Page:A Day in Athens with Socrates (1884).djvu/151



Athenian youth at the age of eighteen was enrolled upon the list of citizens, and admitted to the rights and duties of manhood.

This passage occurs in the description of Hermes, when he meets Odysseus and gives him the charmed herb “moly” as a protection from the wiles of Circe: —

By this allusion to the youth of Alcibiades, Plato seems to suggest that the dialogue took place in the year 433 B.C., when Alcibiades was eighteen years old. But no date can be assigned which does not involve grave chronological inaccuracies, since it is impossible that all the characters should have appeared together at the respective ages here ascribed to them.

was a Greek colony in Thrace, which, although the birthplace of the philosophers Protagoras, Democritus, and Leucippus, of the historian Hecataeus, and of other noted men, was proverbial for the dulness of its inhabitants. Thus Rh