homely illustrations with impressive principles--has exercised an influence at once fascinating, subjugating, humiliating. The impudent Alkibiades has been made to feel painfully his own unworthiness, even while receiving every mark of admiration from others. He has become enthusiastically devoted to Sokrates, whom he has sought to attach to himself, and to lay under obligation, by tempting offers of every kind. The details of these offers are given with a fulness which cannot be translated to modern readers, and which even then required to be excused as the revelations of a drunken man. They present one of the boldest fictions in the Greek language--if we look at them in conjunction with the real character of Alkibiades as an historical person.[41] Sokrates is found proof against every variety of temptation, however seductive to Grecian feeling. In his case, Eros Philosophus maintains his dignity as exclusively pure, sentimental, and spiritual: while Alkibiades retires more humiliated than ever. We are given to understand that the like offers had been made to Sokrates by many other handsome youths also--especially by Charmides and Euthydemus--all of them being treated with the same quiet and repellent indifference.[42] Sokrates had kept on the vantage-ground as regards all:--and was regarded by all with the same mixture of humble veneration and earnest attachment. [Footnote 40: Plato, Sympos. p. 216 C-D.] [Footnote 41: Plato, Sympos. p. 219. See also, respecting the historical Alkibiades and his characte, Thucyd. vi. 15; Xenoph. Memor. i. 1; Antisthenes, apud Athenæum, xii. 534. The invention of Plato goes beyond that of those ingenious men who recounted how Phrynê and Lais had failed in attempts to overcome the continence of Xenokrates, Diog. L. iv. 7: and the saying of Lais, [Greek: ô(s ou)k a)p' a)ndro/s, a)ll' a)p' a)ndri/antos, a)nastai/ê.] Quintilian (viii. 4, 22-23) aptly enough compares the description given by Alkibiades--as the maximum of testimony to the "invicta continentia" of Sokrates--with the testimony to the surpassing beauty of Helen, borne by such witnesses as the Trojan [Greek: dêmoge/rontes] and Priam himself (Hom. Iliad iii. 156). One of the speakers in Athenæus censures severely this portion of the Platonic Symposion, xi. 506 C, 508 D, v. 187 D. Porphyry (in his life of Plotinus, 15) tells us that the rhetor Diophanes delivered an apology for Alkibiades, in the presence of Plotinus; who was much displeased, and directed Porphyry to compose a reply.] [Footnote 42: Plato, Symp. p. 222 B.