A History of Freedom of Thought | Page 7

sun, to which the ordinary Athenian said
prayers morning and evening, was a mass of flaming matter. The
influence of Pericles saved him from death; he was heavily fined and
left Athens for Lampsacus, where he was treated with consideration
and honour.
Other cases are recorded which show that anti-religious thought was
liable to be persecuted. Protagoras, one of the greatest of the Sophists,
published a book On the Gods, the object of which seems to have been
to prove that one cannot know the gods by reason. The first words ran:

“Concerning the gods, I cannot say that they exist nor yet that they do
not exist. There are more reasons than one why we cannot know. There
is the obscurity of the subject and there is the brevity of human life.” A
charge of blasphemy was lodged against him and he fled from Athens.
But there was no systematic policy of suppressing free thought. Copies
of the work of Protagoras were collected and
[29] burned, but the book of Anaxagoras setting forth the views for
which he had been condemned was for sale on the Athenian book-stalls
at a popular price. Rationalistic ideas moreover were venturing to
appear on the stage, though the dramatic performances, at the feasts of
the god Dionysus, were religious solemnities. The poet Euripides was
saturated with modern speculation, and, while different opinions may
be held as to the tendencies of some of his tragedies, he often allows
his characters to express highly unorthodox views. He was prosecuted
for impiety by a popular politician. We may suspect that during the last
thirty years of the fifth century unorthodoxy spread considerably
among the educated classes. There was a large enough section of
influential rationalists to render impossible any organized repression of
liberty, and the chief evil of the blasphemy law was that it could be
used for personal or party reasons. Some of the prosecutions, about
which we know, were certainly due to such motives, others may have
been prompted by genuine bigotry and by the fear lest sceptical thought
should extend beyond the highly educated and leisured class. It was a
generally accepted principle among the Greeks, and afterwards among
the Romans, that religion was a good and necessary thing
[30] for the common people. Men who did not believe in its truth
believed in its usefulness as a political institution, and as a rule
philosophers did not seek to diffuse disturbing “truth” among the
masses. It was the custom, much more than at the present day, for those
who did not believe in the established cults to conform to them
externally. Popular higher education was not an article in the
programme of Greek statesmen or thinkers. And perhaps it may be
argued that in the circumstances of the ancient world it would have
been hardly practicable.

There was, however, one illustrious Athenian, who thought
differently—Socrates, the philosopher. Socrates was the greatest of the
educationalists, but unlike the others he taught gratuitously, though he
was a poor man. His teaching always took the form of discussion; the
discussion often ended in no positive result, but had the effect of
showing that some received opinion was untenable and that truth is
difficult to ascertain. He had indeed certain definite views about
knowledge and virtue, which are of the highest importance in the
history of philosophy, but for our present purpose his significance lies
in his enthusiasm for discussion and criticism. He taught those with
whom he conversed—and he conversed indiscriminately
[31] with all who would listen to him—to bring all popular beliefs
before the bar of reason, to approach every inquiry with an open mind,
and not to judge by the opinion of majorities or the dictate of authority;
in short to seek for other tests of the truth of an opinion than the fact
that it is held by a great many people. Among his disciples were all the
young men who were to become the leading philosophers of the next
generation and some who played prominent parts in Athenian history.
If the Athenians had had a daily press, Socrates would have been
denounced by the journalists as a dangerous person. They had a comic
drama, which constantly held up to ridicule philosophers and sophists
and their vain doctrines. We possess one play (the Clouds of
Aristophanes) in which Socrates is pilloried as a typical representative
of impious and destructive speculations. Apart from annoyances of this
kind, Socrates reached old age, pursuing the task of instructing his
fellow-citizens, without any evil befalling him. Then, at the age of
seventy, he was prosecuted as an atheist and corrupter of youth and was
put to death (399 B.C.). It is strange that if the Athenians really thought
him dangerous they should have suffered him so long. There can,