Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in North Africa. His pagan father was Patricius and his Christian mother was Monica. Through the generosity of a rich man of his town, he was able to go to Carthage in 370 to study. It was there in 371 he took a mistress and in 372 his son was born. He found Carthage attractive in all kinds of ways. Here he could study, here he could enjoy himself. Here at the age of eighteen the first great point in his intellectual life was reached. While reading a dialogue of Cicero he was inspired with a love of truth. He writes, ‘Every vain hope at once became worthless to me and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise that I might return to thee.’ The journey of the prodigal to the father's house was to take many years yet; but the intellectual fire never left Augustine and it was his mind as much as his heart that brought him home to God. He found the Bible barbaric and incomprehensible after the literature of the schools. He joined the Manichees because they were always talking about truth and their dualism made some sense of the problem of evil; but he never went far in their religion and remained an ‘auditor’ for nine years. He returned home in 373 and became a teacher in Thagaste. The following year he returned to Carthage where he remained until 383, when he left for Rome with hopes of high appointment and more agreeable students.

Even if we like diversity, the task of sketching New Testament ethics at first seems formidable. As well as variety of expression there is variety of setting. Every part of the New Testament must be understood against its historical background and the framework of the book in which it is found. We cannot take statements of Matthew and blend them with verses of the Apocalypse. One work is written in the face of the challenge of Judaism redivivus and the other in the face of Nero redivivus. There is a difference of style but that is the smallest thing. The same could be said about the differences between the three Synoptics, Matthew's new law, Mark's mysterious son of man and Luke's world church, even before we move on to the Fourth Gospel with its lord of glory and its community under the word. However, ethical patterns can guide us through this diversity. ‘What then does the New Testament effectively provide, in ethics as in doctrine? It yields certain perspectives, patterns and priorities and it forms the Christian mind which then turns to the examination of contemporary issues.’ The four main patterns are righteousness (or justice), discipleship, faith and love. We glimpse their New Testament outlines before considering their later development.

RIGHTEOUSNESS

Righteousness dominates two parts of the New Testament–the Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel according to Matthew.

Clement had already wandered far, when he came to Alexandria, looking for knowledge. He found the teacher he wanted in Pantaenus, a converted Stoic. After nearly thirty years in Alexandria, he left during the persecution of 202; this is probably the reason why his successor, Origen, who had strong ideas on martyrdom, never mentions him. We hear of him again in two letters written in 212 and 215. The first letter confirms his survival until 212. The second letter establishes his death prior to 215 for it speaks of him as one of ‘those blessed fathers who have gone before us’. His three main writings Protrepticus (Exhortation), Paedagogus (Instructor) and Stromateis (Miscellanies) form a progressive account of Christian knowledge. The Exhortation calls men to faith and salvation. The Instructor guides the believer to a Christian life. The Miscellanies present ‘gnostic notes concerning the true philosophy’, and have been the subject of much controversy. It seems likely that they represent the highest stage of Christian knowledge for their disordered contents are rich in thought and insight. They show the Christian philosopher or teacher as the ideal which determines Clement's own approach to life and morals. Clement discredits the gnostic heresy by putting forward a true form of gnosis.

Christianity did not come to terms with classical thought gradually. As with Judaism the decisive steps were taken quickly. During the second century the problems of converted intellectuals, of pagan ridicule and philosophic attack combined to make Christians insecure.

Basil was born in Caesarea of Cappadocia about 330 of rich but honest parents. His father was a teacher of rhetoric, a lawyer and a wealthy land-owner. One of his grandfathers had died a martyr. The piety and devotion of Basil's mother was reflected in her children, three of whom became bishops, one a nun and another a monk. Three of these children were canonised. After careful training at home, he studied rhetoric and philosophy in Caesarea and Constantinople. In 351 he went to Athens where for five years he took advantage of its rich intellectual life. He returned to Caesarea as a professor of rhetoric for two years, and then turned from the bright prospects of his academic future, was baptised and entered a life of religious discipline. After visiting Egypt and Syria to observe the monks, he selected a quiet country retreat, and gathered a few others who wished to live a hermit's life. He wrote in moving terms of the rich beauty of his surroundings and of its silence. Seeing the dangers of solitary life, he organised monks into a community. He gave to his community a set of rules and a detailed pattern of life. Far more than Pachomius had done in Egypt, he put emphasis on the common life which members shared. Together with his learning, sanctity and perception, he had great powers of organisation. Monasticism in the East has retained the shape which he gave it.

The third volume of my History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1969) was divided into two parts, entitled respectively ‘The World of the Sophists’ and ‘Socrates’. By issuing the two parts separately in paperback form, the Press hopes to make them more easily and cheaply available to students. This book reproduces the second part, with the minimum of alterations necessary to allow it to appear as a separate publication. Mentions of‘vol. I’ or ‘vol. II’ in the text refer to the earlier volumes of this work.

Books have most frequently been referred to in the text and notes by short titles, and articles by periodical and date only. Full particulars of books, and titles and page-references for articles, will be found in the bibliography. The fragments of the Sophists, and other texts relating to them, are included in the Fragmente der Vorsokratiker of Diels and Kranz (abbreviated DK). The texts in an ‘A’ section of DK (Testimonia) have their number preceded by this letter, and those in a ‘B’ section, purporting to be actual quotations from the philosopher in question, are designated ‘fr.’ (fragment).

