HOW SOCRATES SUPPRESSED THE PRYDE AND HAUTINESSE OF ALCIBIADES

Socrates, seeing Alcibiades puft up with pryde and broyling in ambitious behavioure (because possessor of such great wealth and lorde of so large lands) brought him to a place where a table did hang containing a discription of the worlde universall.  Then did Socrates will Alcibiades to seeke out the situation of Athens, which when he found Socrates proceeded further and willed him to point out that plot of ground where his lands and lordships lay.  Alcibiades, having sought a long time and yet never the nearer, sayde to Socrates that his livings were not set forth in that table, nor any discription of his possession therein made evident.  When Socrates, rebuked with this secret quip:  “And art thou so arrogant (sayeth he) and so hautie in heart for that which is no parcell of the world?”

OF CERTAINE WASTGOODES AND SPENDTHRIFTES

Prodigall lavishing of substance, unthrifty and wastifull spending, voluptuousness of life and palpable sensuality brought Pericles, Callias, the sonne of Hipponicus, and Nicias not only to necessitie, but to povertie and beggerie.  Who, after their money waxed scant, and turned to a very lowe ebbe, they three drinking a poysoned potion one to another (which was the last cuppe that they kissed with their lippes) passed out of this life (as it were from a banquet) to the powers infernall.

AESCHINES

(389-314 B.C.)

The life and oratory of Aeschines fall fittingly into that period of Greek history when the free spirit of the people which had created the arts of Pindar and Sophocles, Pericles, Phidias, and Plato, was becoming the spirit of slaves and of savants, who sought to forget the freedom of their fathers in learning, luxury, and the formalism of deducers of rules.  To this slavery Aeschines himself contributed, both in action with Philip of Macedon and in speech.  Philip had entered upon a career of conquest; a policy legitimate in itself and beneficial as judged by its larger fruits, but ruinous to the advanced civilization existing in the Greek City-States below, whose high culture was practically confiscated to spread out over a waste of semi-barbarism and mix with alien cultures.  Among his Greek sympathizers, Aeschines was perhaps his chief support in the conquest of the Greek world that lay to the south within his reach.

[Illustration:  AESCHINES]

Aeschines was born in 389 B.C., six years before his lifelong rival Demosthenes.  If we may trust that rival’s elaborate details of his early life, his father taught a primary school and his mother was overseer of certain initiatory rites, to both of which occupations Aeschines gave his youthful hand and assistance.  He became in time a third-rate actor, and the duties of clerk or scribe presently made him familiar with the executive and legislative affairs of Athens.  Both vocations served as an apprenticeship to the public speaking toward which his ambition was turning.  We hear of his serving as a heavy-armed soldier in various Athenian expeditions, and of his being privileged to carry to Athens, in 349 B.C., the first news of the victory of Tamynae, in Euboea, in reward for the bravery he had shown in the battle.