na.

SOCRATES.

470-399 B.C.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

To Socrates the world owes a new method in philosophy and a great
example in morals; and it would be difficult to settle whether his
influence has been greater as a sage or as a moralist. In either light
he is one of the august names of history. He has been venerated for more
than two thousand years as a teacher of wisdom, and as a martyr for the
truths he taught. He did not commit his precious thoughts to writing;
that work was done by his disciples, even as his exalted worth has been
published by them, especially by Plato and Xenophon. And if the Greek
philosophy did not culminate in him, yet he laid down those principles
by which only it could be advanced. As a system-maker, both Plato and
Aristotle were greater than he; yet for original genius he was probably
their superior, and in important respects he was their master. As a good
man, battling with infirmities and temptations and coming off
triumphantly, the ancient world has furnished no prouder example.

He was born about 470 or 469 years B.C., and therefore may be said to
belong to that brilliant age of Grecian literature and art when Prodicus
was teaching rhetoric, and Democritus was speculating about the doctrine
of atoms, and Phidias was ornamenting temples, and Alcibiades was giving
banquets, and Aristophanes was writing comedies, and Euripides was
composing tragedies, and Aspasia was setting fashions, and Cimon was
fighting battles, and Pericles was making Athens the centre of Grecian
civilization. But he died thirty years after Pericles; so that what is
most interesting in his great career took place during and after the
Peloponnesian war,--an age still interesting, but not so brilliant as
the one which immediately preceded it. It was the age of the
Sophists,--those popular but superficial teachers who claimed to be the
most advanced of their generation; men who were doubtless accomplished,
but were cynical, sceptical, and utilitarian, placing a high estimate on
popular favor and an outside life, but very little on pure subjective
truth or the wants of the soul. They were paid teachers, and sought
pupils from the sons of the rich,--the more eminent of them being
Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus; men who travelled from city
to city, exciting great admiration for their rhetorical skill, and
really improving the public speaking of popular orators. They also
taught science to a limited ex