mortal enemy of the Sophists, whom he encountered, as Pascal did the Jesuits, with wit, irony, puzzling questions, and remorseless logic.  It is true that Socrates and his great successors Plato and Aristotle were called “Sophists,” but only as all philosophers or wise men were so called.  The Sophists as a class had incurred the odium of being the first teachers who received pay for the instruction they imparted.  The philosophers generally taught for the love of truth.  The Sophists were a natural and necessary and very useful development of their time, but they were distinctly on a lower level than the Philosophers, or lovers of wisdom.

Like the earlier philosophers, Socrates disdained wealth, ease, and comfort,—­but with greater devotion than they, since he lived in a more corrupt age, when poverty was a disgrace and misfortune a crime, when success was the standard of merit, and every man was supposed to be the arbiter of his own fortune, ignoring that Providence who so often refuses the race to the swift, and the battle to the strong.  He was what in our time would be called eccentric.  He walked barefooted, meanly clad, and withal not over cleanly, seeking public places, disputing with everybody willing to talk with him, making everybody ridiculous, especially if one assumed airs of wisdom or knowledge,—­an exasperating opponent, since he wove a web around a man from which he could not be extricated, and then exposed him to ridicule in the wittiest city of the world.  He attacked everybody, and yet was generally respected, since it was errors rather than persons, opinions rather than vices, that he attacked; and this he did with bewitching eloquence and irresistible fascination, so that though he was poor and barefooted, a Silenus in appearance, with thick lips, upturned nose, projecting eyes, unwieldy belly, he was sought by Alcibiades and admired by Aspasia.  Even Xanthippe, a beautiful young woman, very much younger than he, a woman fond of the comforts and pleasures of life, was willing to marry him, although it is said that she turned out a “scolding wife” after the res angusta domi had disenchanted her from the music of his voice and the divinity of his nature.  “I have heard Pericles,” said the most dissipated and voluptuous man in Athens, “and other excellent orators, but was not moved by them; while this Marsyas—­this Satyr—­so affects me that the life I lead is hardly worth living, and I stop my ears as from the Sirens, and flee as fast as possible, that I may not sit down and grow old in listening to his talk.”

Socrates learned his philosophy from no one, and struck out an entirely new path.  He declared his own ignorance, and sought to convince other people of theirs.  He did not seek to reveal truth so much as to expose error.  And yet it was his object to attain correct ideas as to moral obligations.  He proclaimed the sovereignty of virtue and the immutability of justice.  He sought to delineate and enforce