Alcibiades was twenty-one years old when we find him first. He was considered the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic, proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling, horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed the record of a charge against one of his friends; and when his wife applied for a divorce, he burst into the courtroom and vacated proceedings by carrying the lady off by force. At banquets he would raise a disturbance, and while he was being forcibly ejected from one door, his servants would sneak in at another and steal the silverware, which he would give away as charity. He also indulged in the Mark Antony trick of rushing into houses at night and pulling good folks out of bed by the heels, and then running away before they were barely awake. His introduction to Socrates came in an attempt to break up a Socratic prayer-meeting. Socrates succeeded in getting the roysterer to listen long enough to turn the laugh on him and show all concerned that the life of a rowdy was the life of a fool. Alcibiades had expected Socrates to lose his temper, but it was Alcibiades who gave way, and blurted out that he could not hope to beat his antagonist talking, but he would like to wrestle with him. Legend has it that Socrates gave the insolent young man a shock by instantly accepting his challenge. In the bout that followed, the philosopher, built like a gorilla, got a half-Nelson on his man, who was a little the worse for wine, and threw him so hard, jumping on his prostrate form with his knees, that the aristocratic hoodlum was laid up for a moon. Ever after Alcibiades had a thorough respect for Socrates. They became fast friends, and whenever the old man talked in the Agora, Alcibiades was on hand to keep order. When war came with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesus they enlisted, Socrates going as corporal and Alcibiades as captain. They occupied the same tent during the entire campaign. Socrates proved a fearless soldier, and walked the winter ice in bare feet, often pulling his belt one hole tighter in lieu of breakfast, to show the complaining soldiers that endurance was the thing that won battles. At the battle of Delium, when there was a rout, Xenophon says Socrates walked off the field leisurely, arm in arm with the general, explaining the nature of harmony. Through the influence of Socrates, the lawless Alcibiades was tamed and became almost a model citizen, although his head was hardly large enough for a philosopher.