The Memorabilia Part 2

Most a.s.suredly (answered Charicles), and from cowherds in particular; or else see that you do not lessen the number of the herd yourself.

Thus the secret was out. The remark of Socrates about the cattle had come to their ears, and they could not forgive the author of it.

Perhaps enough has been said to explain the kind of intimacy which had subsisted between Critias and Socrates, and their relation to one another. But I will venture to maintain that where the teacher is not pleasing to the pupil there is no education. Now it cannot be said of Critias and Alcibiades that they a.s.sociated with Socrates because they found him pleasing to them. And this is true of the whole period. From the first their eyes were fixed on the heads.h.i.+p of the state as their final goal. During the time of their intimacy with Socrates there were no disputants whom they were more eager to encounter than professed politicians.

Thus the story is told of Alcibiades--how before the age of twenty he engaged his own guardian, Pericles, at that time prime minister of the state, in a discussion concerning laws.

Alc. Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?

Per. To be sure I can.

Alc. I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so often hears the epithet "law-abiding" applied in a complimentary sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.

Per. Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.

Alc. Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is good? or to do what is bad?

Per. What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.

Alc. Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?

Per. Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.

Alc. Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?

Per. Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.

Alc. But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness--how do we define them?

Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him--not by persuasion but by compulsion?

Per. I should say so.

Alc. It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things--that is lawlessness?

Per. You are right; and I retract the statement that measures pa.s.sed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.

Alc. And what of measures pa.s.sed by a minority, not by persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only? Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?

Per. I think that anything which any one forces another to do without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.

Alc. It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?

To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.

To which Alcibiades replied: Ah, Pericles, I do wish we could have met in those days when you were at your cleverest in such matters.

Well, then, as soon as the desired superiority over the politicians of the day seemed to be attained, Critias and Alcibiades turned their backs on Socrates. They found his society unattractive, not to speak of the annoyance of being cross-questioned on their own shortcomings. Forthwith they devoted themselves to those affairs of state but for which they would never have come near him at all.

No; if one would seek to see true companions of Socrates, one must look to Crito, (24) and Chaerephon, and Chaerecrates, to Hermogenes, to Simmias and Cebes, to Phaedondes and others, who clung to him not to excel in the rhetoric of the a.s.sembly or the law-courts, but with the n.o.bler ambition of attaining to such beauty and goodliness of soul as would enable them to discharge the various duties of life to house and family, to relatives and friends, to fellow-citizens, and to the state at large. Of these true followers not one in youth or old age was ever guilty, or thought guilty, of committing any evil deed.

(24) For these true followers, familiar to us in the pages of Plato, ("Crito," "Apol.," "Phaedo," etc) see Cobet, "Pros. Xen."

"But for all that," the accuser insists, "Socrates taught sons to pour contumely upon their fathers (25) by persuading his young friends that he could make them wiser than their sires, or by pointing out that the law allowed a son to sue his father for aberration of mind, and to imprison him, which legal ordinance he put in evidence to prove that it might be well for the wiser to imprison the more ignorant."

(25) See "Apol." 20; Arist. "Clouds," 1407, where Pheidippides "drags his father Strepsiades through the mire."

Now what Socrates held was, that if a man may with justice incarcerate another for no better cause than a form of folly or ignorance, this same person could not justly complain if he in his turn were kept in bonds by his superiors in knowledge; and to come to the bottom of such questions, to discover the difference between madness and ignorance was a problem which he was perpetually working at. His opinion came to this: If a madman may, as a matter of expediency to himself and his friends, be kept in prison, surely, as a matter of justice, the man who knows not what he ought to know should be content to sit at the feet of those who know, and be taught.

But it was the rest of their kith and kin, not fathers only (according to the accuser), whom Socrates dishonoured in the eyes of his circle of followers, when he said that "the sick man or the litigant does not derive a.s.sistance from his relatives, (26) but from his doctor in the one case, and his legal adviser in the other." "Listen further to his language about friends," says the accuser: "'What is the good of their being kindly disposed, unless they can be of some practical use to you?

Mere goodness of disposition is nothing; those only are worthy of honour who combine with the knowledge of what is right the faculty of expounding it;' (27) and so by bringing the young to look upon himself as a superlatively wise person gifted with an extraordinary capacity for making others wise also, he so worked on the dispositions of those who consorted with him that in their esteem the rest of the world counted for nothing by comparison with Socrates."

(26) See Grote, "H. G." v. 535.

(27) Cf. Thuc. ii. 60. Pericles says, "Yet I with whom you are so angry venture to say of myself, that I am as capable as any one of devising and explaining a sound policy."--Jowett.

Now I admit the language about fathers and the rest of a man's relations. I can go further, and add some other sayings of his, that "when the soul (which is alone the indwelling centre of intelligence) is gone out of a man, be he our nearest and dearest friend, we carry the body forth and bury it out of sight." "Even in life," he used to say, "each of us is ready to part with any portion of his best possession--to wit, his own body--if it be useless and unprofitable. He will remove it himself, or suffer another to do so in his stead. Thus men cut off their own nails, hair, or corns; they allow surgeons to cut and cauterise them, not without pains and aches, and are so grateful to the doctor for his services that they further give him a fee. Or again, a man ejects the spittle from his mouth as far as possible. (28) Why? Because it is of no use while it stays within the system, but is detrimental rather."

(28) See Aristot. "Eth. Eud." vii. 1.

Now by these instances his object was not to inculcate the duty of burying one's father alive or of cutting oneself to bits, but to show that lack of intelligence means lack of worth; (29) and so he called upon his hearers to be as sensible and useful as they could be, so that, be it father or brother or any one else whose esteem he would deserve, a man should not hug himself in careless self-interest, trusting to mere relations.h.i.+p, but strive to be useful to those whose esteem he coveted.

(29) i.e. "witless and worthless are synonymous."

But (pursues the accuser) by carefully culling the most immoral pa.s.sages of the famous poets, and using them as evidences, he taught his a.s.sociates to be evildoers and tyrranical: the line of Hesiod (30) for instance--

No work is a disgrace; slackness of work is the disgrace--

"interpreted," says the accuser, "by Socrates as if the poet enjoined us to abstain from no work wicked or ign.o.ble; do everything for the sake of gain."

(30) "Works and Days," 309 {'Ergon d' ouden oneidos}. Cf. Plat.

"Charm." 163 C.

Now while Socrates would have entirely admitted the propositions that "it is a blessing and a benefit to a man to be a worker," and that "a lazy do-nothing is a pestilent evil," that "work is good and idleness a curse," the question arises, whom did he mean by workers? In his vocabulary only those were good workmen (31) who were engaged on good work; dicers and gamblers and others engaged on any other base and ruinous business he stigmatised as the "idle drones"; and from this point of view the quotation from Hesiod is unimpeachable--

No work is a disgrace; only idlesse is disgrace.

But there was a pa.s.sage from Homer (32) for ever on his lips, as the accuser tells us--the pa.s.sage which says concerning Odysseus,

What prince, or man of name, He found flight-giv'n, he would restrain with words of gentlest blame: "Good sir, it fits you not to fly, or fare as one afraid, You should not only stay yourself, but see the people stayed."

Thus he the best sort us'd; the worst, whose spirits brake out in noise, (33) He cudgell'd with his sceptre, chid, and said, "Stay, wretch, be still, And hear thy betters; thou art base, and both in power and skill Poor and unworthy, without name in counsel or in war." We must not all be kings.

(31) See below, III. ix. 9.

(32) "Il." ii. 188 foll., 199 foll. (so Chapman).

(33) Lit. "But whatever man of the people he saw and found him shouting."--W. Leaf.