The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
men to dinner, and when Xanthippe was ashamed of their insufficient
appointments, he said, “Be of good cheer; for if our guests are sensible
men, they will bear with us; and if they are not, we need not care about
them.” He used to say, “That other men lived to eat, but that he ate
to live.” Another saying of his was, “That to have a regard for the
worthless multitude, was like the case of a man who refused to take one
piece of money of four drachmas as if it were bad, and then took a heap
of such coins and admitted them to be good.” When Æschines said, “I am a
poor man, and have nothing else, but I give you myself;” “Do you not,” he
replied, “perceive that you are giving me what is of the greatest value?”
He said to some one, who was expressing indignation at being overlooked
when the thirty had seized on the supreme power, “Do you, then, repent of
not being a tyrant too?” A man said to him, “The Athenians have condemned
you to death.” “And nature,” he replied, “has condemned them.” But some
attribute this answer to Anaxagoras. When his wife said to him, “You
die undeservedly.” “Would you, then,” he rejoined, “have had me deserve
death?” He thought once that some one appeared to him in a dream, and
said:—
On the third day you’ll come to lovely Phthia.
And so he said to Æschines, “In three days I shall die.” And when he was
about to drink the hemlock, Apollodorus presented him with a handsome
robe, that he might expire in it; and he said, “Why was my own dress good
enough to live in, and not good enough to die in?” When a person said to
him, “Such an one speaks ill of you;” “To be sure,” said he, “for he has
never learnt to speak well.” When Antisthenes turned the ragged side of
his cloak to the light, he said, “I see your silly vanity through the
holes in your cloak.” When some one said to him, “Does not that man abuse
you?” “No,” said he, “for that does not apply to me.” It was a saying of
his, too, “That it is a good thing for a man to offer himself cheerfully
to the attacks of the comic writers; for then, if they say anything worth
hearing, one will be able to mend; and if they do not, then all they say
is unimportant.”
XVII. He said once to Xanthippe, who first abused him and then threw
water at him, “Did I not say that Xanthippe was thundering now, and
would soon rain?” When Alcibiades said to him, “The abusive temper of
Xanthippe is intolerable;” “But I,” he rejoined, “am used to it, just
as I should be if I were always hearing the noise of a pulley; and you
yourself endure to hear geese cackling.” To which Alcibiades answered,
“Yes, but they bring me eggs and goslings.” “Well,” rejoined Socrates,
“and Xanthippe brings me children.” Once, she attacked him in the
market-place, and tore his cloak off; his friends advised him to keep her
off with his hands; “Yes, by Jove,” said he, “that while we are boxing
you may all cry out, ‘Well done, Socrates, well done, Xanthippe.’” And
he used to say, that one ought to live with a restive woman, just as
horsemen manage violent-tempered horses; “and as they,” said he, “when
they have once mastered them, are easily able to manage all others; so I,
after managing Xanthippe, can easily live with any one else whatever.”
XVIII. And it was in consequence of such sayings and actions as these,
that the priestess at Delphi was witness in his favour, when she gave
Chærephon this answer, which is so universally known:—
Socrates of all mortals is the wisest.
In consequence of which answer, he incurred great envy; and he brought
envy also on himself, by convicting men who gave themselves airs of
folly and ignorance, as undoubtedly he did to Anytus; and as is shown in
Plato’s Meno. For he, not being able to bear Socrates’ jesting, first
of all set Aristophanes to attack him, and then persuaded Meletus to
institute a prosecution against him, on the ground of impiety and of
corrupting the youth of the city. Accordingly Meletus did institute
the prosecution; and Polyeuctus pronounced the sentence, as Phavorinus
records in his Universal History. And Polycrates, the sophist, wrote the
speech which was delivered, as Hermippus says, not Anytus, as others say.
And Lycon, the demagogue, prepared everything necessary to support the
impeachment; but Antisthenes in his Successions of the Philosophers, and
Plato in his Apology, say that these men brought the accusation:—Anytus,
and Lycon, and Meletus; Anytus, acting against him on behalf of the
magistrates, and because of his political principles; Lycon, on behalf
of the orators; and Meletus on behalf of the poets, all of whom Socrates
used to pull to pieces. But Phavorinus, in the first book of his
Commentaries, says, that the speech of Polycrates against Socrates is
not the genuine one; for in it there is mention made of the walls having
been restored by Conon, which took place six years after the death of
Socrates; and certainly this is true.
XIX. But the sworn informations, on which the trial proceeded, were
drawn up in this fashion; for they are preserved to this day, says
Phavorinus, in the temple of Cybele:—“Meletus, the son of Meletus, of
Pithus, impeaches Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, of Alopece: Socrates
is guilty, inasmuch as he does not believe in the Gods whom the city
worships, but introduces other strange deities; he is also guilty,
inasmuch as he corrupts the young men, and the punishment he has incurred
is death.”
XX. But the philosopher, after Lysias had prepared a defence for him,
read it through, and said—“It is a very fine speech, Lysias, but is not
suitable for me; for it was manifestly the speech of a lawyer, rather
than of a philosopher.” And when Lysias replied, “How is it possible,
that if it is a good speech, it should not be suitable to you?” he said,
“Just as fine clothes and handsome shoes would not be suitable to me.”
