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Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day (1896)
Socrates and Athenian Society in His Day - 1896 Author:Alfred Denis Godley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SOCRATES IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES : THE SOPHISTS FOR the impression produced by Socrates on his contemporaries as a great and remarkable personage, th... more »ere are three authorities, one of supreme, and two of secondary importance—Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. It is more especially in Plato's dialogues that the only Socrates with whom we have any concern is revealed—that is, Socrates the conversationalist, the talker par excellence among a people of talkers. If he plays but a small part in history—so far as history is the chronicle of wars and political changes— he must evidently have been intimately connected with the social and intellectual development of Athens. That city was then, as she was five centuries later, always eager to hear or tell of some new thing. It was a period of intellectual awakening, when, as in the Elizabethan and in our own era, new ideas and new discoveries (discovcrics then, at least, of untrodden continents of the intellect) were daily widening the field of discussion. The vehicle of criticism was not writing but conversation ; wit encountered wit in actual speech. And several causes operated to make Athens beyond all Greek towns a conversational centre. Her political importance as well as her theatrical exhibitions brought crowds of strangers from all parts of Greece, the Aegean, nay from the western outposts of Hellenic civilisation—from Sicily itself and the Greek towns of Southern Italy. Even the hardships of the Peloponnesian War had their effect in this direction, as the fear of the Peloponnesian raiders more and more centralised Attic life within the walls of the metropolis of Attica. So in Athens the most diverse elements might find a meeting-place: country gentlemen driven from their estates by the terror of invading armies; island...« less