and was uncertain.  His sayings had such a lofty, hidden wisdom that very few people understood him:  his utterances seemed either paradoxical, or unintelligible, or sophistical.  “To the mentally proud and mentally feeble he was equally a bore.”  Most people probably thought him a nuisance, since he was always about with his questions, puzzling some, confuting others, and reproving all,—­careless of love or hatred, and contemptuous of all conventionalities.  So severely dialectical was he that he seemed to be a hair-splitter.  The very Sophists, whose ignorance and pretension he exposed, looked upon him as a quibbler; although there were some—­so severely trained was the Grecian mind—­who saw the drift of his questions, and admired his skill.  Probably there are few educated people in these times who could have understood him any more easily than a modern audience, even of scholars, could take in one of the orations of Demosthenes, although they might laugh at the jokes of the sage, and be impressed with the invectives of the orator.

And yet there were defects in Socrates.  He was most provokingly sarcastic; he turned everything to ridicule; he remorselessly punctured every gas-bag he met; he heaped contempt on every snob; he threw stones at every glass house,—­and everybody lived in one.  He was not quite just to the Sophists, for they did not pretend to teach the higher life, but chiefly rhetoric, which is useful in its way.  And if they loved applause and riches, and attached themselves to those whom they could utilize, they were not different from most fashionable teachers in any age.  And then Socrates was not very delicate in his tastes.  He was too much carried away by the fascinations of Aspasia, when he knew that she was not virtuous,—­although it was doubtless her remarkable intellect which most attracted him, not her physical beauty; since in the “Menexenus” (by many ascribed to Plato) he is made to recite at length one of her long orations, and in the “Symposium” he is made to appear absolutely indelicate in his conduct with Alcibiades, and to make what would be abhorrent to us a matter of irony, although there was the severest control of the passions.

To me it has always seemed a strange thing that such an ugly, satirical, provoking man could have won and retained the love of Xanthippe, especially since he was so careless of his dress, and did so little to provide for the wants of the household.  I do not wonder that she scolded him, or became very violent in her temper; since, in her worst tirades, he only provokingly laughed at her.  A modern Christian woman of society would have left him.  But perhaps in Pagan Athens she could not have got a divorce.  It is only in these enlightened and progressive times that women desert their husbands when they are tantalizing, or when they do not properly support the family, or spend their time at the clubs or in society,—­into which it would seem that Socrates was received, even