void the conversation of men and keep
in a perpetual solitude. Some have despised the temples and the altars,
and have taught not to honour the gods, while others have been so
superstitious as to worship wood, stones, and irrational creatures. And
as to the knowledge of natural things, some have confessed but one only
being; others have admitted an infinite number: some have believed that
all things are in a perpetual motion; others that nothing moves: some
have held the world to be full of continual generations and corruptions;
others maintain that nothing is engendered or destroyed. He said besides
that he should be glad to know of those persons whether they were in
hopes one day to put in practice what they learned, as men who know an
art may practise it when they please either for their own advantage or
for the service of their friends; or whether they did imagine that, after
they found out the causes of all things that happen, they should be able
to cause winds and rains, and to dispose the times and seasons as they
had occasion for them; or whether they contented themselves with the bare
knowledge without expecting any farther advantage.

This was what he said of those who delight in such studies. As for his
part, he meditated chiefly on what is useful and proper for man, and took
delight to argue of piety and impiety, of honesty and dishonesty, of
justice and injustice, of wisdom and folly, of courage and cowardice, of
the State, and of the qualifications of a Minister of State, of the
Government, and of those who are fit to govern; in short, he enlarged on
the like subjects, which it becomes men of condition to know, and of
which none but slaves should be ignorant.

It is not strange, perhaps, that the judges of Socrates mistook his
opinion in things concerning which he did not explain himself; but I am
surprised that they did not reflect on what he had said and done in the
face of the whole world; for when he was one of the Senate, and had taken
the usual oath exactly to observe the laws, being in his turn vested with
the dignity of Epistate, he bravely withstood the populace, who, against
all manner of reason, demanded that the nine captains, two of whom were
Erasinides and Thrasilus, should be put to death, he would never give
consent to this injustice, and was not daunted at the rage of the people,
nor at the menaces of the men in power, choosing rather not to violate
the oath he had taken than to yield