such as would come most under public observation—in which he, as a philosophical teacher, bore a broad resemblance to them. The whole character of this new intellectual movement in Greece was negative and critical, professing to aim rather at detecting error than establishing certainty. To this the method of Socrates formed no exception. His favourite assertion, that he himself knew nothing for certain, expressed this in the strongest form. And if the reproach brought against the Sophists was that they loved argument too much for argument's sake, and thought more of confounding an opponent than of demonstrating a truth, we have only to read some of the dialogues in which Socrates bears a part, as we have them recorded by his friends and pupils, to see that he at least supplied abundant ground to an ordinary hearer to say the same of him. He could scarcely have realised to the public of his own day the definition which Schiller gives of the true philosopher—"One who loves truth better than his system." Xenophon tells us that in argument he did what he liked with his opponents; and Plato has compared him to the mythical giant Antæus, who insisted that every stranger whom he met should try a fall with him.
It is of the very essence, again, of caricature to take gravity and wisdom for its subject. And caricature on the Athenian stage knew no limits in this. Nothing was sacred for the comic dramatist and his Chorus. The national gods, the great religious mysteries, the mighty Athenian people itself, were all made to put on the comic mask, and figure in the wild procession. Why
