He was a true patriot, and his devotion to the city in which he had been born and bred was only made the more evident by his conviction that he could best prove it by setting his face reso lutely against the attractions of specious and popular, but deadly, false theories of public and private morality. When the city brought him to trial and threatened him with death his sense of civic duty forbade him to withdraw into exile before the trial, or to accept the opportunity of escape during his unforeseen im prisonment. It was his very patriotism which made him an un sparing critic of the "democracy," which means, in Nietzsche's phrase, "one flock and no shepherd," and so led directly to the accusation which proved fatal to him.
Nothing was more marked in his character than an unusually keen sense of humour, an appreciation of the comic in human nature and conduct which protected him at once against senti mentality and against cynicism. This is what his opponents in Plato call his "irony," and treat as an irritating affectation. "In tellectually the acutest man of his age, he represents himself in all companies as the dullest person present. Morally the purest, he affects to be the slave of passion" (W. H. Thompson). No doubt, in part this irony was "calculated"; it "disarmed ridicule by anticipating it." But its true source is the spontaneous sense of "fun" which makes its possessor the enemy of all pretentious ness, moral or intellectual, in himself and in others. And it is certain that, though the purity of Socrates is beyond question, he really had an ardent and amorous temperament.' Religion.—Socrates was clearly a man of deep piety with the temperament of a "mystic." Like other educated men of his age, he regarded mythology, with its foolish or immoral tales about gods, as a mere invention of the poets. But he found it easy to combine his own strong belief in God, the all-wise and all-good ruler of the world, with the view that in practice we could worship God in the way prescribed by "the usage of the city." God's exis tence is shown, he held, not only by the providential order of nature and the universality of the belief in Him, but by warnings and revelations given in dreams, signs, oracles. The soul of man partakes of the Divine; the concluding pages of Plato's Apology prove that Socrates had a strong belief in its immortality. (Xeno phon for apologetic reasons is silent on the point, but has repro duced the argument in the dying speech of his Cyrus in the Cyropaedia. Aristophanes, too, makes Socrates combine the parts of "infidel" physicist and hierophant of a mysterious private faith, and in the Birds [1553, seq.] represents him as presiding at a
fraudulent séance.) He was regular, says Xenophon, in prayer and sacrifice, though he held that since only the gods know what is good for us, our prayer should simply be "give me what is good"; we must not dictate the form the blessing should take. It is clear from Plato that Socrates was deeply influenced by Pythagorean and Orphic religious ideas, though he regarded the ordinary Orphic mystery-monger with healthy contempt.
Aeschines, Alcibiades Fr. 4 (Krauss), which confirms the repre sentation of Plato on this point.
The evidence that Socrates had a markedly "mystical" tempera ment is abundant. Plato tells of his curious "rapts," in one of which he stood spellbound for 24 hours in the trenches before Potidaea, and there seems to be an allusion to this singularity in the Clouds (17r seq.).
The familiar "Divine sign" tells the same story. This according to Plato, was a "voice" often heard by Socrates from childhood. It forbade him to do things; but never gave positive encourage ment. (Xenophon, who makes more of the matter, says, less probably, that it did give positive directions.) Plato treats the "voice" very lightly ; by his account, it merely gave prognosti cations of good or ill luck, and the occasions of its occurrence were often "very trivial." Thus it was neither an "intuitive conscience," nor a symptom of mental disorder, but an "interior audition," a "psychic phenomenon" of a kind now known to be not specially uncommon.