And when the trial was proceeding, Justus, of Tiberias, in his Garland,
says that Plato ascended the tribune and said, “I, men of Athens, being
the youngest of all those who have mounted the tribune …” and that he
was interrupted by the judges, who cried out καταβάντων, that is to say,
‘Come down.’
XXI. So when he had been condemned by two hundred and eighty-one votes,
being six more than were given in his favour, and when the judges were
making an estimate of what punishment or fine should be inflicted on him,
he said that he ought to be fined five and twenty drachmas; but Eubulides
says that he admitted that he deserved a fine of one hundred. And when
the judges raised an outcry at this proposition, he said, “My real
opinion is, that as a return for what has been done by me, I deserve a
maintenance in the Prytaneum for the rest of my life.” So they condemned
him to death, by eighty votes more than they had originally found him
guilty. And he was put into prison, and a few days afterwards he drank
the hemlock, having held many admirable conversations in the meantime,
which Plato has recorded in the Phædo.
XXII. He also, according to some accounts, composed a pæan which begins—
Hail Apollo, King of Delos,
Hail Diana, Leto’s child.
But Dionysidorus says that this pæan is not his. He also composed a
fable, in the style of Æsop, not very artistically, and it begins—
Æsop one day did this sage counsel give
To the Corinthian magistrates: not to trust
The cause of virtue to the people’s judgement.
XXIII. So he died; but the Athenians immediately repented[22] of their
action, so that they closed all the palæstræ and gymnasia; and they
banished his accusers, and condemned Meletus to death; but they honoured
Socrates with a brazen statue, which they erected in the place where the
sacred vessels are kept; and it was the work of Lysippus. But Anytus had
already left Athens; and the people of Heraclea banished him from that
city the day of his arrival. But Socrates was not the only person who
met with this treatment at the hands of the Athenians, but many other
men received the same: for, as Heraclides says, they fined Homer fifty
drachmas as a madman, and they said that Tyrtæus was out of his wits.
But they honoured Astydamas, before Æschylus, with a brazen statue. And
Euripides reproaches them for their conduct in his Palamedes, saying—
Ye have slain, ye have slain,
O Greeks, the all-wise nightingale,
The favourite of the Muses, guiltless all.
And enough has been said on this head.
But Philochorus says that Euripides died before Socrates; and he was
born, as Apollodorus in his Chronicles asserts, in the archonship of
Apsephion, in the fourth year of the seventy-seventh Olympiad, on the
sixth day of the month Thargelion, when the Athenians purify their city,
and when the citizens of Delos say that Diana was born. And he died in
the first year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, being seventy years of age.
And this is the calculation of Demetrius Phalereus, for some say that he
was but sixty years old when he died.
XXIV. Both he and Euripides were pupils of Anaxagoras; and Euripides was
born in the first year of the seventy-fifth Olympiad, in the archonship
of Calliades. But Socrates appears to me to have also discussed
occasionally subjects of natural philosophy, since he very often disputes
about prudence and foresight, as Xenophon tells us; although he at the
same time asserts that all his conversations were about moral philosophy.
And Plato, in his Apology, mentions the principles of Anaxagoras and
other natural philosophers, which Socrates denies; and he is in reality
expressing his own sentiments about them, though he attributes them all
to Socrates. And Aristotle tells us that a certain one of the Magi came
from Syria to Athens, and blamed Socrates for many parts of his conduct,
and also foretold that he would come to a violent death. And we ourselves
have written this epigram on him—
Drink now, O Socrates, in the realms of Jove,
For truly did the God pronounce you wise,
And he who said so is himself all wisdom:
You drank the poison which your country gave,
But they drank wisdom from your godlike voice.
XXV. He had, as Aristotle tells us in the third book of his Poetics,
a contest with a man of the name of Antiolochus of Lemnos, and with
Antipho, an interpreter of prodigies, as Pythagoras had with Cylon
of Crotona; and Homer while alive with Sagaris, and after his death
with Xenophanes the Colophonian; and Hesiod, too, in his lifetime with
Cercops, and after his death with the same Xenophanes; and Pindar with
Amphimenes of Cos; and Thales with Pherecydes; and Bias with Salarus of
Priene; and Pittacus with Antimenides; and Alcæus and Anaxagoras with
Sosibius; and Simonides with Timocreon.
XXVI. Of those who succeeded him, and who are called the Socratic school,
the chiefs were Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes: and of the ten, as they
are often called, the four most eminent were Æschines, Phædo, Euclides,
and Aristippus. But we must first speak of Xenophon, and after him of
Antisthenes among the Cynics. Then of the Socratic school, and so about
Plato, since he is the chief of the ten sects, and the founder of the
first Academy. And the regular series of them shall proceed in this
manner.
XXVII. There was also another Socrates, a historian, who wrote a
description of Argos; and another, a peripatetic philosopher, a native of
Bithynia; and another a writer of epigrams; and another a native of Cos,
who wrote invocations to the Gods.
LIFE OF XENOPHON.
I. Xenophon, the son of Gryllus, a citizen of Athens, was of the borough
of Erchia; and he was a man of great modesty, and as handsome as can be
imagined.
II. They say that Socrates met him in a narrow lane, and put his stick
across it, and prevented him from passing by, asking him where all kinds