unguents, and seldom indulged in that other favourite luxury, the bath. The same eccentricity displayed itself in other parts of his conduct. While serving in the camp before Potidæa, he is said to have stood motionless for a day, from sunrise to sunrise, engaged in meditation. The peculiarity of his personal appearance[187] was well qualified to attract notice, and set off his singular habits: and some of his habits seem better suited to his personal appearance than to his real character; for in his conversation (as it is reported by Plato), he assumed a licence which has given birth to imputations against him, at variance with the purity of morals which he inculcated, and which the concurrent testimony of his followers and biographers asserts that he practised. His favourite associates were the young, among whom he was most likely to gain converts to his own opinions, and accordingly he mixed without scruple in their festivities, and even in their intemperance; though wine was never seen to affect him, and that not from abstinence in his potations. The banquet of Plato, in which Socrates, Alcibiades, Aristophanes, and others are the speakers, ends with a description of the festivities being broken up late at night, by the irruption of a party of drunken revellers, “after which things were no longer carried on regularly, but everybody was compelled to drink a great quantity of wine. On this (said Aristodemus, the relater) several of the party went away, but he himself fell asleep, and slept very abundantly, for the nights were then long. But on awaking towards daybreak, the cocks then crowing, he saw that the other guests were either gone or asleep, and that Agathon, Socrates, and Aristophanes were the only persons awake, and were drinking to the right hand out of a great bowl. Now Socrates was lecturing them: and the rest of his discourse, Aristodemus said he did not remember, for being asleep, he had not been present at the beginning. But the sum of it was, that Socrates compelled them to confess that it was the province of the same man to know how to compose comedy and tragedy, and that he who was by art a tragic poet was a comic poet also. And having been forced to assent to these things, and that without very clearly understanding them, Aristodemus said they fell asleep; and first Aristophanes went to sleep, and then, as the day broke, Agathon. And Socrates, having sent them to sleep, got up and departed; and going to the Lyceum, washed himself, as at other times, and spent the whole day there, and so in the evening went home to rest.”[188]