violence must bring them. With the readiness of Athenian eloquence he bade them remember how completely the power of Sparta must in the end bear down any opposition which they might make to it. For himself he would rather be ten thousand fathoms underground than lead them to certain ruin.

The people of Byzantion were thus saved from indiscriminate pillage, and the Spartans from the necessity of wreaking a terrible revenge on the men whom their officers had goaded into frantic wrath. Although the dark cloud still lowered over the remnant of the Ten Thousand, the sequel of the story was to exhibit Xenophon in the light of the successful adventurer. For the present, he left the army and returned with Kleandros into Byzantion, having bidden his comrades, as he thought, a final farewell. For these the prospect was far from encouraging. They were tempted in the first instance by the proposals of the Theban Koiratadas; but the matter ended only in disappointment, and disappointment led to angry disputes among the leaders, while the number of desertions seemed to make it likely that the great Cyreian army would soon melt away. Such a result Anaxibios in his present mood most heartily desired; but his feelings were soon to undergo a great revulsion. On his voyage from Byzantion he met Aristarchos, who had been sent from Sparta to succeed Kleandros as governor of Byzantion, and who told him that he himself was to be superseded by Pôlos. Anaxibios now resolved on employing the Cyreians in a private war against Pharnabazos, who had treated him with contempt when he found that the sceptre of office had fallen from his hands. As eagerly as he had before sought to break them up, so now he earnestly besought Xenophon to get them all together and bring them to Perinthos for immediate transportation into Asia. Crossing the Propontis from Parion Xenophon appeared again among the Cyreians to their great delight. The scheme of Anaxibios was agreed to with hearty readiness, and the army marched hastily to the place of embarkation. But Aristarchos, hurrying to Perinthos, forbade the passage of the troops across the sea: and when Xenophon replied that he was acting by the orders of Anaxibios, Aristarchos answered briefly, 'Anaxibios is no longer admiral, and if I catch any of you on the sea I will sink you.' When, having foiled this plan, Aristarchos summoned all the Cyreian officers to his presence, Xenophon understood the meaning of a warning

which he had received against entering the walls of the town. Remaining outside under pretence of sacrificing, he learnt that Aristarchos had dismissed his colleagues with orders to come again in the afternoon. Seeing the snare thus set for him, Xenophon set out at once for the camp of Seuthes, and there entered into engagements which seemed to promise not merely maintenance but wealth for the Cyreians. Disappointment again awaited them; and months dragged their weary length along, until at last messengers came with the tidings that the Spartan state needed their services in the war which the Spartans had declared against Tissaphernes. The news filled Seuthes with the hope that he might avoid paying the money due to them; but the power or the fear of Sparta was too great even for the Thrakian chief. Threats of determined action in case of refusal extorted from him the wages due to the Cyreians, who at length crossed to Lampsakos, where Xenophon found an old friend in the Phliasian prophet Eukleides. The latter, expressing his joy at seeing him safe, asked him how much money he had. 'I have sold my horse,' was the answer, 'for fifty dareiks, to furnish me with the means of getting home.' The seer could scarcely believe him; but when on questioning him further he learnt that Xenophon, although he had sacrificed to Zeus the King, had offered nothing since he left Athens to Zeus the Kindly, the mystery was explained. The kindly god must receive a whole burnt offering. A slaughter of little pigs in his honour was followed at once by a distribution of pay to the army and by the restoration of his favourite horse, which the Spartans had repurchased and for which they refused any recompense at his hands. He thus had not only his horse but more than a year's pay in advance. The kindly Zeus was indeed working zealously on his behalf: but when the army reached Pergamos, a prospect of still greater luck was opened for Xenophon. His hostess told him that he might win a splendid prize by seizing the tower or castle of a wealthy Persian named Asidates. The sacrifices at once favoured the enterprise; but his attack was repulsed. On the next day the assault, repeated with the full force of the army, was followed by the capture of Asidates himself with his whole family and all his property. Thus came true,' says Xenophon, with a faith which nothing can daunt or shake, 'the signs of the victims offered before the first attack.' Thus also were more

than realised any visions of wealth which may have floated before his eyes as he started on the eastward march from Sardeis; and Xenophon returned to Athens, if he returned thither at all, a rich man, to find that the great teacher by whose counsels he was guided had drunk the fatal draught of hemlock a few days or a few weeks before his arrival.

CHAPTER II.

SOKRATES.

SOKRATES had already reached an age of more than seventy years, when three Athenian citizens, the leather-seller Anytos, the poet Meletos, and the rhetor Lykon, brought against him three charges, the first of rejecting the gods worshipped at Athens, the second of setting up new deities of his own, the third of corrupting the youth of the city.

