ling the adventures of his youth, from the fascinations of the ragged
Socrates to the fascinations of the magnificent Cyrus, preaching the
lessons of his varied life. Then came the bitter loss of his brave son,
killed in the van at Mantinea. According to good authority he only
survived this blow a couple of years. But even then he appears to have
found distraction from his grief by a dry tract upon the Attic revenue.
Such is the general outline which we shall fill up and color from
allusions throughout his varied and manifold writings.

He was a pure Athenian, evidently of aristocratic birth, and attracted,
probably by his personal beauty, the attention of Socrates, who is said
to have stopped him in the way, and asked him did he know where men of
honor were to be found; upon his replying _no_, the sage said, follow me
and learn. This apocryphal anecdote, at all events, records the fact
that Xenophon attached himself to Socrates's teaching, and so afforded
us perhaps the most remarkable instance of the great and various
influence of that great teacher. We do not wonder at disciples like
Plato; but here is a young man of fashion, of a practical turn, and
loving adventure, who records in after years the teaching after his own
fashion, and in a perfectly independent way, as the noblest of
training. His youth, however, was spent in the distressful later years
of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in fearful gloom and disaster for
his native city. Intimate, apparently, with the great historian
Thucydides, whose unfinished work he seems to have edited, and
subsequently to have continued in his own "Hellenica," he must have long
foreseen the collapse of the Athenian empire, and then he and many other
adventurous spirits found themselves in a society faded in prosperity,
with no scope for energy or enterprise. Such was the somewhat tame and
vulgar Athens which succeeded to that of Pericles and Aristophanes, and
which could not tolerate the spiritual boldness of Socrates. He tells us
himself, in the third book of his "Anabasis," how he was tempted to
leave Athens for the East by his friend Proxenus, who had made the
acquaintance of the chivalrous and ambitious Cyrus, brother of the
Persian king, and governor of southern Asia Minor. This prince was
preparing secretly to invade Persia and dethrone his brother, and for
that purpose was gathering troops and courting the favor of the Greeks.
His splendid gifts were on a scale sufficie