Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day: A Biographical Sketch

Alfred Denis Godley (1856–1925) was an English classical scholar.

Mr. Godley, in a style unusually readable, passes in review the general life of Socrates, touching upon his place in history, his direct relation to the Sophists, his influence upon the young, his electric effect upon the public, the attack made upon him by Aristophanes, and, finally, his condemnation by the Athenian judges. From this sketch he excludes, as far as possible, an examination of philosophic views, saying that while, in the case of Socrates, " it is especially difficult to separate the philosopher from the man," yet the passages chosen "are generally such as bear comparatively little reference to the speculative sides of Socrates' teaching." These extracts from Plato and Aristophanes read so well that any further translations from Mr. Godley's pen would be cordially welcomed. Indeed, his whole style is singularly fresh and pleasant, although once or twice it is not perfectly successful. "Euthydemus is quite unmoved," writes the author, '' and calmly proceeds to enmesh Ctesippus himself in subtleties, till the young man is provoked to retort by actual rudeness, much in the language of the stupid child to the infant prodigy, 'I can't play the piano, and I can't speak French, but I can punch your head !'" When the object is to initiate the reader into Plato's delicate but irresistible humor, it is well to let the philosopher speak as far as possible for himself.

With regard to the Sophists, Mr. Godley does well to emphasize a point which is still not universally recognized. He draws a distinction between the better Sophists, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, and the worse teachers, such as Euthydemus and Thrasymachus, and is right in insisting that Plato, while criticising the latter unsparingly, recognizes the relative merit of the others. Mr. Godley, by showing this distinction between the earlier Sophists and their short-sighted successors to be found in Plato himself, removes the ground of the 'German criticism' directed indiscriminately against the whole class, and implied in the naive remark that " Prodicus is the most innocent of the Sophists."

But these points of value in Mr. Godley's work do not obscure some decided blemishes. No treatment of the character of Protagoras can be complete, if the dialogues Meno and Theaetetus are ignored. It is true that Plato has no intention of besmirching the conduct of the great Sophist; quite the contrary. Yet, when Mr. Godley asserts that Plato did not seriously wish to dethrone Protagoras, he misses the aim of Plato's mature criticism of the saying of Protagoras, that man is a measure of all things. This defect is due to a false abstraction of the man Protagoras from his teaching.

So, also, when there arises the interesting question of the value of the attack made by Aristophanes upon Socrates and his 'Thinking-Shop,' Mr. Godley, again separating the men from their teaching, leaves us transfixed upon the horns of a dilemma: "The great comedian must have recognized the cruel injustice of associating Socrates with the influence of the Unjust Reason." "Nor can it be denied that Aristophanes' position had a certain basis of reasonableness." Any attempt to get behind this contradiction would lead off into the forbidden path of speculation. The result is that the author makes no effort to settle our minds with regard to the real problems of the age. Such an effort would not have involved long criticisms of Greek ideas from some so-called modern standpoint. But it is surely vain to seek to make Socrates alive again, if we consistently refuse to probe his mind in order to see what he really was, and why these Greek ideas were by him thought to be his daily bread.

This book originally published in 1896 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.