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constrained to admit that our knowledge is unfortunately scanty. In the Platonic Apology Sokrates is made to confess his total want of practice in speaking before a public assembly : in the Xenophontic treatise he is described as telling his friend Hermogenes that in obedience to the warning voice of the Daimonion he had abandoned all thought of preparing any defence. Yet, if we are to believe Plato, he defended himself not merely with astonishing readiness (for this from his consciousness of innocence and of general uprightness we might have looked for) but with the peculiar eloquence of which Plato was the unrivalled master: and moreover he spoke after a fashion which assuredly seems to represent rather the thoughts of Plato writing many years later than those which would probably have passed through the mind of Sokrates. But whatever may have been his real defence, sufficient ground for believing that to it he owed his condemnation seems to be furnished by the fact that the verdict was carried by the small majority of thirty out of more than 500 jurymen. When the number of those who actually acquitted him was so large, we can scarcely doubt that many more would have followed their example had not something in the tone of the defence changed the current of their feelings. But undoubtedly there were many more who took their places on the seats of the Dikasts with feelings of extreme irritation against a man who baffled, perplexed, and worried them.

If to men in such a temper as this Sokrates spoke at all as he is said to have spoken in the Platonic or Xenophontic Apology, the smallness of the majority which condemned him becomes the real and perhaps only matter for astonishment. Athenian jurymen beyond all doubt were fully impressed with a sense of their own dignity, and we have seen more than once that they were flattered by the exhibition of feelings which betrayed an awe of their power. They were accustomed to hear impassioned appeals to their sympathy, inforced by the tears of the accused and the intreaties of his kinsmen or his friends. With a dignity which should have been more forcible than mean prostrations and piteous prayers for mercy, Sokrates told them, it is said, that for him there should be no such efforts to divert the question to a false issue. If he had offended, he was ready to pay the penalty. If he had not, it was their duty to acquit him. When further he went on to tell them that far

from having broken any law he had spent his life in trying to open men's eyes to the nature and obligations of law, and that thus he had been their greatest benefactor,-when he assured them that if they condemned him they would hurt not him but themselves only,-when he warned them that, as they had thus far had none who had devoted themselves without pay or reward to promoting the highest good of their citizens by assailing the strongholds of ignorance and vice, so if they should put him to death they would find none to take his place and to carry on a work indispensable for the welfare of the commonwealth, he was stringing together a series of considerations each of which would weight the balance more and more heavily against him.

Sokrates was condemned; but even after condemnation Athenian custom allowed the defendant to make a counter proposal, in mitigation of the penalty demanded by the accuser. But of the two penalties thus put before them the jurymen must choose one: it was not in their power to impose any other. Hence it was to the last degree unlikely that they would ratify the proposition of the criminal, if by naming a merely nominal punishment it practically reversed their verdict of guilty. Here again we have a picture which, we can scarcely doubt, has been, to say the least, largely touched up by the master hand of Plato. If it can be trusted, we should be bound to admit that Sokrates did his best to inflame the animosity of his opponents and to alienate the waverers. Ending his speech with the statement that all his worldly goods would not exceed the value of a mina, but that Plato with some others of his friends wished to become sureties for the payment of a sum of thirty minai, he proposed this fine as a substitute for the penalty sought by Anytos and his colleagues. Had he done this without preface there can be little doubt that of the small majority which condemned him many would gladly have accepted it. But, if we may believe Plato, Sokrates was determined that his judges should pass the capital sentence unless they chose to become his converts. All minor penalties, he told them, would for him be intolerable. Prison life with the Eleven for his only visitants would be a burden greater than he could bear: and the idea of his living in exile would be absurd. Wherever his abode might be, there must he be instant, in season and out of season, in the great work for which he carried about with himself a divine

commission. But in truth why should he be punished at all? At least how could he with any honesty admit the justice of any sentence passed upon him, when he was not more conscious of his existence than he was of the fact that he had devoted his whole life with absolute disinterestedness to the promotion of their highest good? Under any conditions leisure was for him a matter of the first moment,-leisure which should enable him to pry into the mental state of all whom he might meet, compelling them to take stock of their supposed stores of knowledge. Such leisure it was in their power to insure to him by ordering that henceforth he should be maintained in the Prytaneion at the public cost.

