SOCRATES. 35 



Archelaus. He received lessons in music from Damon, a celebrated 

 professor of that science ; but did not learn to play on the lyre till he 

 had arrived at a much later period of his life. For the precepts of 

 eloquence he had recourse to Prodicus ; for those of poetry to Euenus, 

 of Paros, a celebrated elegiac poet ; geometry he learned from Theo- 

 doras. To these graver studies, he sought to add an acquaintance 

 with the delicacies of language and of thought ; and with that view, 

 he frequented the society of the most accomplished females at Athens, 

 particularly Aspasia, the mistress, and afterwards the wife, of Pericles ; 

 and Diotima, from whom he professed to have imbibed the philosophy 

 of love. 



He pursued these methods of obtaining knowledge, in preference, 

 to the course which had been followed by most of his predecessors, 

 who had thought it necessary to visit Egypt and the east, dewpirjs 

 eivlictv, as Herodotus says, for the sake of seeing what was to be 

 seen, and of obtaining some insight into the recondite wisdom of the 

 priests and magi ; whereas Socrates used to boast that he had never 

 left Athens, except on the service of the state. When he was called 

 upon, in his civil capacity, to discharge any of the offices imposed 

 upon him by the laws, he was active, conscientious, and disinterested. 

 He served as a soldier at the siege of Potidaea, (OL. Ixxxvi. 3), and Serves as a 

 Alcibiades, who was his comrade, testified that he surpassed all his 

 fellow-soldiers in his endurance of labour, hunger, and thirst; and 

 that he united the most perfect sobriety with great convivial cheer- 

 fulness. Alcibiades himself, when wounded, was rescued from the 

 most imminent danger by his friend and preceptor. After the con- 

 flict, the prize of valour having been adjudged to Socrates, he pre- 

 vailed upon the umpires to transfer it to Alcibiades. His second 

 campaign was in OL. Ixxxix. 1, when he distinguished himself at the 

 battle of Delium in Boeotia (where the Athenians were defeated) by 

 his valour in defence of Xenophon ; who having lost his horse in the 

 flight, and lying wounded on the ground, Socrates, who was on foot, 

 carried him on his shoulders to a considerable distance, walking 

 deliberately and firmly, and displaying a courage which deterred the 

 enemy from attacking him. He served again, the same year, in the 

 expedition against Amphipolis. Athenaeus endeavours to deprive 

 Socrates of the credit of these military achievements, taking for his 

 text a saying of Democrates, " that one could as easily make a lance 

 of a stalk of savory, as a perfect soldier of a Socrates;" and he 

 attempts to prove, partly by chronological computations, and partly 

 on the ground of improbability, that the account given by Plato is 

 untrue. But Plato is supported by the testimony of Xenophon 

 and Antisthenes ; both of whom lived so near the time when these 

 occurrences are said to have taken place, as to render it in the 

 highest degree improbable that they should have ventured to impose 

 a false account upon persons who knew the real state of the case. 

 The cavils of Athenseus have been satisfactorily refuted by Isaac 



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