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His famous motto “Man is the measure of all things,” which has become a slogan of latter-day humanism, seems to have carried a different message for him. It then expressed his doubts of the authority of the gods, and affirmed a relativism that made it man’s highest duty to obey the prevailing rules of his community. Gorgias was celebrated for developing the arts of rhetoric and persuasive oratory, which burgeoned with the rise of the democratic party in Athens. In these unhappy years of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), the people of Athens suffered a disastrous plague (430-429 B.C.) along with military defeat and the treachery of trusted leaders. With Athens’ decline from the self-confident age of Pericles (c. 460-429 B.C.), the Sophists were only another symptom of cynicism and the distrust of absolutes. The god of success could not satisfy a society that had so conspicuously failed in its long battle for empire. Was there, perhaps, some way of thought, some instrument, some resource, that transcended the whims of the populace or the conceit of politicians? Could the questing mind, cleansed of pride, at least find a way to knowledge that might be the highest, permanent good? Meanwhile, could the seeking itself be a solace?
    In later years a number of doctrines were fathered on Socrates. One was the doctrine of forms (or ideas), which Plato attributed to him and on which Plato built his own philosophy. This was the notion that behind every term like beauty or goodness lay the pure and changeless form of an idea, accessible not to the senses but only to the mind. What the senses perceived, then, seemed real only because they somehow participated in that ideal form. Aristotle also made Socrates the founder of logic. “For two things may be fairly ascribed to Socrates—inductive arguments and universal definition, both of which are concerned with the starting point of science.” Still Aristotle himself doubted the applicability of scientific method to ethics. And competing schools of philosophy would grow out of both the doctrine of forms and the methods of Socratic logic. Socrates’ own contribution to these ideas would be long debated and disputed. But Socrates would survive as the discoverer of ignorance, the patron saint of self-scrutiny.
    Despite the sanctity of the Word, the Seekers who left the most durable imprint on Western history are those who embodied the mystery of their achievement in their lives—and their deaths. The message of Jesus was less in what he said than in his life and Crucifixion, his martyrdom for human “salvation.” The words of sacred Scripture would be endlessly debated. What preserved a single Christian tradition was a Man on the Cross. Similarly, the message of Socrates was not in what he taught, but in how he urged men to seek, dramatized in his life and martyrdom. Plato was astonished at Socrates’ “absolute unlikeness to any human being that is or ever has been.” His final affirmation at his trial was “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” So he set us on a philosophic path where the effort of thought was justified not by the finding but by the seeking.
    This elusiveness justified Socrates’ repeated claim that he, one of history’s most influential teachers, was not a teacher at all but only a kind of midwife. “I have never been the teacher of anyone whatsoever.” The ambiguity of his martyrdom becomes more tantalizing with the centuries. Precisely why was he sentenced to death, and why did he choose death over flight?
    The trial of Socrates was embodied in the turbulent Athens of the fifth century. We have already seen enough of Socrates’ life to explain the hostility of powerful Athenians. Socrates was a friend of Critias, the unscrupulous leader of the Thirty Tyrants who brought a reign of terror in 404, the year of Athens’ surrender to Sparta. But Socrates had earned the enmity of the Thirty Tyrants by refusing to go along with their acts of