Socrătes
（
Σωκράτης).
1.
An Athenian philosopher, whose teaching revolutionized the whole drift of subsequent
philosophical speculation. He was born in the deme Alopecé, near Athens, B.C. 469.
His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor, and his mother, Phaenareté, was a
midwife. In his youth Socrates for a time followed his father's occupation, and a group of
sculptured Graces, preserved in the Acropolis, was exhibited as his work down to the time of
Pausanias; but there is reason to believe that this arose from a confusion of names. It is
thought by some that the relief of draped Graces in the Museo Chiaramonte in Rome represents
the Athenian group, in which case it must have belonged to an earlier period of art than the
century in which Socrates lived.
The personal qualities of Socrates were marked, and such as would readily attract
attention. He enjoyed vigorous health, and was so robust as to be capable of enduring fatigue
and hardship to a degree that astonished all who knew him. He went barefooted at all seasons
of the year; and this not merely at Athens, but when serving as a soldier in the much colder
climate of Thrace; and he wore the same clothing in winter as in summer. His features were of
remarkable ugliness; and his flat nose, thick lips, and bulging eyes led to his being
compared to a satyr.
As to the particulars of his life, there is no connected account. It is known that he
served as a heavy-armed soldier at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis; but he seems not to have
filled any public office until B.C. 406, when he was a member of the Senate of Five Hundred,
and as such refused, in spite of all personal risk, to put an unconstitutional question to
vote. He displayed the same moral courage in refusing to obey the order of the Thirty Tyrants
for the arrest of Leon of Salamis.
From the period of his middle life, at any rate, he devoted his time wholly to the
self-imposed task of teaching, giving up all other business, both public and private, and
neglecting all means of acquiring a fortune. It was probably his remissness in this respect
which was responsible for the ill-temper and fretfulness of his wife Xanthippé,
whose name has passed into all modern tongues as the type of a shrew. Socrates never opened a
school and never lectured publicly, nor did he receive any money for his teaching, but went
about in the most public parts of the city, such as the
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Socrates. (Vatican.)
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market-place, the gymnasia, and the work-shops, seeking opportunities for awakening
in the young and old alike moral consciousness and an impulse towards self-knowledge with
respect to the end and value of human action. His object, however, was only to aid those with
whom he talked in developing such germs of knowledge as were already present in them, and not
to communicate to them dogmatically
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So-called Prison of Socrates at Athens.
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any knowledge of his own. He was especially severe upon false pretences and
intellectual conceit; and, consequently, to many persons he became exceedingly obnoxious, and
was the object of much dislike and misrepresentation. This is probably the reason why
Aristophanes, in
The Clouds, selected Socrates as the type of men engaged in
philosophical and rhetorical teaching; the more so, as his grotesque physiognomy admitted so
well of being imitated in the mask which the actor wore. The audience at the theatre would
more readily recognize the peculiar figure which they were accustomed to see every day in the
market-place than if Prodicus or Protagoras, whom most of them did not know by sight, had
been brought on the stage; nor was it of much importance either to them or to Aristophanes
whether Socrates was represented as teaching what he did really teach, or something utterly
different.
Attached to none of the prevailing parties, Socrates found in each of them his friends and
his enemies. Hated and persecuted by Critias , Charicles, and others among the Thirty
Tyrants, who had a special reference to him in the decree which they issued, forbidding the
teaching of the art of oratory, he was impeached after their banishment and by their
opponents. An orator named Lycon, and a poet (a friend of Thrasybulus) named Meletus, had
united in the impeachment with the powerful demagogue Anytus, an embittered antagonist of the
Sophists and their system, and one of the leaders of the band which, setting out from
Phylé, forced their way into the Piraeus, and drove out the Thirty Tyrants. The
judges also are described as persons who had been banished, and who had returned with
Thrasybulus. The chief articles of impeachment were that Socrates was guilty of
corrupting the youth and of despising the tutelary deities of the State, putting in their
place other new divinities. At the same time it had been made a matter of accusation against
him that Critias , the most ruthless of the Tyrants, had come forth from his school. Some
expressions of his, in which he had found fault with the democratic mode of electing by lot,
had also been brought up against him; and there can be little doubt that use was made of his
friendly relations with Theramenes, one of the most influential of the Thirty, with Plato's
uncle Charmides, who fell by the side of Critias in the struggle with the popular party, and
with other aristocrats, in order to irritate against him the party which at that time was
dominant. The substance of the speech which Socrates delivered in his defence is probably
preserved by Plato in the discourse which goes under the name of the “Apology of
Socrates.” Being condemned by a majority of only six votes, he expresses the
conviction that he deserved to be maintained at the public cost in the Prytaneum, and refuses
to acquiesce in the adjudication of imprisonment or a large fine or banishment. He will
assent to nothing more than a fine of sixty minae, on the security of Plato, Crito , and
other friends. Condemned to death by the judges, who were incensed by this speech, by a
majority of eighty votes, he departs from them with the protestation that he would rather die
after such a defence than live after one in which he should have endeavoured to excite their
pity. The sentence of death could not be carried into execution until after the return of the
vessel which had been sent to Delos on the periodical Theoric mission. The thirty days which
intervened between its return and the condemnation of Socrates were devoted by him in prison
to poetic attempts (the first he had made in his life) and to his usual conversation with his
friends. One of these conversations, on the duty of obedience to the laws, Plato has reported
in the
Crito, so called after the faithful follower of Socrates, who had
endeavoured without success to persuade him to make his escape. In another, imitated or
worked up by Plato in the
Phaedo, Socrates immediately before he drank the cup
of hemlock developed the grounds of his immovable conviction of the immortality of the soul.
