did sacrifice and festival banquet, and joy came
back to Athens again. A new era had begun for the city, not one of
dominion and empire, but one marked by some share of her old dignity and
importance in Greece.

_SOCRATES AND ALCIBIADES._

During the period of the Peloponnesian war two men became strikingly
prominent in Athens, a statesman and a philosopher, as unlike each other
in character, appearance, aims, and methods as two persons could well
be, yet the most intimate of friends, and long dividing between them the
admiration of the Athenians. These were the historically famous
Alcibiades and Socrates. Alcibiades was a leader in action, Socrates a
leader in thought; thus they controlled the two great dominions of human
affairs.

Of these two, Socrates was vastly the nobler and higher, Alcibiades much
the more specious and popular. Democratic Athens was never long without
its aristocratic leader. For many years it had been Pericles. It now
became Alcibiades, a man whose career and character were much more like
those of Themistocles of old than of the sedate and patriotic Pericles.

Alcibiades was the Adonis of Athens, noted for his beauty, the charm of
his manner, his winning personality, qualities which made all men his
willing captives. He was of high birth, great wealth, and luxurious and
pleasure-loving disposition, yet with a remarkable power of
accommodating himself to circumstances, and becoming all things to all
men. While numbers of high-born Athenians admired him for his
extraordinary beauty of person, Socrates saw in him admirable qualities
of mind, and loved him with a warm affection, which Alcibiades as warmly
returned. The philosopher gained the greatest influence over his
youthful friend, taught him to despise affectation and revere virtue,
and did much to develop in him noble qualities of thought and
aspiration.

Yet nature had made Alcibiades, and nature's work is hard to undo. He
was a man of hasty impulse and violent temper, a man destitute of the
spirit of patriotism, and in very great measure it was to this brilliant
son of Athens that that city owed its lamentable fate.

No greater contrast could be imagined than was shown by these almost
inseparable friends. Alcibiades was tall, shapely, remarkably handsome,
fond of showy attire and luxurious surroundings, full of animal spirits,
rapid and animated in speech, and aristocratic in sentiment; Socrates
short, thick-set, remarkably ug