Socrates: A Man for Our Times Read Online Free Page B

Athenian. All the more so in that Athens was going through the most glorious, exciting, and dangerous phase in its history. Let us look more closely at this remarkable city.

III
    Socrates and the Climax of Athenian Optimism
    S ocrates often reminds one of Sir Thomas More, combining as he did absolute rectitude with puckish humor and a patriotism qualified only by his profound sense of religious duty. More said, “I serve the king—but God first.” Socrates said, “Athenians, I cherish and love you. But I shall obey God rather than you.” It was Socrates’ good fortune that he came to maturity when Athens, which had successfully brought the whole of Greece to overwhelming victory against the mighty Persian Empire, was reaching its splendid but lonely apogee. There are such rare moments in history. In 1940 Churchill told the British—I heard him say it—“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
    Greece, in the mid-fifth century B.C., like Britain in 1940, had a leader who embodied everything it seemed to stand for, and who articulated its message to all the world and to posterity. Pericles (495–429 B.C.) was arguably the greatest statesman of antiquity. He was son of Xanthippus, who had plunged up and down the roller-coaster of Athenian politics at the time, round the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., when Cleisthenes had founded Athenian democracy. Agariste, Pericles’ mother, was the great man’s niece, and he aspired to complete his great-uncle’s work by perfecting the city’s democratic system. The victory over Persia filled Athens, and Pericles in particular, with a spirit of optimism that he put to practical use by devising immense schemes of progress. He was rich, and we first hear of him as a theatrical angel, or choregus, financing Aeschylus’ stupendous tragedy Persae , commenting on the Athenian victory, produced in 472 B.C., two years before Socrates’ birth. Ten years later, he was elected chief magistrate and continued to be so for a generation. It was Pericles’ gift to transmute Athenian optimism into a spirit of constructive energy and practical dynamism that swept through this city like a controlled whirlwind. Pericles believed that Athenians were capable of turning their brains and hands to anything of which human ingenuity was capable—running a city and an empire, soldiering, naval warfare, founding a colony, drama, sculpture, painting, music, law, philosophy, poetry, oratory, education, science—and do it better than anyone else. Do it, moreover, in a mood of joyful freedom.
    It was Pericles’ good fortune not only to come to power at exactly the right time, but to be attended by a passionate admirer who was also a writer and historian of genius. Thucydides was born in 460 B.C., making him ten years younger than Socrates but to all intents his contemporary, who died in the same year. He was the perfect historian: He saw events more accurately and objectively, inquired more pertinaciously, and recorded them more truthfully than any other historian of antiquity. But he also felt himself involved, had strong opinions, and worshipped Pericles—as Plato worshipped Socrates a generation later—because he, too, loved energy and the dynamism it makes possible. Whereas Churchill wrote his own history, Pericles—who might have done so—was cut short by the plague. But he had Thucydides to do it for him. Perhaps its highest point was the funeral oration Pericles was appointed by Athens to pronounce over his dead soldiers after the first year of the Peloponnesian War. This was a grand and solemn occasion, attended by the elite and the populace of the city. Socrates was certainly there, alongside the dramatic poets Sophocles and Euripides, the architect-sculptor Phidias, and the painter Zeuxis.
    It was the underlying theme of