lives painted with such unsparing severity, nor was it pleasant to the Sophists and rhetoricians to see their idols overthrown, and they themselves exposed as false teachers and shallow pretenders.  No one likes to see himself held up to scorn and mockery; nobody is willing to be shown up as ignorant and conceited.  The people of Athens did not like to see their gods ridiculed, for the logical sequence of the teachings of Socrates was to undermine the popular religion.  It was very offensive to rich and worldly people to be told that their riches and pleasures were transient and worthless.  It was impossible that those rhetoricians who gloried in words, those Sophists who covered up the truth, those pedants who prided themselves on their technicalities, those politicians who lived by corruption, those worldly fathers who thought only of pushing the fortunes of their children, should not see in Socrates their uncompromising foe; and when he added mockery and ridicule to contempt, and piqued their vanity, and offended their pride, they bitterly hated him and wished him out of the way.  My wonder is that he should have been tolerated until he was seventy years of age.  Men less offensive than he have been burned alive, and stoned to death, and tortured on the rack, and devoured by lions in the amphitheatre.  It is the fate of prophets to be exiled, or slandered, or jeered at, or stigmatized, or banished from society,—­to be subjected to some sort of persecution; but when prophets denounce woes, and utter invectives, and provoke by stinging sarcasms, they have generally been killed.  No matter how enlightened society is, or tolerant the age, he who utters offensive truths will be disliked, and in some way punished.

So Socrates must meet the fate of all benefactors who make themselves disliked and hated.  First the great comic poet Aristophanes, in his comedy called the “Clouds,” held him up to ridicule and reproach, and thus prepared the way for his arraignment and trial.  He is made to utter a thousand impieties and impertinences.  He is made to talk like a man of the greatest vanity and conceit, and to throw contempt and scorn on everybody else.  It is not probable that the poet entered into any formal conspiracy against him, but found him a good subject of raillery and mockery, since Socrates was then very unpopular, aside from his moral teachings, for being declared by the oracle of Delphi the wisest man in the world, and for having been intimate with the two men whom the Athenians above all men justly execrated,—­Critias, the chief of the Thirty Tyrants whom Lysander had imposed, or at least consented to, after the Peloponnesian war; and Alcibiades, whose evil counsels had led to an unfortunate expedition, and who in addition had proved himself a traitor to his country.