes was prompted by personal hostility, such as he
entertained for Creon and Euripides.  The Platonic Symposium brings the two
together in the house of the poet Agathon to help him celebrate the success of
his tragedy (in 417-6 B. C.), and very good company they make. After all the
rest of the guests have gone home or are under the table, the trio keep on
passing the bowl around, Socrates meanwhile holding forth to the two poets
that the genius of tragedy and comedy are the same, and therefore a tragedian
should write comedy also, till first Aristophanes drops out, and then, at dawn
of day, Agathon; while the hard-headed senior, after seeing them to bed, takes
a cold bath and goes to his daily occupation.  Aristophanes' choice is
sufficiently explained by the fact that, unlike the migratory professors,
Socrates was an Athenian, one of the best-known men in the city, and, perhaps
we may add, a figure that the gods seemed to have fashioned on purpose for
caricature.

     The modern sense of fair play takes offence at the misrepresentation, the
more because it suspects that the prejudice created by the Clouds may have had
some part in the condemnation of Socrates twenty-five years later.  It may be
that the Athenian public itself thought the poet had gone too far in making
Socrates a "meteorosophist" after the school of Diogenes of Apollonia, for the
piece, though one of the poet's best, got only the third prize. ^1 But
Socrates himself, who had the equanimity to which a sense of humour
contributes as much as a good conscience, if he sat in the audience that day,
doubtless laughed as consumedly as the next at what he was doing on the stage,
not least when, at the end, old Strepsiades set his "idea institute" on fire.

[Footnote 1: Ameipsias, in his Konnos, which got the second prize at the same
Dionysia, had Socrates for one of his principal characters, a poor beggar who
would not flatter, an enthusiast, but a rarely good man.]

     However unscrupulously Aristophanes attached to the name of Socrates a
character and teachings most unlike the truth, he could not have taken this
name for his arch-sophist if his audience had not put Socrates in that class.
Nor could they well have classed him otherwise: like the sophists, he was
incredulous about the universes the physicists thought out so neatly; man
seemed to him to have enough to do to understand himself.  Like them the
cultivation of virtue - however that was to be defined - was the principal
thing; and, again like them, he believed that virtue could be taught, and he
found his mission in this task.  He did not, indeed, make his living by
teaching; he was odd enough to think that if a man had anything that his
fellows would be better for knowing he ought not to keep it back till he had
counted his honorarium.  But an economic definition of "sophist" as a
professor who receives fees for instruction is hardly an adequate
characterisation. ^2

[Footnote 2: How Socrates did get his living - when he was not dining out - is
uncertain, and still more uncertain is it how Xanthippe subsisted.]

     Socrates, then, as his contemporaries saw him, was a sophist.  That he
controverted the teachings of others was what they all did; that, by his
subtle dialectic, he tangled them up in the fallacies of their own arguments -
or of his - and showed that they did not know what they were talking about,
proved only that he was better at that game than the rest. If those who came
closer to him felt his greater moral earnestness, that was the character of
the man, and, however favourably it distinguished him from some of the tribe,
was in no wise inconsistent with the calling nor without example among its
professors.  If we can divest ourselves of the prejudice against the word
which we have from Plato, Socrates was in fact the greatest of the sophists.
He would have been prompt to disclaim being a philosopher in the sense in
which we give the title to Plato and Aristotle, or to his predecessors, from
Thales to Anaxagoras.  He was never weary of iterating that he had no system,
no body of doctrine to expound, physical or metaphysical, political or
ethical.  The name is, however, of little consequence; whatever we call him,
Socrates makes an era in the history of human thought.

     Socrates' starting-point is a scepticism as radical as that of
Protagoras: he rejected not only the conflicting theories of the physicists,
"of whom some conceived of existence as a unity, others as a plurality; some
affirmed perpetual motion, others perpetual rest; some declared becoming and
perishing to be universal, others altogether denied such things," but this
whole enterprise, their "pursuit of knowledge for its own sake." No less vain
is the search for an absolute truth, an absolute good, or for a universal
standard: man cannot transcend the limitations of his humanity.  What seems to
the individual to be is true for him.  Yet, though all opinions may be equally
true, it is plain that when translated into action they do not all work
equally well; some are, from this practical point of view, better than others,
that is, they further the individual in his aims or conduce to the advantage
of the community, which is also his interest.  By the consideration of these
consequences a man may be led to adopt better opinions, and in so doing he
becomes a wiser man. ^1

[Footnote 1: See H. Jackson, "Socrates," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.,
XXV, 335.]

     The task of the educator is not to impose his truth on others, but to
guide them along this way to make the better truth their own.  This is
Socrates' conception of his own calling.  His method is dialectic - the
conversational method of question and answer.  He employs it, on the one hand,
to lead the respondent to see not only that his notions are indefinite or
inconsistent, but that they will not work; and, on the other hand, to help him
bring to birth the better truth which is embryonic in his mind, and to
recognise his own child.  This is, in his view, the only sound educational
method; and it is in this theory and the application of it that his genius
appears most conspicuous.