“I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old
and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but
and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that
virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other
good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the
doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed. But if
anyone says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore,
O men of Athens, I say to you, … either acquit me or not; but whatever you do,
know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.”—Athenian
philosopher Socrates (469 BC-399 BC), quoted by Plato, Apology, translated by Benjamin
Jowett (1891)
We know Socrates for the line, “The unexamined life
is not worth living.” But neither, he makes plain here, is a shallow,
materialistic one.
That lesson has, of course, been forgotten in
contemporary Washington, city of power, ambition, and the money that accrues to
this. Another lesson, it seems, must also be learned all over again: that there
are some principles worth staking one’s life for.
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