, because he did not fancy he knew what he did not know,
and did not profess to have any wisdom of his own. It was quite
true--all his thinking had only made him quite sure that he knew nothing;
but he was also sure that he had an inward voice within him, telling him
which was the way in which he should walk. He did not think much about
the wild tales of the Greek gods and goddesses; he seems to have
considered them as fancies that had grown up on some forgotten truth, and
he said a healthy mind would not dwell upon them; but he was quite sure
that above all these there was one really true Most High God, who
governed the world, rewarded the good, punished the bad, and sent him the
inward voice, which he tried to obey to the utmost of his power, and by
so doing, no doubt, his inward sight grew clearer and clearer. Even in
his home his gentleness and patience were noted, so that when his
scolding wife Xantippe, after railing at him sharply, threw some water at
his head, he only smiled, and said, "After thunder follows rain." He did
not open a school under a portico, but, as he did his work, all the
choicest spirits of Greece resorted to him to argue out these questions
in search of truth; and many accounts of these conversations have been
preserved to us by his two best pupils, Plato and Xenophon.

[Picture: Socrates] But in the latter days of the Peloponnesian war, when
the Athenians were full of bitterness, and had no great deeds to
undertake outside their city, a foolish set of arguing pretenders to
philosophy arose, who were called the Sophists, and who spent their time
in mere empty talk, often against the gods; and the great Socrates was
mixed up in people's fancy with them. A comic writer arose, named
Aristophanes, who, seeing the Athenians fallen from the greatness of
their fathers, tried to laugh them into shame at themselves. He
particularly disliked Euripides, because his tragedies seemed, like the
Sophists, not to respect the gods; and he also more justly hated
Alkibiades for his overbearing ways, and his want of all real respect for
gods or men. It was very hard on Socrates that the faults of his pupils
should be charged against him; but Aristophanes had set all Athens
laughing by a comedy called "The Clouds," in which a good-for-nothing
young man, evidently meant for Alkibiades, gets his father into debt by
buying horses, and, under the teaching of Socrates, learns both to cheat
his creditors and to tr