The seer, supposing that he must have returned laden with wealth, could scarcely believe him; but when on questioning him further he learnt that Xenophon, although he had sacrificed to Zeus the King, had offered nothing since he left Athens to Zeus the Kindly,' the mystery was explained. The kindly god must receive a whole burnt offering and a slaughter of little pigs in his honour was followed at once by a distribution of pay to the army and by the restoration of his favourite horse, which the Spartans had repurchased and for which they refused any recompense at his hands. He thus had not only his horse but more than a year's pay in advance. The kindly Zeus was indeed working zealously on his behalf: but when, having marched by Antandros to Atarneus, the army reached Pergamos, a prospect of still greater luck was opened for Xenophon. His hostess, Hellas, the wife of Gongylos, told him that he might win a splendid prize by seizing the tower or castle of a wealthy Persian named Asidates. The sacrifices at once favoured the enterprise; but a vigorous attack by 600 of his comrades ended in a retreat which at the cost of wounds to nearly half their men enabled them to bring back about 200 captives and some cattle. On the next day the assault, repeated with the full force of the army, was followed by the capture of Asidates himself with his whole family and all his property. Thus came true,' says Xenophon, with a faith which nothing can daunt or shake, 'the signs of the victims offered before the first attack:' and thus also were more than realised any visions of wealth which may have floated before his eyes as he started on the eastward march from Sardeis. With eager gratitude his comrades bade him make his own choice out of all the spoil; and Xenophon returned to Athens3 a rich man, to find that the great teacher whose wisdom he revered and by whose counsels he was guided had drunk the fatal draught of hemlock a few days or a few weeks before his arrival. 1 Zeus Meilichios. Xen. An. vii. 8, 4. 2 This was a descendant of the Eretrian Gongylos who in the Persian War had taken the side of Xerxes. Xen. H. iii. 1, 6. The signification of the expedition and retreat of the Ten Thousand is pretty much that of the campaigns of Alexander. If neither can be said strictly to belong to the history of the Greek country, they both form part of the history of the artificial Greek people which comes into prominence just as the ancient Hellenic cities dwindle away and lose all political existence. This fact alone justifies the careful study of a narrative which otherwise might have been passed by with a very brief notice. It must further be remembered that this expedition of the Ten Thousand, although owing to the death of Cyrus it failed to dethrone Artaxerxes, left on the Hellenic world generally a profound impression that the Persian empire could not possibly withstand the determined assault of a Greek army well disciplined and well provided, under the command of an able and ambitious general. This conviction, brought against Sokrates by Anytos, Meletos, and Lykon. 400 B.C. CHAPTER II. SOKRATES. SOKRATES had already reached an age of more than seventy years,1 when three Athenian citizens, the leather-seller Anytos, the poet Charges Meletos, and the rhetor Lykon, brought against him three charges, the first of rejecting the gods worshipped at Athens, the second of setting up new deities of his own, the third of corrupting the youth of the city. Of these three men Anytos, as many would have it, had escaped condemnation for his failure to relieve the garrison at Pylos only by bribing the jurymen who tried him. During the tyranny which ensued on the fall of Athens he had been nearly ruined in his estate: and his eagerness to retrieve his broken fortunes roused in him a feeling of indignation when he was told that Sokrates had spoken of his son as far too fine a youth to be put to an unsavoury trade. The other two had, so far as we can learn, no further causes for antipathy to Sokrates than those which affected the classes to which they severally belonged. Of these classes Sokrates, for whatever reasons, had incurred the determined enmity. As a citizen, this illustrious man had lived a life not merely blameless but deserving the gratitude of his countrymen. He had Early life of behaved with credit among the Athenian hoplites Sokrates. at Potidaia and Delion; with righteous zeal he had firmly opposed the madness of the people whom Theramenes was hounding on to the murder of the generals after Argennoussai; $ with the same fearless composure he had gone quietly home when the Thirty despots commissioned him with four others to arrest and bring before them the Salaminian Leon. Of his earlier life there is little to say. He may have followed for a time the occupation of his father Sophroniskos, and he may have carved the group of Charites which were shown in the Akropolis as his work. Some said that as a young man he had lived viciously; but, expressed again and again by rhetoricians like Lysias and Isokrates, tended greatly, we cannot doubt, to determine the purpose of Alexander the Great; and thus the masterly retreat of Xenophon became directly a cause of the expedition, which carried the name and the language of Hellas to the plains of the Penj-áb. 1 Έτη γεγονώς πλείω ἑβδομήκοντα. Plato, Apol. Sokr. p. 17. This fact may be accepted without entering here into questions concerning the genuineness of the celebrated Apology. 3 452. 2 See p. although with his thorough frankness he admitted that the work of self-discipline was with him a severe struggle, there seems to be no ground for the imputation. That he betook himself with some eagerness to the study of physics may fairly be gathered from the Platonic dialogue in which Sokrates is represented as receiving the instructions of Parmenides. By that philosopher he is said to have been counselled to test all theories and inferences by the method of his pupil the Eleatic Zenon,-in other words, not merely to assure himself that the conclusion was warranted by the premisses, but to weigh carefully all that could be urged against the latter. Sokrates and Such tests, it is obvious, might be used to upset the system of which Zenon was so vehement a champion. It was almost impossible that Sokrates could fail to discover the verbalism in which the Eleatic philosophers often involved them- the science of Physics. selves; nor in the hypotheses maintained by one philosopher after another could he well see much more than a series of guesses of which the latest held its ground only until some other thinker came forward to prove its absurdity. Beyond all doubt, the formation of these theories by exploding the old mythological creed vastly aided the growth of the human mind; but it would have been strange indeed if some one had not sooner or later risen to protest against the multiplication of hypotheses for which it was impossible to adduce the manifest evidence of fact. Such