wrestling in the palæstra, where his breadth of shoulders stood him in good stead, and winning prizes at the Isthmian games. He also found time to study "the old masters" of philosophy, and (as might be expected) the two whose works attracted him the most were Heraclitus and Pythagoras. The melancholy of the one, and the mysticism of the other, found an echo in his own thoughts.
He was fifteen at the time of the expedition to Sicily, and was probably among the crowd which watched the great fleet sail out of the harbour of Piræus in all the pomp and circumstance of war; and two years afterwards he must have shared in the general despair, when the news came that the fleet and the flower of the army had perished, and with them the hopes of Athens.
Then Decelea (only fifteen miles from the city) was fortified by the Spartans, and proved a very thorn in the side of Attica; for flocks and herds were destroyed, slaves fled thither in numbers, and watch had to be kept by the Athenians night and day, to check the continual sallies made from thence by the enemy. Plato was now eighteen, and was enrolled in the list which corresponded to the modern Landwehr, and had to take his share in that harassing garrison duty which fell on rich and poor alike, when the citizens (as Thucydides tells us) slept in their armour on the ramparts, and Athens more resembled a military fort than a city.
Then followed the loss of prestige and the defection of allies; for the subject islands either openly revolted
