of the nature of violence rather than of law?

To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands
at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to
practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.

To which Alcibiades replied: Ah, Pericles, I do wish we could have met
in those days when you were at your cleverest in such matters.

Well, then, as soon as the desired superiority over the politicians of
the day seemed to be attained, Critias and Alcibiades turned their backs
on Socrates. They found his society unattractive, not to speak of the
annoyance of being cross-questioned on their own shortcomings. Forthwith
they devoted themselves to those affairs of state but for which they
would never have come near him at all.

No; if one would seek to see true companions of Socrates, one must
look to Crito, (24) and Chaerephon, and Chaerecrates, to Hermogenes,
to Simmias and Cebes, to Phaedondes and others, who clung to him not to
excel in the rhetoric of the Assembly or the law-courts, but with the
nobler ambition of attaining to such beauty and goodliness of soul as
would enable them to discharge the various duties of life to house and
family, to relatives and friends, to fellow-citizens, and to the state
at large. Of these true followers not one in youth or old age was ever
guilty, or thought guilty, of committing any evil deed.

(24) For these true followers, familiar to us in the pages of Plato,
("Crito," "Apol.," "Phaedo," etc) see Cobet, "Pros. Xen."

"But for all that," the accuser insists, "Socrates taught sons to pour
contumely upon their fathers (25) by persuading his young friends that
he could make them wiser than their sires, or by pointing out that
the law allowed a son to sue his father for aberration of mind, and to
imprison him, which legal ordinance he put in evidence to prove that it
might be well for the wiser to imprison the more ignorant."

(25) See "Apol." 20; Arist. "Clouds," 1407, where Pheidippides "drags
his father Strepsiades through the mire."

Now what Socrates held was, that if a man may with justice incarcerate
another for no better cause than a form of folly or ignorance, this same
person could not justly complain if he in his turn were kept in bonds by
his superiors in knowledge; and to come to the bottom of such questions,
to discover the difference between madness and ignorance was a problem
which he was perpetually workin