ignorant under the care of another master?
If a young man gets an acquaintance that brings him into debauchery,
ought his father to lay the blame on the first friends of his son among
whom he always lived virtuously? Is it not true, on the contrary, that
the more he finds that this last friendship proves destructive to him,
the more reason he will have to praise his former acquaintance. And are
the fathers themselves, who are daily with their children, guilty of
their faults, if they give them no ill example? Thus they ought to have
judged of Socrates; if he led an ill life, it was reasonable to esteem
him vicious; but if a good, was it just to accuse him of crimes of which
he was innocent?

And yet he might have given his adversaries ground to accuse him, had he
but approved, or seemed to approve those vices in others, from which he
kept himself free: but Socrates abhorred vice, not only in himself, but
in everyone besides. To prove which, I need only relate his conduct
toward Critias, a man extremely addicted to debauchery. Socrates
perceiving that this man had an unnatural passion for Euthydemus, and
that the violence of it would precipitate him so far a length as to make
him transgress the bounds of nature, shocked at his behaviour, he exerted
his utmost strength of reason and argument to dissuade him from so wild a
desire. And while the impetuosity of Critias' passion seemed to scorn
all check or control, and the modest rebuke of Socrates had been
disregarded, the philosopher, out of an ardent zeal for virtue, broke out
in such language, as at once declared his own strong inward sense of
decency and order, and the monstrous shamefulness of Critias' passion.
Which severe but just reprimand of Socrates, it is thought, was the
foundation of that grudge which he ever after bore him; for during the
tyranny of the Thirty, of which Critias was one, when, together with
Charicles, he had the care of the civil government of the city, he failed
not to remember this affront, and, in revenge of it, made a law to forbid
teaching the art of reasoning in Athens: and having nothing to reproach
Socrates with in particular, he laboured to render him odious by
aspersing him with the usual calumnies that are thrown on all
philosophers: for I have never heard Socrates say that he taught this
art, nor seen any man who ever heard him say so; but Critias had taken
offence, and gave sufficient proofs of it: for after the Thirty had
c