ciation of both of them with Socrates must have been more continued and intimate; for both of them are made to take great part in the Platonic dialogues, while the attachment of Socrates to Alcibiades is represented as stronger than that which he ever felt towards any other man; a fact not difficult to explain, since the latter, notwithstanding his ungovernable dispositions, was distinguished in his youth not less for capacity and forward impulse, than for beauty; and since youthful beauty fired the imagination of the Greeks, especially that of Socrates, more than the charms of the other sex. From the year 420 B.C., in which the activity of Alcibiades as a political leader commenced, it seems unlikely that he could have seen much of Socrates, and after the year 415 в.с. the fact is impossible; since in that year he became a permanent exile, with the exception of three or four months in the year 407 в.с. At the moment of the trial of Socrates, therefore, his connection with Alcibiades must at least have been a fact long past and gone. Respecting Critias, we make out less; and as he was a kinsman of Plato, one of the wellknown companions of Socrates, and present at his trial, and himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with Socrates may have continued longer; at least a color was given for so asserting. Though the supposition that any of the vices either of Critias or Alcibiades were encouraged, or even tolerated, by Socrates, can have arisen in none but prejudiced or ill-informed minds, yet it is certain that such a supposition was entertained; and that it placed him before the public in an altered position after the enormities of the Thirty. Anytus, incensed with him already on the subject of his son, would be doubly incensed against him as the reputed tutor of Critias.

Of Meletus, the primary, though not the most important accuser, we know only that he was a poet; of Lycon, that he was a rhetor. Both these classes had been alienated by the cross-examining dialectics to which many of their number had been exposed by Socrates. They were the last men to bear such an exposure with patience, and their enmity, taken as a class rarely unanimous, was truly formidable when it bore upon any single individual.

We know nothing of the speeches of either of the accusers before the dicastery, except what can be picked out from the remarks in Xenophon and the defence of Plato. Of the three counts of the indictment, the second was the easiest for them to support, on plausible grounds. That Socrates was a religious innovator, would be considered as proved by the peculiar divine sign, of which he was wont to speak freely and publicly, and which visited no one except himself. Accordingly, in the "Platonic Defence," he never really replies to this second charge. He questions Meletus before the dicastery, and the latter is represented as answering, that he meant to accuse Socrates of not believing in the gods at all; to which imputed disbelief Socrates answers with an emphatic negative. In support of the first count, however, the charge of general disbelief in the gods recognized by the city, - nothing in his conduct could be cited; for he was exact in his legal worship like other citizens, and even more than others, if Xenophon is correct. But it would appear that the old calumnies of the Aristophanic "Clouds" were revived, and that the effect of that witty drama, together with similar efforts of Eupolis and others, perhaps hardly less witty, was still enduring; a striking proof that these comedians were no impotent libellers. Socrates manifests greater apprehension of the effect of the ancient impressions, than of the speeches which had been just delivered against him: but these latter speeches would of course tell, by refreshing the sentiments of the past, and reviving the Aristophanic picture of Socrates, as a speculator on physics as well as a rhetorical teacher for pleading, making the worse appear the bet