Now this avowal on the part of Socrates, that in his earlier career he was a follower of the physical philosophers, goes far to explain several important points. In the first place, it explains to us the propriety, and in some sense the _justice_, of Aristophanes' sketch of Socrates, some twenty years earlier than we know of the philosopher's mind from Plato, viz., as a speculator on meteorics after the fashion of Anaxagoras himself, a star-gazer, a lecturer on clouds and thunder and circling motions, rain and mist, and phenomena celestial and subterranean. We know, indeed, from Diogenes Laertius, ii. 4, that Socrates had been a hearer of Archelaus, himself a pupil of Anaxagoras. And thus we understand why Socrates was identified with the other sophists or schoolmen of the day, who taught 'wisdom' generally, ethics not less than physics. As subverters of the established traditions about the gods, and exponents of truth to the best of their knowledge, they met with the same opposition and the same obloquy, in their day, that the Huxleys and the Darwins, and other conspicuous men of our own times, are not wholly exempt from. Their teaching was thought to be 'latitudinarian,' and so they were credited with many views from which they would have recoiled with horror. In the _Nubes_ (902), Socrates is charged with denying the existence of justice, and defending the proposition by the example of the gods, who themselves set it at nought, as when Zeus maltreated and imprisoned his own father, Cronus; and in the same play (1415), the lawfulness of a son beating his father is maintained as a part of the new-fangled Socratic creed. Now in the second book of the _Republic_ (p. 377, _fin._), this case of Cronus is expressly repudiated by Socrates as monstrous and unnatural; as also the doctrine that a son may lawfully beat his own father for wrong-doing. In a very curious passage of the 'Wasps' (1037), Aristophanes bitterly blames the Athenians for not having supported him in putting down the _nuisance_ of the philosophers, whom he calls ἠπίαλοι and πυρετοὶ, 'agues' and 'fevers,' teachers of parricide, and base informers. By not giving the prize, he says, to his play of the 'Clouds,' only the year before, they had frustrated all his hopes of crushing and extinguishing the philosophers. Now, these philosophers are represented as headed by Socrates, and Socrates was the very worst of them. That he was at that period (about twenty years before his death) essentially a sophist, and incurring with the rest of them the odium of the popular opinion, seems undeniable. The precise views that he held on ethics, and consequently the exact nature of his teaching at that period, we have no other means of knowing. But it seems inconceivable that Aristophanes should have so grossly misrepresented his character with the slightest chance of success; and we know that it was his ardent desire that his play of the 'Clouds' should succeed. On the whole, we