for the world. The wealthy Crito
would have turned his pockets inside out for Socrates, but Socrates had
all he wished, and explained that as it was he had to dance at home in
order to keep down the adipose. Aristides, who was objectionable because
he so shaped his conduct that he was called "The Just" and got himself
ostracized, was one of his dear friends. Antisthenes, the original
Cynic, used to walk six miles and back every day to hear Socrates talk.
The Cynic was a rich man, but so captivated was he with the preaching
of Socrates that he adopted the life of simplicity and dressed in rags
and boycotted both the barber and the bath. On one occasion Socrates
looked sharply at a rent in the cloak of his friend and said, "Ah,
Antisthenes, through that hole in your cloak I see your vanity!"

Xenophon sat at the feet of Socrates for a score of years, and then
wrote his recollections of him as a vindication of his character. Euclid
of Megara was nearly eighty when he came to Socrates as a pupil, trying
to get rid of his ill-temper and habit of ironical reply. Cebes and
Simmias left their native country and became Greek citizens for his
sake. Charmides, the pampered son of wealthy parents, learned pedagogics
by being shown that, in households where there were many servants, the
children got cheated out of their rightful education because others did
all the work, and to deprive a child of the privilege of being useful
was to rob him of so much life. AEschines, the ambitious son of a
sausage-maker, was advised by Socrates to borrow money of himself on
long time without interest, by reducing his wants. So pleased was the
recipient with this advice, that he went to publishing Socratic
dialogues as a business and had the felicity to fail with tidy
liabilities.

But the two men who loom largest in the life of Socrates are Alcibiades
and Plato--characters very much unlike.

Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was
considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic,
proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling,
horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing
that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have
done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who
a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after
the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a
copy