SOCRATES: THE FIRST MARTYR OF PHILOSPHY

By Will Durant

I see him, in the oldest tale told of him, standing in the snow outside his tent on the night before the battle of Potidaea. The place is Greece, the year is 432 before Christ, and Socrates is thirty-eight years old. There he is, short and stocky, already half bald, and not inclined to good looks; yet there is something about him that convinces you at once that he is an exceptional man. All night long he stands barefoot between the snow and the stars, in almost motionless meditation. He is the Thinker; through him thought, speculation, philosophy, will begin to play a role in European history and will dare the adventure of attempting to understand the world.

But this man is no dreamer, to whom thought is a cowardly substitute for action; the very next day, at the height of the battle, he saves the life of his young friend Alcibiades at the risk of his own; and every report heralds his bravery. Like all great men, he could have been any sort of great man; he chose to become a philosopher, not knowing that it is safer to be a general.

And so we see him, next, teaching his pupils under the porticoes of the Parthenon. His little band follow him up that scared hill, to hear the Master discourse on wisdom as the highest virtue and democratic aristocracy as the highest state. What hair he has left is now quite white; he is stouter than ever and not an inch taller; he has the head of a satyr, the mouth of a town crier, the eyes of a warrior, the nose of a genius; he will smell out truth where it is, and no disguise will cheat him. One garment covers his body – a simple toga, seldom changed and never immaculate; underneath are the feet of a peasant, always bare.

He prefers his roofless school to his noisy home. His wife, Xanthippe, is a misfortune. She berates the philosopher as a good-for-nothing idler, who spends his time gabbing in the market place instead of making bread and butter; she is disappointed to find that Socrates returns from town day after day with his head full and his hands empty; she has a realistic mind, and believes that a man should provide for his family before rearranging the universe. She tells him so in many phrases; and to avoid a misunderstanding, she empties a pail of water upon his head. He is not much disturbed; he goes off quietly, saying “I might have known that after so much thunder there would be rain.” Such a wife is bound to make a man a philosopher.

So he goes back to his students, to Diogenes the cynic, Antisthenes the radical, Albibiades the dandy, Plato the enthusiast, and many more. He likes the splendor of their young bodies gleaming in the sun and splashing in the pool. He finds the secret of a happy old age in intellectual comradeship with youth; and to these handsome lads he confides his most intimate thoughts, his way to wisdom and peace.

What is that he teaches them? First, modesty. “There is only one thing that I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Clearly we cannot understand Nature, for her moods and her signs are contrary, and she seems beyond good and evil, now friendly to us, and now a foe; but it is well to believe that a great Mind moves in all things, and speaks as a secret spirit in our hearts.

Second, clarity. He checks his students with question after question, stings their theories with facts, compels them to define their terms, deflates them with humor, burns then with irony, and forces them to see the implications of their thought. He will have no loose minds about him; and such of these as come soon slink away, licking their wounds and scheming revenge.

Third, intelligence. It seems to him a noble virtue, greater than goodness without brains; and he believes that all wrongdoing is rooted in ignorance. He abhors the incompetence of Athens’ democracy, and suggests that education might be desirable in elected persons; he proposes that arduous training should be required of all who offer themselves for office. He knows the faults and possibilities of democracy 2,350 years before the radio.

Suddenly his life moves out of the quiet rhythm of speculation into the turbulence of public strife. His pupil, Critias, organizes a rich man’s revolution, overthrows the democracy, sets up a dictatorship of wealth, and invites the old philosopher to bless the new regime. Socrates refuses; he scorns all who use violence and considers government by millionaires to be as ruinous as government by the mob; he will have no aristocracy but that of the wisest men, selected from all ranks by equal educational opportunity in every generation. In the midst of bloodshed and chaos he stands alone.

Then the democrats recapture Athens, kill Critias, and arrest Socrates as the supposed intellectual source of the revolt. They cannot charge him with political heresy, which is no crime in Athens; they charge him, deviously, with irreligion – by which they mean that he has rejected the crowded pantheon of Greece and believes there is only one God.

Five hundred judges are selected from the people to form the court of justice, the Dikastery, that tries him. He makes little defense. He challenges his accusers to show him guilty of either impiety or crime; he startles the court by telling it that instead of being tried for his life, he ought to be supported at public expense as a teacher; useful precisely because of the independence of his thought and speech. The judges are politically hostile to him, and do not care for his ideas; they vote for death by 80 to 220. He has still a chance for life – if he will appeal to the public assembly, it may accept a slighter penalty. But he refuses to ask for mercy; and calm and strong as ever, he is led away to jail, condemned to drink the hemlock that will kill him. He is seventy-one years old, and it is the year 399 before Christ.

The rest of his story all the world knows, for Plato – who loved him this side of idolatry – has put it down in prose more beautiful than poetry. Read that incomparable narrative, at the end of the Phaedo, in which, with all the restraint of an artist, his greatest pupil tells how the Master drank the last cup and quietly watched himself die.

Read those other delights of Plato’s – the Apology of Socrates, The Symposium, and The Republic; in these bright pages the old sage still lives, carried on in an immortality of fame, still influencing our ideals of conduct and government, stirring us on to the study and practice of wisdom. These books will open for you one little pathway into the Country of the Mind; other paths you will find for yourself, until you have won the comradeship of all genius and have absorbed something of that intellectual and moral heritage of the race, which transforms us into men.

Source: First published in The American Magazine, October 1929; reprinted in the new anthology of Will Durant’s philosophy writings, An Invitation To Philosophy (Promethean Press, © copyright 2003, John Little and the Estate of Will and Ariel Durant) and available in the “Books” section of Max Contraction Online.