Translations, from both ancient and modern authors, are my own unless otherwise stated.

LIFE

Socrates was a native Athenian, son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, of the deme Alopeke. He was born in 470 or 469 B.C., for the records of his trial and execution put them in the spring of 399, and plato gives his age as seventy at the time. His father is said to have been a stonemason or sculptor, and references in plato to Daedalus as his ancestor (Euthyphro IIb, Alc. I 121 a) do something to confirm this. As doctors traced their descent to Asclepius as eponymous ancestor (so Parentage and Life ofSocrates Eryximachus in Plato, Symp. 186e), sculptors would naturally trace their line back to Daedalus. The justification for the mythical genealogy is that it was regular Greek practice for a craft to be handed on from father to son. Accordingly it was said that Socrates himself was brought up in the sculptor's craft, which he may have practised in his earlier years (Zeller, Ph. d. Gr. 52, nne 1 and 2), before he ‘deserted it for paideia’ as Lucian later put it (Somn. 12). Sophroniscus seems to have been a respected citizen who could hold up his head in any company, since plato makes Lysimachus son ofAristides speak ofhim as a lifelong friend whom he held in the highest esteem. It is unlikely that he was poor, or that Socrates's later poverty was anything but self-chosen, as plato in the Apology (23b) says it was.

The Peloponnesian War involved him in much active service, and he earned high praise for his courage and coolness, especially in adversity, and his powers of endurance.

GENERAL

It is a bold—some will say over-bold—procedure to try to separate Socrates from plato. In the dialogues of plato it would seem that he has so blended his own spirit with that of Socrates that they can never again be separated. I thought so myself until I came to write an account of the Sophistic movement; but the study which this necessitated has made me see Socrates as squarely set in his contemporary world of the Sophists, Thucydides and Euripides and an eager participant in their arguments. Certainly it has been impossible to leave him out of the previous sections describing fifth-century controversies. Plato, for all his reverence for Socrates as the inspiration and starting point of his own reflections, is a more sophisticated philosopher and marks a new and fateful development in the history of thought. I would even claim that in reading plato himself, without any checking or supplementation from other sources, one gets a strong impression that he was an essentially different philosophical character from the master through whose mouth he so often expresses the results of his own maturer and more widely ranging mind. He was still passionately concerned with the questions which excited the previous two generations—whether law and morals were natural or conventional in origin, whether ‘virtue’ could be taught, whether intelligence or inanimate nature was prior, whether all values were relative, the nature and standing of rhetoric, the relation between being and seeming, knowledge and opinion, language and its objects—and to him Protagoras and Gorgias, Prodicus and Hippias were still opponents whose challenge had not been adequately met; but to meet it called for something far more radical and comprehensive than the simple ethical intellectualism of Socrates.

‘PHILOSOPHIA DE CAELO DEVOCATA’

For the Greeks themselves the name of Socrates formed a watershed in the history of their philosophy. The reason they give for this is that he turned men's eyes from the speculations about the nature of the physical world which had been characteristic of the Presocratic period, and concentrated attention on the problems of human life. In the most general terms, his message was that to investigate the origin and ultimate matter of the universe, the composition and motions of the heavenly bodies, the shape of the earth or the causes of natural growth and decay was of far less importance than to understand what it meant to be a human being and for what purpose one was in the world. This estimate of Socrates as a turning-point can be traced to Aristotle, though he does not perhaps give it such incontrovertible support as later writers supposed, and the exaggeratedly schematic view of Greek philosophy which it suggests was the work of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods. The chief testimonies in Aristotle are these:

(i) In the first chapter of De partibus animalium he is asserting the importance of recognizing the formal–final cause as well as the necessary or material. This had not been clear to earlier thinkers because they had no adequate conception of essence (‘what it is to be’ so-andso) nor of how to define the real being of anything. Democritus had an inkling of it, ‘and in Socrates's time an advance was made as to the method, but the study of nature was given up (εληξε), and philosophers turned their attention to practical goodness and political science’ (642a 28).

In 1894 Edmund Pfleiderer observed that, since innumerable writers, many of them men of the highest reputation, had written about Socrates and Plato, anyone undertaking the task once more must surely, in tanta scriptorum turba, ask himself like Livy: Facturusne operae pretium sim? I should not like to have to count the number of books and articles about Socrates that have appeared in the seventy-odd years since Pfleiderer wrote, but I must hope that yet another presentation of him, in the context of the history of Greek philosophy and especially of the philosophic preoccupations of his own century, will prove worth while. The enormous bulk of the scholarly literature means that my own reading in it has been even more—much more—selective than for earlier periods of Greek thought. I have tried to make the selection representative of at least the more recent work, but it is probably inevitable that some of my readers will look in vain for their favourite items. I hope however that I have made myself sufficiently familiar with the ancient evidence to be entitled to views of my own, and it would not be safe to assume that the omission of a writer or a theory is necessarily due to ignorance. In putting Socrates into his setting in the history of Greek thought, it is impracticable to take note of every theory about him, including those which seem to me (though others may differ) to be highly improbable. I shall not, for instance, say much about what may be called the pan-Antisthenean school, who see Antisthenes lurking anonymously in many of Plato's dialogues and disguised as Socrates in Xenophon's Memorabilia.