SOCRATES, PLATO, AND THE
ROMAN STOICS
By Professor Charles Pomeroy Parker
WHEN Socrates grew up in the city of Athens, in the generation just after the Persian Wars, any Athenian citizen, however poor he might be, was at liberty to arrange his own life as he wished. Socrates made up his mind that moneymaking was not worth while, in comparison with the liberty to spend his time in thinking about truth. There was a great deal of lively thinking in the Greek world then, and Athens, under Pericles,[1] not only was winning her empire, but was finding that great thinkers, or at any rate their thoughts, loved to come to her. Pythagorean philosophers were wide awake in those days. They were discovering truth about the art of healing, they spent much successful work on astronomy, they were making progress in music, they studied mathematics, especially geometry. Many philosophers of other schools were studying fire, air, water, and earth, claiming that they changed into each other, as we say solids melt into liquids, and liquids dissolve into gases, and as some thinkers suppose that gas atoms are made up of electric units. Others were impressed by the great expanse of the sky, and said that the only way to find truth was to think of the universe as a great unchanging sphere. Others, again, held a doctrine of atoms, tiny invisible shapes of hard matter, which by combining or separating made the changing world.
SOCRATES AND ANAXAGORAS
Socrates, eagerly studying all these theories, heard at last of a philosopher, Anaxagoras, who said that Thought makes the world; but Anaxagoras did not seem to him to show the rational way in which Thought would work. Rational Thought, as Socrates viewed
- ↑ Harvard Classics, xii, 35ff.
