himself. And though men would not, as a general principle, have extended such toleration to religious subjects, yet the established habit in reference to other matters greatly influenced their practice, and rendered them more averse to any positive severity against avowed dissenters from the received religious belief. It is certain that there was at Athens both a keener intellectual stimulus, and greater freedom as well of thought as of speech, than in any other city of Greece. The long toleration of Socrates is one example of this general fact, while his trial proves little, and his execution nothing, against it, as will presently

appear.

There must doubtless have been particular circumstances, of which we are scarcely at all informed, which induced his accusers to prefer their indictment at the actual moment, in spite of the advanced age of Socrates.

In the first place, Anytus, one of the accusers of Socrates, appears to have become incensed against him on private grounds. The son of Anytus had manifested interest in his conversation, and Socrates, observing in the young man intellectual impulse and promise, endeavored to dissuade his father from bringing him up to his own trade of a leather seller. It was in this general way that a great proportion of the antipathy against Socrates was excited, as he himself tells us in the "Platonic Apology." The young men were those to whom he chiefly addressed himself, and who, keenly relishing his conversation, often carried home new ideas which displeased their fathers; hence the general charge against Socrates, of corrupting the youth. Now this circumstance had recently happened in the peculiar case of Anytus, a rich tradesman, a leading man in politics, and just now of peculiar influence in the city, because he had been one of the leading fellow-laborers with Thrasybulus in the expulsion of the Thirty, manifesting an energetic and meritorious patriotism. He, like Thrasybulus and many others, had sustained great loss of property during the oligarchical dominion; which perhaps made him the more strenuous in requiring that his son should pursue trade with assiduity, in order to restore the family fortunes. He seems, moreover, to have been an enemy of all teaching which went beyond the narrowest practicality, hating alike Socrates and the sophists.

While we can thus point out a recent occurrence, which had brought one of the most ascendant politicians in the city into special exasperation against Socrates, another circumstance which weighed him down was, his past connection with the deceased Critias and Alcibiades. Of these two men, the latter, though he had some great admirers, was on the whole odious; still more from his private insolence and enormities than from his public treason as an exile. But the name of Critias was detested, and deservedly detested, beyond that of any other man in Athenian history, as the chief director of the unmeasured spoliation and atrocities committed by the Thirty. That Socrates had educated both Critias and Alcibiades, was affirmed by the accusers, and seemingly believed by the general public, both at the time and afterwards. That both of them had been among those who conversed with him, when young men, is an unquestionable fact; to what extent, or down to what period, the conversation was carried, we cannot distinctly ascertain. Xenophon affirms that both of them frequented his society when young, to catch from him an argumentative facility which might be serviceable to their political ambition; that he curbed their violent and licentious propensities, so long as they continued to come to him; that both of them manifested a respectful obedience to him, which seemed in little consonance with their natural tempers; but that they soon quitted him, weary of such restraint, after having acquired as much as they thought convenient of his peculiar accomplishment. The writings of Plato, on the contrary, impress us with the idea that the asso