this place, grant me to be beautiful in soul, and all that I possess of outward things to be at peace with them within. Teach me to think wisdom the only riches. And give me so much wealth, and so much only, as a good and holy man could manage or enjoy. Phædrus, want we anything more? For my prayer is finished."
Phæd. "Pray that I may be even as yourself; for the blessings of friends are common."[1]
It was hardly possible that Socrates should be popular—puzzling and refuting all he met. "The world cannot make me out" (he says to Theætetus), "therefore they only say of me that I am an extremely strange being, who drive men to their wits' end." His passion for conversation in itself would annoy many; and they probably regarded him as a garrulous and impertinent pedant, whom it was wise to avoid. "I hate this beggar who is eternally talking" (says Eupolis, the comedy-writer), "and who has debated every subject upon earth, except where to get his dinner." And often this vague feeling of dislike would grow into a strong personal hatred. For no man likes to be defeated on his own ground, or to be forced to confess himself ignorant of his favourite subject or theory, still less to be stultified and made ridiculous before a crowd of bystanders. There were numbers who had suffered this humiliation from the unsparing "irony" of Socrates, and their collective enmity grew daily more formidable. Again, few who had seen the "Clouds" of Aristophanes acted some twenty years previously, had forgotten Socrates, as he appeared on the stage,—dangling in a basket between heaven and earth,—the master of "the think-
- ↑ Sewell's Dialogues of Plato, 199.
