idn't know the plans--they were only privates
in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and
while working to assist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like
sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on shore
will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians
love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the
laborer's right to damn the man who gives him work.

Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this
pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also
leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival
that of Phidias and Pericles!

Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in
groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and
feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of
weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting
away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and
liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the
possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a
playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an
adjunct of religion.

Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny
of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made
her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse
is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family
facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of
the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and
troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings
requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."

Evidently Phaenarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we
hear of her being called to Mythaeia on a professional errand shortly
before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar
call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was
again taken along--from which we assume, following in the footsteps of
Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be
grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents
and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she
gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching
them by prec