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The main original materials from which a rational judgment 

 must now be formed, are not numerous : various dialogues and 

 memoranda put together by hearers and friends of Socrates, 

 which appear once to have existed, being now lost. Cicero 

 speaks in praise of the " Socratici viri." On the one hand we 

 have the beautiful and affecting testimony of Plato, in his 

 Dialogues, professing to record the conversation of Socrates, 

 his teacher, more especially the Phsedo, recording his last 

 hoars, which Cicero tells us he could never read without 

 weeping. He also gives us the noble Apology or Defence 

 which Socrates made before his judges. We have, again, the 

 clear and circumstantial details given in the Memorabilia of 

 Xenophon, another eminent disciple of Socrates, totally unlike 

 Plato in the character of his mind, and in the nature of his 

 composition, yet leaving an accordant result in the mind of 

 the reader. It is in itself no slight evidence in fayour of 

 Socrates that two such men as Plato and Xenophon were his 

 disciples and friends in life, and warm eulogists after his death. 

 Now what have we on the other side to set against this testi- 

 mony ? We have, in addition to the mere facts of his 

 accusation before the judges, and of his condemnation and 

 sentence by them, little else than the ridiculous attack made 

 upon him by Aristophanes, in his comedy of The Clouds ; an 

 attack, however, to which Socrates significantly alludes in his 

 defence, according to Plato, as one of the most powerful influ- 

 ences against liim, though made many years previously. An 

 argument as to moral character derived from Athenian comedy, 

 which enjoyed and abused the most unbounded license, which 

 consisted of the broadest and grossest caricatures, which 

 delighted in personal and political allusions, aimed at the 

 greatest men, including Pericles himself, and the main object 

 of which was to inspire uproarious mirth in thirty thousand 

 spectators ; must surely be of a very precarious and suspicious 

 nature. It is the very essence of caricature to invest dignified 

 and venerable objects with ludicrous associations. The greater 



