will show how in the Greek State the details of individual conduct also are exhaustively mapped out. In his ideal State citizens dine in public, are restricted in regard to the age of marriage, and have their whole existence arranged for them. Yet the Greek City did indeed teem with sceptical philosophies and burned with the zeal of the scientific spirit, which vented itself in keen intellectual discussion. Such disputations were, however, for the most part academic and were regarded rather as exercises in dialectic. When, however, Socrates tried to bring philosophy down to earth and set up an individual standard of conduct, he could no longer be tolerated.
Mr Gilbert Murray in his "History of Greek Literature" puts forward the theory that the accuser of Socrates had probably a genuine grievance, since the son of the accuser, intellectually emancipated from the old sanctions of conduct, had not constructed new sanctions for himself. Such risks few parents will approve, and least of all would an Athenian father have done so. But the main issue of the trial was that no citizen should be allowed to stand apart from the State or criticise the ethics of the State, which were entirely bound up with the State religion.[1]
- ↑ " Greek democracies could never pardon the introduction of new gods. Their objection to this was not, however, that the gods in question were false gods. If they had been so, it would not have mattered so much. What they could not tolerate was
