Proceedings of british the growing financial pressure caused

by

the failure of the

great

Sicilian expedition,the land-blockade of Athens and the gradual destruction of her sea-power in the Decelean war, and the crazy Treor-ism of the ' Thirty\ and remember that for many years at any rate

wholly devoted himself to his spiritual readilysee that no inference can be drawn from his poverty in 399 to the wealth and social positionof his parents or to his own financial positionin the first fortyyears of his career. The more reasonable questionwould be how such a man, after such a career, could be so much as able to keep himself suppliedwith food and even in a positionto pay a fine of as much as a mina without askingfor time. And it is clear that in the Apology Socrates means
before his death Socrates had
*

vocation \

we can

to say that he not

could pay this much down

on

supplementthe offer,as was customary when not dischargethe penaltyimmediately,by imemnprtisonuntil the fine has been paid.
We may, I

the spot, since he does an offender could the

suggestionof

probably a sufficient basis for the statements about the family of Socrates which we find in the later writers appealedto by DiogenesLaertius ; in particularth,ere appears to be no real evidence that Socrates hseilm-f
think, infer that the Platonic notices
are

had ever followed statuary or any other craft. Plato's assertions about his youth and earlymanhood at least imply that he had from

satisfyhis passionfor science ',and figuresof the Graces which were shown to visitors to Athens as the work of Socrates prove only that these figureswere shown in a much later time as such, but nothing more.^ It is also worth while to note that Xenophon, who is still regardedin what may be called official quarters as so trustworthyan authorityon
the first abundant leisure to
'

the

late story of the

'

'

the facts of Socrates' life,never refers to his parentage or names either Sophroniscusor Phaenarete, except in the one brief passage in Hellenica /, where he refers to the behaviour of Socrates in the affair of the trial of the generalswho had commanded at Arginusae.There

speaks of the philosopherfor once as HcoKpccTTjH^co^pouiaKov 'AQrjvalos*In the one other placeoutside his Socratic discourses
he
*
' '

It is true, as Professor Gardner reminds me, that Pausanias appears to have seen these statues {Paus. i. 22. 8 ; ix. 35, 2). But in the former passage all that he says is thaj;the group was currentlyascribed to Socrates (/cat Xdpiras 'ScoKpdTT)

TToiTJo-TaOiP 2w(l)poviiTKXoevyova-i)SO, that he

can

hardlybe presumed
'original relief,
a

to be

speaking

with certainty on the point. See the full discussion of the point in Frazer, Pausanias s Descriptionof Greece, vol. ii,pp. 268-72, where the author comes to

the conclusion that Socrates

though

he admits the

certainlydid not execute possibilittyhat he may have

the

made

copy of it.

PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATE

About Socrates The paper which I have the honour of of the

laying

before my

Academy to-day is of the nature of an experiment which can make no claim to represent the results of extraordinaryresearch or profound speculation,but is,all the same, in my own opinion well worth the making. Its immediate interest is, no doubt, for the specialstudent of the historyof philosophicthought, but it should also prove in some degree attractive to every one who has a genuine interest in great literature,inasmuch as it aims at throwing some lighton the literarymethods of a great philosopher who was at the same time one of the world's greatest literaryand

colleagues a simple experiment,

question of the relation of the Socrates who figuresas the protagonist in all the most widely known of Plato's prose dramas to the Socrates who was a prominent figurein the
dramatic artists. The
Athens of the last half of the fifth

century

B.C.,

is,of

course,

albusteo-ly

thought on the fmeundta-l issues of science,ethics,and religion. It is also a questionof interest to the student of the historyof literaryforms. Even if we are indifferent to the whole history of the actual development of scientific thought, we can hardly as students of literature be equally indifferent to the general problem suggested by the sudden anpcpearin the earlyyears of the fourth century of a wholly new type of prose composition,the ^(OKpariKosXoyos or
critical for the historian of Hellenic
'

discourse of Socrates *.

About the fact of the emergence of this type of composition justat this particulardate there can be no conceivable doubt. Aristotle comments on the fact that the ' Socratic discourse is a distinct
'

literaryform,
versified Greek
'
'

in the Poetics 1447 b 2, where he associates it with the

mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and complains that the language possesses no genericname for the type, inasmuch as the word mime implies the use of verse, and is thus only appriparot-e to one speciesof a form for which prose is,as a matter of fact,
' '

suitable a medium as verse. What Aristotle took to be the dtins-ctive characteristics of this literaryform is clear from the two
as

placethe recognitionof community of form between the mime and the Socratic discourse implies that, in Aristotle's opinion,the Socratic discourse by its realism'. For, as we know from the ancient notices
remarks he makes about it. In the first
' ' ' ' *

the
'

'

is dtins-guished

of the 'mimes' and

can see

for ourselves from Theocritus' brilliant