everything. He would be, as occasion arose, a soldier, a politician, a lawgiver, or a philosopher.
Socrates, though he disliked politics, could not avoid being mixed up with political disputes. In
his youth he was a soldier, and (in spite of his disclaimer in the Apology) a student of physical
science. Protagoras, when he could spare time from teaching scepticism to aristocratic youths in
search of the latest thing, was drawing up a code of laws for Thurii. Plato dabbled in politics,
though unsuccessfully. Xenophon, when he was neither writing about Socrates nor being a
country gentleman, spent his spare time as a general. Pythagorean mathematicians attempted to
acquire the government of cities. Everybody had to serve on juries and perform various other
public duties. In the third century all this was changed. There continued, it is true, to be politics in
the old City States, but they had become parochial and unimportant, since Greece was at the
mercy of Macedonian armies. The serious struggles for power were between Macedonian soldiers;
they involved no question of principle, but merely the distribution of territory between rival
adventurers. On administrative and technical matters, these more or less uneducated soldiers
employed Greeks as experts; in Egypt, for example, excellent work was done in irrigation and
drainage. There were soldiers, administrators, physicians, mathematicians, philosophers, but there
was no one who was all these at once.
The age was one in which a man who had money and no desire for power could enjoy a very
pleasant life--always assuming that no marauding army happened to come his way. Learned men
who found favour with some prince could enjoy a high degree of luxury, provided they were
adroit flatterers and did not mind being the butt of ignorant royal witticisms. But there was no
such thing as security. A palace revolution might displace the sycophantic sage's patron; the
Galatians might destroy the rich man's villa; one's city might be sacked as an incident in a dynastic
war. In such circumstances it is no wonder that people took to worshipping the goddess Fortune,
or Luck. There seemed nothing rational in the ordering of human affairs. Those who obstinately
insisted upon finding rationality somewhere withdrew into themselves, and decided, like Milton's
Satan, that
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.