The Socratics.—The thought of Socrates has, in the main, been made fruitful for subsequent ages by being taken up and con tinued in the life-work of Plato. A more temporary influence was exercised by certain other members of the group of Socratic men whom it has become customary to speak of as the "minor" Socratics. The most important of them are Antisthenes of Athens and Eucleides of Megara, with whom the Cynics and Megarians of the 4th and early 3rd centuries are historically connected. With them it is usual also to mention Aristippus of Cyrene, often still spoken of as somehow connected with the Cyrenaic school of the early 3rd century.
It is probable, however, that the current accounts exaggerate the closeness of the connection between these men and the later schools. Aristippus of Cyrene figures in Xenophon's Memorabilia Simply as a luxurious and refined man of the world who makes it his rule of life to extract personal enjoyment from existence, sitting loose to all attachments which might interfere with his ease and not allowing himself to take root anywhere. The later anecdotes about him bear out this representation. There is no good evidence that he had a philosophy or originated a school. Aristotle ascribes no doctrine to him and never mentions a "Cyrenaic" school of Hedonists, though he could hardly have avoided doing so in his discussions of Hedonism in the Nico machean Ethics if he had known of one. Plutarch expressly describes the Cyrenaics as contemporaries of Epicurus, and all the names of members of the school known to us belong to the time of the successors of Alexander the Great. The one point of doctrine common to them appears to have been that they rejected the notion of a good more permanent than the pleasure of the moment. The supposed connection of Aristippus with them seems to be based on a confusion with his grandson of the same name, who, according to Eusebius, reduced his grandfather's practice to theory.
Eucleides of Megara was a friend both of Socrates and of Plato, who temporarily took refuge with him after the death of Socrates, and, at a later date, dedicated the Theaetetus to him. All we know of his teaching is that he held to the Monism of Parmenides, maintaining that nothing is real except "the One," which is also called "wisdom" "intellect" (vas) and "God" (D.L., ii. 106). The mention of "wisdom" as a synonym for "the One" seems to reveal the influence of Socrates. Most of our notices of Megarians deal with men of a later time, Eubulides, a contemporary of Aristotle, Diodorus Cronus and Stilpo. These men were pugnacious formal logicians famous for their rejection of the notion of "possibility" which is so fundamental in the Aristotelian philosophy. According to them, nothing is possible except the actual. Aristotle resented the criticism so keenly that "sophist" in his terminology appears to be regularly equivalent to "Megarian logician." It is not clear how these are con nected with the Monism of Eucleides. There are reasons for sup posing the puzzling antinomies of Plato's Parmenides to be a parody of Megarian logic, and it is a view which has been widely accepted in recent times that they are also meant in Plato's Sophistes by the "friends of Forms" who are there contrasted with the materialists and said to maintain that reality consists of a mul titude of "incorporal Forms" which can only be apprehended by thought. This identification is, however, uncertain (and, in the
present writer's opinion, mistaken).
Antisthenes was a friend of Socrates of long standing, with a marked individuality of his own, and a voluminous writer much admired for his style. He does not appear to have been a "disci ple," though he was personally attached to Socrates, and particu larly admired his strength of will and mastery of his passions. In philosophy he is chiefly known for two things, his denial of the possibility of making judgments in which the predicate and sub ject terms are non-identical, and his insistence in ethics on the simplification of life by the reduction of our wants to an indis pensable minimum. In virtue of the latter he was commonly re garded as the founder of Cynicism and it is certain that he personally influenced the famous Diogenes and that the later Cynics were in the habit of regarding him as a model man. But it is not clear either that the Cynics of the 4th century were a "sect" or "school" in any real sense of the words, or that the nick name "dog" was ever given to anyone before Diogenes. It was believed in later antiquity that there was a personal feud be tween Antisthenes and Plato, and it seems certain that one of the works of Antisthenes, called Sathon, was a virulent personal attack on Plato. But the ingenuity spent in the 19th century on discovering polemical allusions to Antisthenes in Plato's dialogues seems to have been mostly wasted. According to Plato, the logical paradox that "contradiction is impossible" was maintained by numerous persons in the days of Socrates. Hence it seems un reasonable to detect special allusions to Antisthenes in the fre quent references to this paradox in the dialogues.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The following may be specially mentioned among recent works: J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato (1914), Plato's Phaedo (19"), Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito (1924), Early Greek Philosophy (3rd ed., 192o), The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul in Proceedings of the British Academy (1915 16) ; A. E. Taylor, Varia Socratica (i9ii), The Platonic Biography of Socrates, in Proceedings of the British Academy (1916-17), Plato, the Man and his Work (1926) ; A. Dies, Autour de Platon (Paris, 1927) ; K. Joel, Der echte und der Xenophontische Sokrates (1893-1901) ; H. von Arnim, Xenophons Memorabilia und Apologie des Sokrates (Copenhagen, 1923) ; H. Maier, Sokrates, sein Werk und seine ge schichtliche Stellung (Tubingen, 1913) ; U. von Wilamowitz-Moellen dorf, Platon, vol. i. (1919) ; A. Busse, Sokrates (19i4) ; I. Bruns, Das literarische Portriit in Altertum (1896) ; T. Gomperz, Griechische Denker, vol. ii. (Leipzig, 5902 ; Eng. trans. Greek Thinkers, 1901-12) ; G. Zuccante, Socrate (Turin, 1909). Among earlier works, besides the standard histories of ancient philosophy, which, however, need revision in all that relates to Socrates, see particularly G. Grote, History of Greece, ch. lxviii. (last ed. i9o7), and Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates (last ed. 1885) ; W. H. Thompson, The Phaedrus of Plato (1868), Appendix I.