s and the Sophists is allowed
to appear. He is poor and they are rich; his profession that he teaches
nothing is opposed to their readiness to teach all things; his talking
in the marketplace to their private instructions; his tarry-at-home life
to their wandering from city to city. The tone which he assumes towards
them is one of real friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards
Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind
and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling
of Plato in other passages (Laws). But Anaxagoras had been dead thirty
years, and was beyond the reach of persecution.

It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers
who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more
violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference
can be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the
words attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the
aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind
him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they
would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated
from his control.

The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of
certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar
words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the
possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wisdom of Critias, the
poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to
the imagination of Plato. The arguments of those who maintain that the
Apology was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not
require a serious refutation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher,
who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact
reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not
have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many
points of the defence might have been improved and strengthened, at all
more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of
Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly
determine; nor can we say how he would or must have written under the
circumstances. We observe that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates
does not prevent Plato from introducing them together in the Symposium
engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor is there a