Page:The trial and death of Socrates (1895).pdf/16

x year 469 His father, Sophroniscus, was a sculptor: his mother, Phænarete, a midwife. Nothing definite is known of his moral and intellectual development. There is no specific record of him at all until he served at the siege of Potidæa (432 -429 ) when he was nearly forty years old. All that we can say is that his youth and manhood were passed in the most splendid period of Athenian or Greek history. It was the time of that wonderful outburst of genius in art, and literature, and thought, and statesmanship, which was so sudden and yet so unique. Athens was full of the keenest intellectual and political activity. Among her citizens between the years 460 and 420  were men who in poetry, in history, in sculpture, in architecture, are our masters still. Æschylus' great Trilogy was brought out in the year 458, and the poet died two years later, when Socrates was about fifteen years old. Sophocles was born in 495, Euripides in 481 They both died about 406 , some seven years before Socrates. Pheidias, the great sculptor, the artist of the Elgin marbles, which are now in the British Museum, died in 432 Pericles, the supreme statesman and orator, whose name marks an epoch in the history of civilisation, died in 429  Thucydides, the historian, whose history is 'a