As a citizen, this illustrious man had lived a life not merely blameless but deserving the gratitude of his countrymen. He had behaved with credit at Potidaia and Delion; he had firmly opposed the madness of the people whom Theramenes was hounding on to the murder of the generals after Argennoussai; with the same composure he had gone quietly home when the Thirty despots commissioned him with four others to arrest and bring before them the Salaminian Leon. Some said that as a young man he had lived viciously; but, although he admitted that the work of self-discipline was with him a severe struggle, there seems to be no ground for the imputation.

The physical science of the age of Sokrates rested almost wholly on assumptions and on theories which were virtually nothing more than guesses to account for the supposed nature of phenomena. It would have been strange indeed if some one had not sooner or later risen to protest against the multiplication of hypotheses for which it was impossible to adduce the evidence of fact. Such a thinker arose in Sokrates, in whose mind the contradictory conclusions of the philosophers (or, as they were called, Sophists) caused a revulsion never to be over

come.

Turning, therefore, with disgust from their wranglings, Sokrates beheld before him, as he thought, a vast field in which

the plough had scarcely turned a single furrow. If it was impossible for man to determine what were the constituents of the sun, it was surely not impossible for him to ascertain the conditions of his own life, the laws which he must obey, the nature of his relations to other men, and the character of human action. Starting with the assured conviction that the gods were everywhere present, he held it to be his duty to ascertain the boundaries which separated the province of human reason from that of the divine government of the world. Nor was he at any loss to find them. From the time of his boyhood he had heard an inward voice which, without telling him what he should do, warned him against any given action. This was styled by some of his disciples the Daimonion or Dæmon, which, by revealing to him dangers to be avoided, made his way plain before his face; but as he made no mystery of it in his own case, so it must at the least be noted that he nowhere explicitly speaks of it as a privilege peculiar to himself.

He was still a young man (how young we know not) when the sense of a divine mission, binding him to devote his whole life to the service of his fellows, broke upon his mind. Abandoning his occupation as a sculptor, and retaining, it would seem, no means of making an income, he made it his business to put all men to the test, so that the reality or the hollowness of their professions might for their own higher good and happiness be made known to themselves and to the world. In the discharge of this mission he might be seen at all times of the day in all places of public resort, seeking the conversation of all and shunning none. The perfect frankness of the man, the ingenuous confession of his own ignorance, the earnestness which convinced his hearers that, if he exposed their shallowness, it was only in order that they might work their way to the real treasures which awaited all disinterested seekers, could not fail to gather round him knots of listeners, of whom many became his disciples or, as he preferred to call them, his friends. The impression thus made led some to regard him as a man of whom the world had not yet seen the peer; and the resolution to ascertain the truth of this fact by a reference to the Delphian oracle was the natural consequence of this conviction.

The answer brought back by Chairephon from the shrine of Phoibos was that of all men Sokrates was the wisest. In Sokrates himself these words awakened no feeling of self-gratu

lation, but merely a desire to solve that which he felt sure must be a riddle or enigma. He was at once conscious of his own ignorance and convinced of the perfect veracity of the god. He betook himself therefore to a statesman of wide repute for his wisdom, but he soon satisfied himself that his supposed knowledge was a mere mask. When, however, he sought to convince the statesman of this fact, he found that he had only made him his enemy; and he returned home, assured that thus far the Delphian priestess was right. His own ignorance and that of the statesman were on a par: but he was conscious of it and as eager to acknowledge it as the statesman was to deny it; and so far he was the wiser man. The experiment was tried on others (reluctantly and with pain and fear, because he saw the strength of the resentment which he roused), and always with the same result. Hence when he asked himself whether he would exchange his own general consciousness of ignorance for the partial knowledge which sought to pass itself off as omniscience, he was constrained to answer the question in the negative, and so to admit that the Delphian priestess had spoken the truth to Chairephon.

The verdict of the Delphian god compelled him to take another course, if he wished to reconcile the truthfulness of the deity with his own ever-present and overpowering sense of ignorance. Henceforth he must question the greatest statesmen, the most famous poets, and the most illustrious philosophers of the city; and he proceeded to do so with a subtlety and pertinacity which invariably succeeded in showing either that the man interrogated knew not his own science or art, or that the knowledge of some one thing had led him to regard himself as knowing everything. When, then, Sokrates, not as a teacher but simply as one aware of his own ignorance and anxious only to learn, addressed to statesmen and men of scientific reputation questions on the simplest elements of the subjects with which they professed to deal, and gradually drew from them the humiliating confession that even of these elements they had no real knowledge whatever, it was natural that the feelings of surprise and mortification should pass rapidly through the stage of resentment into that of abiding hatred.

But when we come to the trial in which the jealousies thus smouldering for five-and-twenty years burst into flame, we are