Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/194

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170 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE constitution of Draco. It can scarcely have been by Theramenes himself, since it shows no special hostility to Critias and the Oligarchical extremists. The same pamphleteering spirit infected even Pausanias, the exiled Spartan king, and led him to attack Lysander and the Ephors under the cover of a Life of Lycurgus.^ Socrates, son of Sophroniscus from AL^PEKfi (468-399 B.C.) Among the Sophists of the fifth century is one who scarcely deserves that name, or, indeed, any other which classes him with his fellows : a man strangely detached ; living in a world apart from other men a life of incessant moral and intellectual search; in that region most rich to give and hungry to receive sympathy, elsewhere dead to the feelings and conventions of common society. It is this which makes the most earnest of men a centre of merri- ment, a jester and a willing butt. He analyses life so gravely and nakedly that it makes men laugh, as when he gropes his way to the conclusion that a certain fiery orator's aim in life is " to make many people angjy at the same tijne!' The same simpleness of nature led him to ask extraordinary questions ; to press insistently for answers ; to dance alone in his house for the sake of exercise ; to talk without disguise of his most intimate feelings. He was odd in appearance too ; stout, weather- stained, ill-clad, barefooted for the most part, deep-eyed, and almost fierce in expression ; subject to long fits of brooding, sometimes silent for days, generally a persistent and stimulating talker, sometimes amazingly eloquent ; a man who saw through and through other men, left them paralysed, Alcibiades said, and feeling Mike very