He died with composure and cheerfulness in his seventieth year, B.C. 399.
Three peculiarities distinguished Socrates: (
a) His long life passed
in contented poverty and in public dialectics, of which we have already spoken. (
b) His persuasion of a special religious mission. He had been accustomed
constantly to hear, even from his childhood, a divine voice— interfering, at
moments when he was about to act, in the way of restraint, but never in the way of
instigation. Such prohibitory warning was wont to come upon him very frequently, not merely
on great but even on small occasions, intercepting what he was about to do or to say. Though
later writers speak of this as the Daemon or Genius of Socrates, he himself did not personify
it, but treated it merely as a “divine sign, a prophetic or supernatural
voice.” He was accustomed not only to obey it implicitly, but to speak of it
publicly and familiarly to others, so that the fact was well known both to his friends and to
his enemies. See a paper by H. Jackson in the English
Journal of
Philology, vol. v., and
Freymüller, De Socratis
Daemonio (1864). (
c) His great intellectual
originality, both of subject and of method, and his power of stirring and forcing the germ of
inquiry and ratiocination in others. He was the first who turned his thoughts and discussions
distinctly to the subject of ethics, and was the first to proclaim that “the proper
study of mankind is man.” With the philosophers who preceded him, the subject of
examination had been Nature, or the Cosmos as one undistinguishable whole, blending together
cosmogony, astronomy, geometry, physics, metaphysics, etc. In discussing ethical subjects
Socrates employed the dialectic method, and thus laid the foundation of formal logic, which
was afterwards expanded by Plato and systematized by Aristotle.
The originality of Socrates is shown by the results he achieved. Out of his intellectual
school sprang not merely Plato, himself a host, but all the other leaders of Grecian
speculation for the next half century, and all those who continued the great line of
speculative philosophy down to later times. Euclid and the Megaric School of
philosophers—Aristippus and the Cyrenaic Antisthenes and Diogenes, the first of
those called the Cynics—all emanated more or less directly from the stimulus
imparted by Socrates, and so, for that matter, did the Stoics and Epicureans, though each
followed a different vein of thought. Ethics continued to be what Socrates had first made
them —a distinct branch of philosophy—alongside of which politics,
rhetoric, logic, and other speculations relating to man and society gradually arranged
themselves; all of them more popular, as well as more keenly controverted, than physics,
which at that time presented comparatively little charm, and still less of attainable
certainty. There can be no doubt that the individual influence of Socrates permanently
enlarged the horizon, improved the method, and multiplied the ascendant minds, of the Grecian
speculative world, in a manner never since paralleled. Subsequent philosophers had a more
elaborate doctrine and a larger number of disciples who imbibed their ideas; but none of them
applied the same stimulating method with the same efficacy, and none of them so struck out of
other minds that fire which sets light to original thought.
See Zeller,
Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Engl. trans.
(1877);
Alberti, Sokrates (1869);
Bertram,
Der Sokrates d. Xenoph. und Aristoph. (1865);
Carran, La
Sophistique de Socrate (1886);
Guttmann, Ueber den
wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt des Sokrates (1881). The best ancient sources
are Xenophon's
Memorabilia and
Symposium, with Plato's
Crito, Symposium, Apologia, and
Phaedo. See
Philosophia.
2.
An ecclesiastical historian, born at Constantinople about A.D. 379. He was a pupil of
Ammonius and Helladius, and followed the profession of an advocate in his native city, whence
he is surnamed Scholasticus. The
Ecclesiastical History (
Ἐκκλησιαστικὴ Ἱστορία) of Socrates extends from the reign of Constantine
the Great, 306, to that of the younger Theodosius, 439. He appears to have been a man of less
bigotry than most of his contemporaries, and the very difficulty of determining from internal
evidence some points of his religious belief may be considered as arguing his comparative
liberality. His history is divided into seven books. His work is edited by Hussey
(1853) and Bright, with an introduction
(1878); and is translated
into English in Schaff's Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d series, vol. ii.
(New York, 1891).
