With all this faithfulness, however, in the public service, Socrates was very far from wishing to be what we call a public man; on the contrary, he kept himself systematically out of places which were eagerly coveted by less able men, and refused to have anything to do with the party politics of the day. This withdrawal from the service of the State, to the majority of Greeks, with whom the State was everything, could not but appear strange, and tend to increase their prejudice against philosophy and philosophers. But Socrates acted here, as in all other matters, with admirable good sense; he felt that to be a politician and a preacher of righteousness was to combine two vocations practically incompatible; for the popular measure which it might serve the immediate need of the political man to advocate it might not seldom be the first duty of {15} the moralist to condemn. Besides, if he took office with men who habitually acted on principles of which he could not but disapprove, he would be forced to waste his strength in a fruitless opposition to measures which he could not prevent; and in this way it came to pass that, while he utterly disapproved, in the general case, of a good citizen, whether from the love of selfish ease, or from false modesty, or from moral cowardice, refusing to take part in public life, in his own particular work he felt that political activity would be a hindrance, and that it was his duty to abstain. In these few paragraphs are summed up all that from indisputable authority we know of the personal history of the greatest of heathen preachers. The circumstances connected with his death are too closely interwoven with the character of his teaching to be intelligible here. We shall therefore enter now directly into a short exposition of his ethical teaching; after which we shall be in a condition to consider with an intelligent astonishment how it came to pass that the preacher of the noblest doctrine that Athens ever heard, before the preaching of Paul on the Hill of Mars, after living in high repute and popularity for seventy years, should at last have been made to quit the scene of his moral triumphs, publicly branded with the stigma which was wont to be attached to the lowest of malefactors and the vilest of traitors.