and checked him at any important crisis of his life, had forbidden him to take part in the affairs of the state. He was, however, devoted to Athens; and except on military service, we are told that he never left the city walls. Two Thessalian princes once tried to tempt him, by lavish offers of money, to settle at their courts; but he replied with noble independence that it did not become him to accept benefits which he could never hope to return, and that his bodily wants were few, for he could buy four measures of meal for an obolus at Athens, and there was excellent spring-water to be got there—for nothing.
One secret of the influence exercised by Socrates lay in his genial humour, and in his entire freedom from conventionality. He was not (he says himself) as other men are. He conversed in the open air with all chance-comers, rich and poor alike, instead of immuring himself in a lecture-room. He would take no pay, while the Sophists round him were realising fortunes. Instead of wasting time in the barren field of science, or wearying his hearers with the subtleties of rhetoric, he discussed the great practical questions of life and morality, and, as Cicero said, "brought down philosophy from heaven to earth." What is Truth? What is Virtue? What is Justice?—or, as he put it himself, "All the good and evil that has befallen a man in his home,"—such were the subjects of his daily conversation. He was the first who openly asserted that
"The proper study of mankind is man;"—
that is, man's nature and happiness, his virtues and
