Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/197

TEACHING OF SOCRATES 173 friends Euclides at Megara, and Phaedo at Elis, seem to have found "in him chiefly dialectic — abstract logic and metaphysics, based on Eleaticism. Two others, ^schines and Apollodorus, found the essence of the man in his external way of life (see p.340). Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynic school, believed that he followed Socrates in proclaiming the equal nulHty of riches, fame, friendship, and everything in the world except Virtue. Virtue was the knowledge of right living ; all other knowledge was worthless, nay, impossible. Equally contemptuous of theoretic knowledge, equally restricted to the purstiit of right living, another Socratic, Aristippus of Cyrend, identified Right Living with the pursuit of every momentary pleasure ; which, again, he held to be the only way of life psychologically possible. If one can attempt to say briefly what side of Socrates was developed by Plato, it was perhaps in part his negative criticism, leading to the scepticism of the later Academics ; and in part his mystical side, the side that was eventually carried to such excess by the Neo-Platonists of the fourth century A.D. Socrates was subject to an auditory hallucination : a Divine Sign used to 'speak' to him in warning when he was about to act amiss. But the most fundamental likeness between Plato and Socrates seems to lie in a different point — in their con- ception of Love. The great link that bound Socrates to his fellows, the secret, perhaps, of the affection and worship with which so many dissimilar men regarded him, was this passionate unsatisfied emotion to which he could give no other name. The Pericleans were Movers' of Athens. Socrates Moved' what he called Beauty or Truth or Goodness ; and, through this far- 13