4: PLATO AND SOCRATES

And as he was thus essentially twofold in character, so Socrates had to contend against two classes of enemies. "An offence" to the whole tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by those who hated them, by the good old men of Athens, whose conservatism finds its representative in Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what all [90] honest people might seem to take for granted, only a further development of the pernicious function of the Sophists themselves, by the most subtly influential of them all. If in the Apology he proves that the fathers of sons had no proper locus standi against him, still, in the actual conduct of his defence, as often in Plato's Dialogues, there is (the candid reader cannot but admit it) something of sophistry, of the casuist. Claiming to be but a simple argument, the Apology of Socrates moves sometimes circuitously, after the manner of one who really has to make the worse appear the better reason (ton hêttô logon kreittô poiein)+ and must needs use a certain kind of artificial, or ingenious, or ad captandum arguments, such as would best have been learned in the sophistic school. Those young Athenians whom he was thought to have corrupted of set purpose, he had not only admired but really loved and understood; and as a consequence had longed to do them real good, chiefly by giving them that interest in themselves which is the first condition of any real power over others. To make Meno, Polus, Charmides, really interested in himself, to help him to the discovery of that wonderful new world here at home--in this effort, even more than in making them interested in other people and things, lay and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox!) the central business of education. Only, the very thoroughness of the sort of self-knowledge he [91] promoted had in it something sacramental, so to speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm; could not leave them just as they were. He had not been able in all cases to expand "the better self," as people say, in those he influenced. Some of them had really become very insolent questioners of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves; and had but passed from bad to worse. That fatal necessity had been involved of coming to years of discretion. His claim to have been no teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his death.

     The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is
     tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super-
     ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune
     is called 'tragic.'  In the latter sense, one might say of
     Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his
     fate was tragic.  But in truth innocent suffering of that sort
     is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within
     the sphere of reason.  Now suffering--misfortune--comes within
     the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free-
     will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable;
     as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds.
     This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of
     a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself,
     so to speak, guilty of his misfortune.  In genuine tragedy, then,
     they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from
     this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the
     fate of Socrates.  His fate therefore is not merely personal, and
     as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the
     general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of
     Greece, which is therein carried out.  Two opposed Rights come
     forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this
     way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the
     one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other
     wrong.  On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious
     moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally
     religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason,
     creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of
     the knowledge of good and evil.  The latter remains the common
     principle of philosophy for all time to come.  And these are the
     two principles which come forth over against each other, in the
     life and in the philosophy of Socrates.  Geschichte der
     Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.

"I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander," says Montaigne, again, "but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot"; and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him. "For the sake of no long period of years," says Socrates himself, now condemned to death--the few years for which a man of seventy is likely to remain here--

     You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach
     from those who desire to malign the city of Athens--that ye put
     Socrates to death, a wise man.  For in very truth they will
     declare me to have been wise--those who wish to discredit you--
     even though I be not.  Now had you waited a little while this
     thing would have happened for you in the course of nature.  For
     ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life,
     hard by death.  Apology, 38.

Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates "consumed the poison in the [93] prison." Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all that was then said and done. Socrates had used the brief space which elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, "whither he must go, to die" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who still lingered in the court precisely on what are called "The four last things." Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal. Socrates himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of the moment.

The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in violent [94] distress--treatment in marked contrast, it must be observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as recorded in the Gospels.

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