SOCKATES AND THE ATHENIANS. 375 which science was forbidden to pry, were yet accessible to the seekings of the pious man, through oracles, omens, and other excep- tional means of communication which divine benevolence vouch- safed to keep open. Considering thus to how great an extent Socrates was identified in feeling with the religious public of Athens, and considering moreover that his performance of open religious duties was assiduous we might wonder, as Xenophon does wonder, 1 how it could have happened that the Athenian di- kasts mistook him at the end of his life for an irreligious man. But we see, by the defence which Xenophon as well as Plato gives for him, that the Athenian public really considered him, in spite of his own disclaimer, as homogeneous with Anaxagoras and the other physical inquirers, because he had applied similar scientific reasonings to moral and social phaenomena. They look- ed upon him with the same displeasure as he himself felt towards the physical philosophers, and we cannot but admit that in this respect they were more unfortunately consistent than he was. It is true that the mode of defence adopted by Socrates contributed much to the verdict found against him, and that he was further weighed down by private offence given to powerful individuals and professions ; but all these separate antipathies found their best account in swelling the cry against him as an over-curious scep- tic, and an impious innovator. Now the scission thus produced between the superior minds and the multitude, in consequence of the development of science and the scientific point of view, is a fact of great moment in the history of Greek progress, and forms an important contrast be- tween the age of Homer and Hesiod and that of Thucydides ; though in point of fact even the multitude, during this later age, were partially modified by those very scientific views which they regarded with disfavor. And we must keep in view the prim- itive religious faith, once universal and unobstructed, but subse- quently disturbed by the intrusions of science ; we must follow the great change, as well in respect to enlarged intelligence as to refinement of social and ethical feeling, among the Greeks, from the Hesiodic times downward, in order to render some ac- count of the altered manner in which the ancient mythes camo 1 Xenophon, Memorab i. 1
