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

Pericles’ panegyric over the dead that human beings were not the helpless victims of fate but masters of their own destiny. The soldiers had died defending Athens, which was the supreme human artifact. Then, being more explicit, he said Athens was the one society where justice applied equally to all, where men might not be equal but where social differences did not stop anyone getting to the top if he had enough ability. All Athenians voluntarily submitted to law and government, which they ultimately controlled, and this included fighting to defend it and, if necessary, dying, as these soldiers had done.
    Athens was thus a disciplined, indeed a self-disciplined society, but its discipline was balanced by intellectual freedom. Society was open, the exercise of power transparent—there was no secrecy by authority and so no suspicion among those who freely submitted to it. Hence Athenian society was a model to other Greeks—“the School of Hellas”—and if it controlled other cities, it did so on its merits, and its subjects had no reason to complain of its rule any more than the soldiers who died to preserve it. This remarkable speech was faithfully recorded by Thucydides (who no doubt embellished and polished it), and it gave Socrates much food for thought as it raised so many issues on which he had strong opinions of his own, as we shall see. Not least, it illustrated the distinction he drew between oratory, which sought to persuade, and philosophy, which sought truth. That Pericles was persuasive was abundantly evident. But was what he said true?
    The question was all the more important in that Pericles, in proclaiming his grandiose visions of Athenian humanism, was not alone. He was leader of a pleiad, a cluster of stars, gifted men of all kinds united by their high opinion of human capacity. They included the elderly Aeschylus, who died in 456 B.C., five years after Pericles swept to power, but whose Prometheus Bound , his last, unfinished play, tells the story of the mythical figure punished by Zeus for giving mankind fire and the arts. Prometheus is presented as the champion of the oppressed and a highly independent thinker, and this grand play, enormously exciting for Socrates—whose sympathies were strongly for and against its protagonist—was often revived in his lifetime. Also in the humanist circle was Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) who, though a quarter century older than Socrates, was known to him all his life and whose Antigone (441 B.C.), a desperate tragedy of cruelty, suicide, and despair, shows humans at their noblest and is a hymn to man and woman. It was so successful that Pericles put the playwright on his ticket when he next stood as strategos , and Sophocles was elected general in 440 B.C., the first of many public services he rendered in the intervals between his writing.
    The most important of the pleiad, both in Pericles’ eyes and in the view of Athens generally, was Protagoras (485–415 B.C.), who came from Abdera in Thrace but who made Periclean Athens his headquarters and taught there as a sophist from 455 B.C. He was the chief theorist and articulator of the Periclean doctrine of anthropocentrism and is quoted by Plato in his Theaetetus as laying down the maxim “Man is the measure of all things.” His books, On Truth and On the Gods , have not survived, but the second came as close to atheism as was possible in ancient Greece. He was quoted as saying, “As for the gods I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not. Or what they are like in form. Many things prevent us knowing about them, including the sheer difficulty of the subject, and the brevity of human life.” Socrates, like most Athenians, was not happy about that or about the fact that Protagoras taught arete, or virtue, to young men of rich or noble families, and taught it in a worldly way, as the means to “get on.” He also charged high fees and became rich. Inevitably Protagoras and Socrates came to verbal blows in