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His words did their work. By what majority we know not, the Dikasts passed sentence that Sokrates should be dealt with by the Eleven. The result, we are told, was that which he had looked for, and indeed desired. Now that the end had come, he had the satisfaction of knowing that through his trial, as in his previous relations with his countrymen, he had acted rightly. Not once, since it began, had the warning voice bidden him hold back a single utterance. It was the divine will that he should now depart, and to that will he yielded a hearty and glad submission. The dying, he added, were supposed to see further than other men; and they must forgive him, if, looking as he now could, into the future, he told them that any hopes which they might have of arresting his work by his death must be disappointed. For themselves his death was a mistake. The true method of avoiding humiliating confessions of ignorance was not by slaying others but by giving themselves up to the task of self-improvement in obedience to the precept inscribed in the Delphian temple, 'Know thyself.' But that which for them was a blunder was for him the happiest of all events. Whatever death might be, no harm could ever befall the good; and he trusted that they too might face death with the supreme consolation imparted by this conviction. Lastly he commended to them his children as persons needing the friendly discipline which he had applied to all. 'If they fancy themselves to be something when they are nothing, and follow their own desires, treat them as I have treated you; and then you will have given me an abundant recompense for all my toil. But it is time for me to go to my death, for you to return to your active life. Which of these two things is the better, no man can say. God alone knows.'

By a singular accident the sentence was passed on the day which followed the crowning of the Sacred Ship before its departure for Delos. Each year this trireme, bearing on its stern the garland placed upon it by the priest of Apollon, went on the pilgrimage to that holy island in memory of the deliverance wrought for the tribute children by the slayer of the Minotauros. From the moment when this wreath was put in its place to the hour when the vessel again entered the haven of Peiraieus, no capital sentence could be executed; and Sokrates thus remained for some thirty days, chained, we are told, in his cell, but cheered, if his serene soul needed any comfort, by the devotion of his friends who were allowed free access to him. To these his sentence was not so gratifying as it was to himself, and Kriton, we are told, had arranged a plan for escape to be carried out by bribing the gaoler. With some indignation Sokrates rejected a proposal which would fasten on him the guilt of disobeying the law,-the very crime for which he had been tried and of which up to that time he knew himself to be wholly guiltless. The days which might still remain to him, be they few or many, must be spent in meditation on the eternal truths which formed the unfailing inheritance of those who sincerely sought them. Of that solemn time the Phaidon of Plato has left to us an imperishable monument. Unruffled by a single disturbing thought, Sokrates poured out for his friends those treasures of positive knowledge of which during his public career he had been regarded as somewhat chary; and when at last he had taken the hemlock juice and his eyes grew heavy, he bade Kriton remember that he owed a cock to Asklepios. With the gentle playfulness of one who felt that in all conditions he had a home in God he prayed his friend by no means to forget the debt. The cock was the bird which heralded the return of light and life to the darkened earth, and Asklepios was the Great Healer whose voice brought back the dead from their graves. So, with the conviction that the life here is the portal to the life hereafter, passed away the man who in the words of his disciple was of all men the most excellent, the most wise, and the most just.

CHAPTER III.

FROM THE RETURN OF THE TEN THOUSAND TO THE BATTLE OF LEUKTRA.

Six months, perhaps six weeks, sufficed to show the most vehement of the Spartan allies what sort of bargain they had made and what kind of work they had been helping to do. The day which saw the downfall of the Athenian walls was for them the triumph of the gospel which Brasidas had preached. Their eyes were opened when a few days or a few months later it became plain that the freedom which they had helped to win meant freedom only for the Spartans. They had been looking forward to a time when each city should be left to manage its own affairs, without visits from Athenian and other tributegatherers: they now found each city assessed in sums the total of which yielded a thousand talents, while the Akropolis became the stronghold of a Peloponnesian garrison under a Spartan harmost.

Foiled in upholding the rule of the Thirty at Athens, Lysandros found that he had plenty to do when he was sent by the Spartans to the eastern coasts of the Egean. His zeal on behalf of the Dekarchies which he had established called forth complaints not only from the cities but from Pharnabazos. The latter could not be disregarded; and Lysandros, recalled home, found the position of a simple citizen so intolerable that he besought leave to undertake a pilgrimage to the Libyan oracle of Amoun. He went also to Dodona and to Delphoi; and at each he sought encouragement for the plan which, as he hoped, might make him one of the Spartan kings. The goal, we might think, was not much worth the effort of seeking it. Sparta was ruled not by the kings, but by the ephors, whose commissioners now hampered their action even in the command of the Spartan armies. Still it was possible that by a man of powerful will the office might be made the means of exercising a largely extended influence. Unable to secure it for himself, he used all his strength to bring about the election of one on whose obedience he felt that he could count. He found him

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