public gold when making his giant statue of Athena. He was acquitted but was then arraigned for impiety and put in prison, where he died. Protagoras and Anaxagoras were likewise hounded, and enemies even indicted Pericles’ mistress Aspasia (about whom more will be said), though she won acquittal. By 428 B.C., the brilliant group of humanists who had run and adorned Athens in the name of man had been broken up and dispersed.
Socrates survived the plague, something his friends noted with surprise. While many fled the city or kept to their houses, Socrates continued his usual practice of walking the streets and talking to all, regardless of possible contagion. The fact that he escaped was taken as a tribute to his generally healthy life and exercises. By now he was forty, a middle-aged man and becoming, in his own way, an Athenian celebrity. It is time for us to turn to his work and in particular his idiosyncratic methods of practicing philosophy.
IV
Socrates the Philosophical Genius
T he onset and ravages of the plague, the death of Pericles, the decline of his regime and the suspension of his cultural program, the prosecution of his leading followers, and the general malaise in Athens, had a personal effect on Socrates. They forced him to ponder seriously his function in life. He had always been a thinker and enjoyed talking and debating with fellow Athenians. But he had never had a job. Now he began to feel he had a mission. The age of Pericles had been admirable in many ways: It had encouraged architecture and building, painting and pottery, music and the theater, as well as manufacturing and commerce and the useful arts. But there was something missing. It was all very well to reiterate its slogan, “Man is the measure of all things,” and to insist that human beings were not helpless playthings of the gods but masters of their fate. But what sort of a person was man? The Pericleans were eager to improve art and technology in all their aspects, and had to a great extent succeeded in doing so. But what about improving man? Was it possible? And if so, how? It seemed to Socrates that these questions were never asked and ought to be asked.
It was not that clever and thoughtful Greeks were idle. On the contrary. They asked questions all the time. But they tended to concentrate on the world, and the distant worlds—or whatever they were—in the sky. The Greeks called it the cosmos, and enquiry centered on how it worked, cosmology, and how it was originally created, cosmogony. As a young man, Socrates engaged in such questioning himself. He inherited a considerable body of knowledge, or as he came to see, pseudo-knowledge. There were, for instance, a group of wise inquirers in Ionian Greece, to the east, especially in Miletus. Such were Thales, active around 580 B.C., over a century before Socrates, his pupil Anaximander, and his pupil Anaximenes. Thales, who was possibly a Hebrew, or Semitic, was later called by Aristotle the founder of the physical sciences. He used the Egyptian system of land measurement to invent the technique of geometry. He was said to have foretold the solar eclipse that occurred during the Battle of the Halys (May 28, 585 B.C.). He was a polymath who drew snatches of exact knowledge from the accumulated wisdom of the Semitic world, but his conjectures were eccentric. He believed, for instance, that magnets have souls. He thought the earth floated on water.
Anaximander wrote the first treatise on the cosmos, which has survived, though only in fragments. He conceived it as a unity, operating under laws, with the moon and the sun moving in cycles. He was the first to draw a map of the earth. He invented the gnomon for astronomic observation. Like Darwin, he believed that man and animals evolved. He answered the question, “If the earth rests on water, what supports the water?” by answering that it was not necessary because it lay at the center and at equal distance from everything, so was held
Socrates survived the plague, something his friends noted with surprise. While many fled the city or kept to their houses, Socrates continued his usual practice of walking the streets and talking to all, regardless of possible contagion. The fact that he escaped was taken as a tribute to his generally healthy life and exercises. By now he was forty, a middle-aged man and becoming, in his own way, an Athenian celebrity. It is time for us to turn to his work and in particular his idiosyncratic methods of practicing philosophy.
IV
Socrates the Philosophical Genius
T he onset and ravages of the plague, the death of Pericles, the decline of his regime and the suspension of his cultural program, the prosecution of his leading followers, and the general malaise in Athens, had a personal effect on Socrates. They forced him to ponder seriously his function in life. He had always been a thinker and enjoyed talking and debating with fellow Athenians. But he had never had a job. Now he began to feel he had a mission. The age of Pericles had been admirable in many ways: It had encouraged architecture and building, painting and pottery, music and the theater, as well as manufacturing and commerce and the useful arts. But there was something missing. It was all very well to reiterate its slogan, “Man is the measure of all things,” and to insist that human beings were not helpless playthings of the gods but masters of their fate. But what sort of a person was man? The Pericleans were eager to improve art and technology in all their aspects, and had to a great extent succeeded in doing so. But what about improving man? Was it possible? And if so, how? It seemed to Socrates that these questions were never asked and ought to be asked.
It was not that clever and thoughtful Greeks were idle. On the contrary. They asked questions all the time. But they tended to concentrate on the world, and the distant worlds—or whatever they were—in the sky. The Greeks called it the cosmos, and enquiry centered on how it worked, cosmology, and how it was originally created, cosmogony. As a young man, Socrates engaged in such questioning himself. He inherited a considerable body of knowledge, or as he came to see, pseudo-knowledge. There were, for instance, a group of wise inquirers in Ionian Greece, to the east, especially in Miletus. Such were Thales, active around 580 B.C., over a century before Socrates, his pupil Anaximander, and his pupil Anaximenes. Thales, who was possibly a Hebrew, or Semitic, was later called by Aristotle the founder of the physical sciences. He used the Egyptian system of land measurement to invent the technique of geometry. He was said to have foretold the solar eclipse that occurred during the Battle of the Halys (May 28, 585 B.C.). He was a polymath who drew snatches of exact knowledge from the accumulated wisdom of the Semitic world, but his conjectures were eccentric. He believed, for instance, that magnets have souls. He thought the earth floated on water.
Anaximander wrote the first treatise on the cosmos, which has survived, though only in fragments. He conceived it as a unity, operating under laws, with the moon and the sun moving in cycles. He was the first to draw a map of the earth. He invented the gnomon for astronomic observation. Like Darwin, he believed that man and animals evolved. He answered the question, “If the earth rests on water, what supports the water?” by answering that it was not necessary because it lay at the center and at equal distance from everything, so was held
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