Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the possibilities of the stage; AEschylus was pointing out the way as a playwright; and the passion for physical beauty was everywhere an adjunct of religion. Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family facts. She wipes her mouth on her apron and is at home in every room of the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed." Evidently Phaenarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we hear of her being called to Mythaeia on a professional errand shortly before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was again taken along--from which we assume, following in the footsteps of Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she--even though her professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely incidental. It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional. * * * * * From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill, for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw down his tools and took off his apron for good. He was then thirty-five years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have no other gods before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the universe was hardly large enough.