ABSTRACT
From these reformers we now may turn to study the great figure of Socrates. Unlike the thinkers with whom we have hitherto been concerned, who were all foreigners who had settled in Athens because Athens was practically the metropolis of Greece, Socrates was a full Athenian citizen. 1 He was born about 470, and met his death in 399; his youth was thus passed in the great Periclean age, and his declining years among the troubles of the Peloponnesian War. He took a full share in the ordinary civic duties of the day. He fought as a hoplite, or heavy-armed soldier, in the Athenian campaigns in Thrace, and he was again engaged in 424, when his steady behaviour won him admiration, at the battle of Delium. At the age of sixty-five he became a member of the Council; and he was a member of the Committee of Council which was presiding in the Assembly on the day on which nine of the Athenian generals were condemned in a body, by a single vote, for their failure to rescue drowning sailors at the naval battle of Arginusae (405). Such a condemnation en masse was contrary to a rule of the constitution, and Socrates, alone among all the members of the Committee, refused to concur in putting to the Assembly such an unconstitutional vote. 2 A year later, when the Thirty Tyrants were exercising a reign of terror in Athens, he was ordered, with four other citizens, to arrest and bring for execution a citizen whom they had proscribed; and once more he refused to concur in what he regarded as an illegal order. A steady discharge of civic duty, and a steady refusal to go outside the bounds of civic law, are thus the two features which mark his life as an Athenian citizen.