a thinker arose in Sokrates, in whose mind the contradictory conclusions of the philosophers (or, as they were called, Sophists) caused a revulsion never to be overcome. The uncertainty of the explanations offered for the motions of the planets or the changes of the seasons was for him the proof that they who attempted to explain such things were invading a region into which the gods would allow no prying. Whatever astronomical knowledge might be needed for navigation or other practical purposes might, he thought, be easily learnt from night-watchers and pilots; but attempts to determine the distances of the planets and the modes of their revolution betrayed impiety of the same kind which led Anaxagoras to assert the identity of Fire and the Sun. Sokrates and the science of Ethics. Turning, therefore, with disgust from the wranglings of philosophers who reviled each other with the fury of lunatics,1 Sokrates beheld before him, as he thought, a vast field in which the plough had scarcely turned a single furrow. If it was impossible for man to determine what were the constituents of the sun, it was surely not impossible for him to ascertain the conditions of his own life, the laws which he must obey, the nature of his relations to other men, and the character of 1 Xen. Mem. I. i. 14. human action. Starting with the assured conviction that the gods were everywhere present, and that from them nothing was hid even to the thoughts and intents of the heart, he held it to be his duty to ascertain the boundaries which separated the province of human reason from that of the divine government of the world. Nor was he at any loss to find them. Although the interference of the gods in human affairs was constant, it was exercised only in matters the results of which were uncertain; and it was absurd, if not impious, to ask for their help where the suppliant needed only to exercise the faculties with which they had endowed him. From the time of his boyhood he had heard an inward voice which, without telling him what he should do, warned him against any given action. This was styled by some of his disciples the Daimonion or Dæmon, which, by revealing to him dangers to be avoided, made his way plain before his face. It was a divine guide of which he spoke not less familiarly than of other personal characteristics; and as he made no mystery of it in his own case, so it must at the least be noted that he nowhere explicitly speaks of it as a privilege peculiar to himself. The religious mission of Sokrates. He was still a young man (how young we know not) when the sense of a divine mission, binding him to devote his whole life to the service of his fellows, broke upon his mind. As with the youthful Hebrew prophet who saw the Lord upon his throne, high and lifted up, the profoundest sense of personal unworthiness was blended with unhesitating eagerness to obey. The rigid application of the Zenonic method to his own conceptions had convinced him of his absolute ignorance of matters in which true knowledge was of vital moment to his moral health, and had perhaps made him suspect that the knowledge vaunted by others was not more solid or real than his own. But, however this might be, it was his duty henceforth to proclaim himself the Apostle of Truth, not in the sense which would claim for him the possession of truth, but only as attesting the devotion of his life to its discovery and its promulgation. Abandoning his occupation as a sculptor, retaining, it would seem, no means of making an income, he made it his business to put all men to the test, so that the reality or the hollowness of their professions might for their own higher good and happiness be made known to themselves and to the world. If the acquisition of Truth, that is, of real knowledge, be the one thing needful, the conceit of knowledge without the reality must be the greatest of all evils. The presence of this conceit, wherever it exists, must be made manifest in con 1 This is the account put into his nouth by Plato, Apol. Sokr. p. 31. ccording to. Xenophon Mem. iv 3, 12, its commands were positive as well as negative. 2 Isaiah vi. 1. fusion of thought, if only the probe be pushed home with sufficient vigour and pertinacity. For himself he had nothing to fear or to hide. He went forth (as a man knowing himself to be ignorant and having, as he supposed, emptied himself of all prejudices and preconceptions), to ascertain whether or how far others who talked glibly about freedom and forms of government, about science and art, theory and practice, law and justice, really attached a clear meaning to the words which they used and regulated their lives by their conceptions. In the discharge of this mission he might be seen at all times of the day in all places of public resort, seeking the conversation of all and shunning none. In the Agora and the Gymnasion his voice might be heard, asking those who chose to listen to him what they meant by speaking of certain things as just or expedient or beneficial, and of certain other things as inexpedient or unjust or hurtful. The perfect frankness of the man, the ingenuous confession of his own ignorance, the dexterity with which by flank movements he led his hearers to make statements conclusively proving their mere pretence to knowledge, the earnestness which convinced them that, if he exposed their shallowness, it was only in order that they might work their way to the real treasures which awaited all disinterested seekers, could not fail to gather round him knots of listeners, of whom many became his disciples or, as he would prefer to have them, his friends. The impression thus made led some to regard him as a man of whom the world had not yet seen the peer; and the resolution to ascertain the truth of this fact by a reference to the Delphian oracle was the natural consequence of this conviction. Sokrates and amination. The answer brought back by Chairephon from the shrine of Phoibos was that of all men Sokrates was the wisest. In Sokrates himself these words awakened no feeling of selfgratulation, but merely a desire to solve that which he felt sure must be a riddle or enigma. He was at once conscious of his own ignorance and convinced of the perfect veracity of the god. He betook himself therefore to a statesman of wide repute for his wisdom, but he soon satisfied himself that his supposed knowledge was a mere mask. When, however, he sought to convince the statesman of this fact, he found that he had only made him his enemy; and he returned home, assured that thus far the Delphian priestess was right. His own ignorance and that of the statesman were on a par; but he was conscious of it and as eager to acknowledge it as the statesman was to deny it; and so far he was the wiser man. The experiment was tried on others (reluctantly and with pain and fear, because he saw the strength of the resentment which he roused), and always with the same result. He went to the poets, with something like the |