a development and not a negation of the lesson learned from Socrates' self-knowledge. As regards the master's personal appearance and manner of life, however, there is no such problem to give us pause. In these matters Plato and Xenophon agree so perfectly that we cannot doubt the veracity of the portraiture.

In the deme of Alopece, lying just outside of Athens between Mount Lycabettus and the Ilissus, Socrates was born in the year 469 B.C. His father Sophroniscus was a sculptor, and there is a persistent tradition that the son in after years followed the same profession. He is said even to have won considerable repute as a maker of statues; and in the time of the traveller Pausanias two Charites standing at the entrance to the Acropolis were pointed out as his handiwork. But the later life of the philosopher might seem to corroborate the story that he quite despised and neglected the workshop, though we need not suppose that, as the story further adds, he gave himself up to idle courses. His mother Phænerete, for whom Socrates seems to have entertained great respect, was a midwife; and, if we may believe Plato, the philosopher was fond of alluding to the fact and declaring that he inherited the profession, his office being to assist young men in bringing to the light the generous thoughts that lay

The writers of antiquity were zealous collectors of anecdotes and witty sayings; their memory for these was inexhaustible, and in general we may accept with some confidence the shrewd words they report of their great men. But on the other hand, they were less careful about the events of a man's life, and were ready in this respect to credit the wildest rumours and myths. In especial the childhood and death of famous men were soon enveloped in a halo of legends, and Socrates naturally was not exempt from this canonisation. So, for instance, Plutarch tells us how at the child's birth his father inquired of the Delphian oracle about his rearing, and was admonished in reply "to suffer the lad to do whatever entered his mind, and to use no coercion. Neither should he attempt to divert the boy from his native impulses but should offer prayers in his behalf to Zeus Agoræus and the Muses, and have no further concern, for Socrates had in his own breast a surer guide than any number of masters and pedagogues." Plutarch in his reverence has repeated an idle legend which grew out of Socrates' dæmon, or inner guide, and his connection with the oracle later in life.

It was also very common in antiquity to indicate the intellectual relationship of noted men by associating them as teacher and pupil,

achronism. So, if we could believe later stories, Socrates was the pupil of a great many famous philosophers, musicians, rhetoricians, and men of science, some of whom he could never have seen. In the Apology Socrates says that he received the regular education appointed by the Athenian laws, and this we may accept as authentic. With the other boys of his age he went to teachers who instructed him in music and gymnastics, a very simple education, although the term "music" included a pretty thorough study of the poets.

But doubtless the young man's real education was what he himself picked up in his intercourse with the citizens of Athens and with the innumerable strangers who flocked thither. At that time Athens was at the height of her military glory, and had become the intellectual centre of Hellas, "the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence," as Milton calls her. All the currents of thought of that eager questioning world met there, and already the Athenians showed that curiosity which in their decay led St. Luke to say of them that they "spend their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing." We have trustworthy evidence that the young Socrates talked with Parmenides, when the aged philosopher of Elea was visiting Athens; he met and argued with

be sure he let no famous stranger pass through the city without seeking to discover what secret wisdom the newcomer might possess. For this search after wisdom was Socrates' mission in life, and in his earlier years no doubt he approached each new man renowned in the Greek world for wisdom with modesty and with a hungering desire to learn. But as man after man disappointed him, as he found empty pretence taking the place of real knowledge, and the idle use of words passing for true understanding, and shallow cleverness claiming the praise of genuine insight, gradually the attitude and manner of this strange inquisitor took on a change. Instead of seeking for wisdom in others, he began systematically and imperturbably to expose their folly, teaching them that the understanding of their own ignorance was the first step toward the knowledge whose possession they already vaunted so loudly.

This change in Socrates' manner took place apparently when he was about thirty years old, the age at which great reformers are wont, it seems, to begin their labours,-and from that time to his death he must have been one of the marked characters in that city of notable men. This terrible debater of the market-place, this "Esop of the mob," as Emerson calls him, with his great bald head and monstrous face,

in summer and winter, was the strangest and most invincible talker the world ever has known, the more formidable because his insatiable curiosity led the unwary into making raslı statements, while his unabashed assumption of ignorance gave no opportunity for retort. Ignorant false pretenders to wisdom he bullied and mauled outrageously; the honest he left oftenest with a doubt still unsettled, but always a doubt that pointed the way to a higher truth; the young, with whom he especially loved to converse, he treated with a kind of fatherly tenderness, often very quaint and genial.

Xenophon's Memoirs are a collection of brief conversations between Socrates and various persons of the city, and give us an admirably clear picture of the man. "He was always in public view," writes Xenophon; "in the morning he went to the arcades and gymnasiums, when the market-place filled he was to be seen there, and the rest of the day you might find him wherever the most people were congregated." At one time we hear him talking with Aristodemus, "the little," pointing out to this great scoffer of the gods the beauty and design of the world, and proving thereby the intelligence of the divine government; at another time we hear him debating with the shrewd Aristippus, who was afterwards to be the author of the