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* Gilbert Murray:  Ancient Greek Literature
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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 was wont to joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife, assisting at the birth of men’s bodies; he himself was a midwife of souls.  How he drew men to him—­of the power he had—­let Alcibiades bear witness.  “As for myself,” says Alcibiades, “were I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would tell you on oath how his words have moved me—­ay, and how they move me still.  When I listen to him my heart beats with a more than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears flow.  Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way—­ never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition:  but this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as I am what I am.  Even now, if I were to listen, I could not resist.  So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against this siren’s song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old sitting at his feet.  No one would ever think that I had shame in me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates.”

Poor Alciabes! whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own and for his city’s destruction by stopping his ears against his Teacher!  Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens... only Athens would not be saved... and he could not have saved her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;—­what a picture of duality it is!