eat respect for his father as a worn-out notion.
The beauty and the lisp of Alkibiades were imitated so as to make it
quite plain who was meant by the youth; and Socrates himself was
evidently represented by an actor in a hideous comic mask, caricaturing
the philosopher's snub nose and ugly features. The play ended by the
young man's father threatening to burn down the house of Socrates, with
him in it. This had been written twenty years before, but it had been
acted and admired again and again, together with the other comedies of
Aristophanes--one about a colony of birds who try to build a city in the
air, and of whom the chorus was composed; and another, called "The
Frogs," still more droll, and all full of attacks on the Sophists.

Thus the Athenians had a general notion that Socrates was a corrupter of
youth and a despiser of the gods, for in truth some forms of worship,
like the orgies of Bacchus, and other still worse rites which had been
brought in from the East, were such that no good man could approve them.
One of the thirty tyrants had at one time been a pupil of his, and this
added to the ill-feeling against him; and while Xenophon was still away
in Asia, in the year 399, the philosopher was brought to trial on three
points, namely, that he did not believe in the gods of Athens, that he
brought in new gods, and that he misled young men; and for this his
accusers demanded that he should be put to death.

Socrates pleaded his own cause before the council of the Areopagus. He
flatly denied unbelief in the gods of his fathers, but he defended his
belief in his genius or in-dwelling voice, and said that in this he was
only like those who drew auguries from the notes of birds, thunder, and
the like; and as for his guidance of young men, he called on his accusers
to show whether he had ever led any man from virtue to vice. One of them
answered that he knew those who obeyed and followed Socrates more than
their own parents; to which he replied that such things sometimes
happened in other matters--men consulted physicians about their health
rather than their fathers, and obeyed their generals in war, not their
fathers; and so in learning, they might follow him rather than their
fathers. "Because I am thought to have some power of teaching youth, O
my judges!" he ended, "is that a reason why I should suffer death? My
accusers may procure that judgment, but hurt me they cannot. To fear
death is to seem wise witho