Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

6 LATER GREEK PHILOSOPHY.
a moral nature, a will and a conscience, which are peerless
in the heathen world. To make men wise was his life-long
endeavour; to destroy the idola, the false ideas of things
which he found them cherishing, and to substitute the true.
The discovery of truth with a view to conduct, so as to make
the individual worth more to himself and to the State, was
the aim of his wonderful dialectic ;
for man was always con
ceived of and treated by him as a member of a community,
a being in relation to his fellow beings, whose line of duty
was marked out by the public life of his day. The condition
of such a career as that of Socrates, with such an aim, was
the existence of a very noble, free, and large public life in
the community which he sought to lead into the ways of
wisdom ;
a life full of energy, purpose and hope.
His country, teeming as it was with brilliant energy and
activity, could not bear his searching uncompromising examin
ation of its ideas, its principles,
and its aims. As befell a
greater than Socrates, it cast him out and slew him. Thence
forth the story of Athens is a story of decline and decay. It
need not be thought that the
ment of God on the martyrdom of her great
I most dread judgments
But as a fact, from the days
decay of Athens was the judg
teacher. God s
are the stern execution of His laws.
of Socrates the course of
Athenian history was one of rapid degradation ;
then followed
the rise of Macedon to supremacy in Greece, the victories
of Alexander, the division of his vast empire among his
generals, and the final extinction of the liberties of Athens,
which lost all political dignity and independence, while
remaining the intellectual centre of the world.
There are few things in history more humiliating than
the life of Athens as a State during the Macedonian era,
tossed about as she was from conqueror to conqueror, and
indulging in slavish adulation of them all. There are pas
sages in Plutarch s Life of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the most