onsist in evening
flirtations, with the eating of indigestible food at unseasonable hours,
and the dancing of "the German." It was carried on out-of-doors in
the brightest sunlight; it brooked no effeminacy; its amusements were
athletic games, or dramatic entertainments, such as have hardly since
been equalled. Its arena was a town whose streets were filled with
statues and adorned with buildings, merely to behold which was in itself
an education. The participators in it were not men with minds so dwarfed
by exclusive devotion to special pursuits that after "talking shop" they
could find nothing else save wine and cookery to converse about. They
were men with minds fresh and open for the discussion of topics which
are not for a day only.

A man like Sokrates, living in such a community, did not need to write
down his wisdom. He had no such vast public as the modern philosopher
has to reach. He could hail any one he happened to pass in the street,
begin an argument with him forthwith, and set a whole crowd thinking
and inquiring about subjects the mere contemplation of which would raise
them for the moment above matters of transient concern. For more
than half a century any citizen might have gratis the benefit of oral
instruction from such a man as he. And I sometimes think, by the way,
that--curtailed as it is to literary proportions in the dialogues of
Plato, bereft of all that personal potency which it had when it flowed,
instinct with earnestness, from the lips of the teacher--even to this
day the wit of man has perhaps devised no better general gymnastics for
the understanding than the Sokratic dialectic. I am far from saying that
all Athens listened to Sokrates or understood him: had it been so, the
caricature of Aristophanes would have been pointless, and the sublime
yet mournful trilogy of dialogues which pourtray the closing scenes of
the greatest life of antiquity would never have been written. But the
mere fact that such a man lived and taught in the way that he did
goes far in proof of the deep culture of the Athenian public. Further
confirmation is to be found in the fact that such tragedies as the
Antigone, the Oidipous, and the Prometheus were written to suit the
popular taste of the time; not to be read by literary people, or to be
performed before select audiences such as in our day listen to Ristori
or Janauschek, but to hold spell-bound that vast concourse of all kinds
of people which assembled at the