We may suspect that during the last thirty years of
the fifth century unorthodoxy spread considerably among the educated
classes. There was a large enough section of influential rationalists to
render impossible any organized repression of liberty, and the chief
evil of the blasphemy law was that it could be used for personal or
party reasons. Some of the prosecutions, about which we know, were
certainly due to such motives, others may have been prompted by genuine
bigotry and by the fear lest sceptical thought should extend beyond the
highly educated and leisured class. It was a generally accepted
principle among the Greeks, and afterwards among the Romans, that
religion was a good and necessary thing
[30] for the common people. Men who did not believe in its truth
believed in its usefulness as a political institution, and as a rule
philosophers did not seek to diffuse disturbing "truth" among the
masses. It was the custom, much more than at the present day, for those
who did not believe in the established cults to conform to them
externally. Popular higher education was not an article in the programme
of Greek statesmen or thinkers. And perhaps it may be argued that in the
circumstances of the ancient world it would have been hardly
practicable.
There was, however, one illustrious Athenian, who thought
differently--Socrates, the philosopher. Socrates was the greatest of the
educationalists, but unlike the others he taught gratuitously, though he
was a poor man.
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