Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/492

 470 HISTORY OF GREECE. of Plato, one of the well-known companions of Sokrats, and present at his trial, and himself an accomplished and literary man, his association with Sokrates may have continued longer ; at least a color was given for so asserting. Though the suppo- sition that any of the vices either of Kritias or Alkibiades were encouraged, or even tolerated, by Sokrates, can have arisen in none but prejudiced or ill-informed minds, yet it is certain that such a supposition was entertained ; and that it placed him before the public in an altered position after the enormities of the Thirty. Anytus, incensed with him already on the subject of his son, would be doubly incensed against him as the reputed tutor of Kritias. Of Meletus, the primary, though not the most important accuser, we know only that he was a poet ; of Lykon, that he was a rhetor. Both these classes had been alienated by the cross-examining dialectics to which many of their number had been exposed by Sokrates. They were the last men to bear such an exposure with patience, and their enmity, taken as a class rarely unanimous, was truly formidable when it bore upon any single individual. We know nothing of the speeches of either of the accusers before the dikastery, except what can be picked out from the re marks in Xenophon and the defence of Plato. Of the three counts of the indictment, the second was the easiest for them to support, on plausible grounds. That Sokrates was a religious innovator, would be considered as proved by the peculiar divine ugn, of which he was wont to speak freely and publicly, and which visited no one except himself. Accordingly, in the " Pla- tonic Defence," he never really replies to this second charge. He questions Meletus before the dikastery, and the latter is rep- resented as answering, that he meant to accuse Sokrates of not believing in the gods at all ; l to which imputed disbelief Sok- rates answers with an emphatic negative. In support of the first count, however, the charge of general disbelief in the gods recognized by the city, nothing in his conduct could be cited ; for he was exact in his legal worship like other citizens, and even more than others, if Xenophon is correct. 2 But it would 1 Plate, Apol. Sok. c. 14, p. 26, C.
 * Xcn. Mem. i. 2, 64 ; i, 3. 1.