terature into the bargain!--But
to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter
in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself
began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not
so far above that of his father. A group of the Graces carved by
him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred
years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one
may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias. But, successful
or not, he seems soon to have given it up. Of his youth we know
very little. Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and
also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of
terrible passions: anger hardly to be governed, and vehement
desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair." *
By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'--a transgression of
right action. He set out to master himself: a tremendous and
difficult realm to master.

------
* Gilbert Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature_
------

We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he
was absolute monarch of that realm. We do not know when he
abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some
fame as a public teacher. We catch glimpse of him as a soldier:
from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in
424; and at Amphipolis in 422. Thus to do the hoplite, carrying
a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some
constitution; and indeed he had;--furthermore, he played the
part with distinguished bravery--though wont to fall at times
into inconvenient fits of abstraction. Beyond all this, for the
outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating,
extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor;
that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself;
an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you
cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect
in which he does not call for love.

And men did love him; and he them. He saw in the youth of
Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all
the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such,
and drew them towards their soulhood. Such love and insight is
the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher: who sees divinity
within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees
the God within the marble; and calls it forth. He