Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/104

94 made a reproach to Socrates that Alcibiades, who betrayed his country, and Critias, who, as one of the Thirty Tyrants, became her cruel oppressor, had been among his pupils.

The very influence which Socrates exercised over young men became a cause of his being held in suspicion and dislike by the pères de famille of Athens. He was thought to fill the mind of youth with new-fangled ideas, and to teach boys to lose respect for their own fathers, substituting a preposterous independence of spirit for the obedience natural to their age. In the year 399, when Socrates had for at least thirty years pursued his mission, and when he was more than seventy years of age, the feeling of unpopularity which he had excited found its culmination, owing apparently to the circumstance that he had endeavoured to prevent the son of one Anytus, a rich tradesman and powerful demagogue, from following his father's trade as a leather-seller. The boy appears to have been full of promise, and Socrates wished him to choose a more intellectual career. Anytus, however, was incensed, and took counsel on the matter with others who bore a grudge against Socrates, and among them with Melêtus a poet, and Lycon a rhetorician. Poets and rhetoricians were both among the classes of people whose claims to knowledge of the truth Socrates had constantly impugned, and the two persons above named had probably each suffered under his public refutations. The result of their conference was, that one day there appeared, in regular form, posted up at the office of the King-Archon, one of the chief