CHAPTER VI.

SOCRATES.

BEFORE you rises a rocky hill; white lines gird its rugged sides, one of which is so broken as to be almost a precipice. That which at first sight looks like a glistening crown set lightly on the sombre mass, is a marble temple standing out in sharp relief against the clear blue sky....

The dazzling sunshine upon the grey-green slopes around this hill makes you shade your watering eyes with your hand. Then you see that the white lines you took to be strata of chalk are buildings, seemingly built into the very rock itself; that streets of these stony edifices lie in irregular lines about the plain; that the groves of ashengrey olives lie close against marble temples; that the tiny moving specks upon the white roads are not illusion, but real moving figures..

As you walk onwards towards the city, you skirt the hill, and come upon its sloping and accessible side. Here the marble buildings abound, and you begin to distinguish colossal statues standing loftily upon their massive pedestals.

There is a certain bustle and activity. . . Drays drawn by thin oxen bear huge masses of stone lumberingly along the hard white roads. Sheds and huts by the roadside are flanked by piles of stones, slabs, and boulders. The sharp clink of the hammer, the chip, chip, of the busy chisel, is to be heard far and near. The very dust that the warm breezes-those same breaths of summer air which fanned your cheek and toyed with your

hair as they brought you warm spicy odours—are playing with in the corners is powdered marble. The children are making houses with discarded glittering lumps . . . brown little barefoot creatures, their shaggy locks grey with dust. They cry out to each other in a monotonous but musical chant as they run here and there picking up their building materials. Then you meet a dark, bearded man with a yoke on his shoulders, from which curiously shaped earthen pots are slung. He wears a loose, coarse garment, and is barefoot. . . . He is a honey-carrier from Mount Hymettus, whose blue summit you can see rising beyond that terraced hill. This dray coming heavily along is laden with the pure white stone from the Hymettus quarries. The girl who wears her loose robe with a certain grace, who supports her basket with one arm, while the other rests lightly on one of the shafts, is a flower-girl. She and the dark-browed, sullen-faced driver, who paces by the oxen, now and then exclaiming to them in a sing-song which seems all diphthongs and soft consonants, seem to be friends. At all events, she keeps up a monotonous chatter as they proceed. More building sheds, more busy masons. . . Why all this building?

You look at the landscape more closely, and see that many of the large edifices have been injured, and that some are almost ruins. The stonemasons and statuaries have enough to do, for proud Athens in the year 440 before Christ declined to be a city wrecked by her enemies; and when disaster came to her, she renewed her plumage, and was a veritable Phoenix until her very life-blood had been sucked out by her vampire foes.

This is Athens. . . . The many-pillared edifice crowning the rocky hill is the Parthenon, the temple of Venus; the mound itself, which you rightly guess to be some 500 feet high, is the Acropolis. The pillared portico yonder is the entrance to the theatre. .

...

That quadrangle, where a number of lithe, brown

limbed youths are throwing themselves about-some wrestling, others trying their strength by the bar or lifting weights—is a Palæstra or gymnasium for boys.

You can see robed figures standing about-they are the tutors, parents, and friends, watching the practice. Those white dots surrounding the cypresses that flank the winding road yonder in even rows are tombs. The cemeteries proper lie outside the wall; but this is the road leading from the Dipylum Gate to the Academy, where it is a special honour to be buried, and where there are the graves of many heroes who fell fighting for their country. The white dots are their monuments.

Let your eye travel citywards along that road. You see a plot of ground, separated from the olive groves and fields round about, planted with avenues of trees and intersected by shining little streams. In its centre is a temple-like mansion. . . . It is the Academy, which you must visit in many succeeding pages, for there Plato passed the principal part of his teaching life.

The other side of the Acropolis are important buildings you will see in their turn.

Now you must leave the main road, and turn into a narrow street of irregularly-built low houses. Some are little better than huts, seemingly built of lumps of rock piled one upon the other. In some ways these ancient Athenians were mere savages, while in others they were farther advanced than we Anglo-Saxons of to-day. While they wrought magnificent statues of carved ivory, coloured marbles, and gold, their actual physical wants were treated as we should treat a demand for superfluous luxuries. It was an afterthought to legislate for them while it was possible to hide them under a veil of magnificent and luxurious misery.

These huts, with crooked doorways and unglazed apertures doing duty for windows, are not the holes and corners where indigent labourers hide themselves at night. They are respectable family dwellings.

There is one somewhat larger than the rest. Voices and the sound of the chisel are to be heard. A brawny, broad-shouldered youth, bared to the waist, is chipping away at a block of marble. As he stoops, you notice the muscles twisting about his arms and against his shoulderblades like brown snakes. He does not stop working, though the young man in the purple robe, with goldembroidered border and tassels, is talking to him. This is Crito, a young man of property, who can afford to wear rings on his carefully-tended hands and to curl and perfume his hair and beard. His father and this young man's father, Sophroniscus, a sculptor who was scarcely successful, were friends. How can Crito, the "curled darling," affect the company of this rough young "stonescraper," as he was afterwards sarcastically called by satirists? As he raises his round, massive head, you exclaim to yourself at his ugliness. His coarse, sunburnt face is broad and ill-moulded, his nose flat, with widespread nostrils, his eyes prominent, and looking out from under the shaggy eyebrows with a "bull-like," stolid stare -a stare which is always annoying when given by a human being, because it either means very much or nothing at all. In an animal it expresses puzzled or unmeaning astonishment. In a fellow-creature it arises from utter stupidity, or is the dull surface of unfathomable mental depths.

In the case of the ugly young sculptor it is the latter. For the chosen companion of the rich and elegant Crito is the son of Sophroniscus the sculptor, and Philarete the midwife, and his name is Socrates.

He has been self-contained and puzzling since childhood. He accepted his father's choice of a profession placidly, and placidly he chipped away at the marble, as he worked away with his keen, strong mind the while at some problem he intended to solve. Traditions tell that he listened to and talked with Parmenides and Zeno. The probability is that he contrived to hear all and each

of the clever men that spoke publicly at Athens. Philosophy was then to the blasé young men of Athens as a refreshing sea-breeze to a tropical traveller, as bread to a palate sickened of sweets. It revived their drooping minds, exhausted by debauchery. The young Socrates attracted and irritated simultaneously. He listened with respect to any one who chose to honour him with his conversation, seemed impressed by his opinions, and asked further questions. The first question exposed the weak points of the converser's statement, whatever it might be; the second overthrew the defence set up to protect the weak points; the remainder destroyed the arguments attempted, until the one speaking to Socrates had mentally "not a leg left to stand upon."

These passages-of-arms were amusing and stimulating to bystanders, but scarcely so to the one who was conversing with the mysterious youth. It was, doubtless, during or after a controversial conversation with Socrates that the rich young Crito determined that this great power should not be lost to the world. He, as it were, laid his purse at the feet of Socrates, imploring him to leave statuary and become a philosophical teacher. How long he had to persuade is not told; eventually it appears that Socrates accepted the offer, and "studied for the profession."

Friendship between men in ancient Greece was a different sentiment to the friendship we know. The restless, passionate Greek nature was an embodied aspiration after the Good, the Beautiful,-in another word, after Perfection. It threw itself violently into every channel that seemed to lead to the desired end, and, when disappointed, left that channel only to seek another. Thus we find the manhood of Greece disappointed with and most decidedly underrating women, of whom in their records and histories we hear little or nothing—and giving all their affection to members of their own sex. A man or a youth with personal charms, or gifted with mental power or physical

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