Thus while Socrates loved to mingle with men of all classes and ages, his most congenial companions were those of a younger generation. With the gracious boy, Charmides, “beautiful in mind and body, a charming combination of moral dignity and artless sprightliness,” he discussed temperance in the presence of his guardian, Critias. With Theætetus, “the younger Socrates,” like his master more beautiful in mind than in body, he conversed about the nature of knowledge, in the presence of his tutor. With the fair and noble young Lysis, invoked to do so by his lover, Hypothales, he discourses on the right words or acts best calculated to ingratiate himself with his ward, and the theme is friendship. In the presence and with the coöperation of four youths he discusses courage with General Laches, and to young Clineas and his adviser he narrates his amusing encounter with Euthydemus and his brother, the bumptious young Sophists, the “eristic sluggers.” He explains the true nature of his own art to Ion, the Homeric rhapsodist. In the Meno he brings out the essential points of the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid from the mind of an ignorant slave boy.[54] This relation of old and younger men was thought to keep youth plastic, docile, and receptive, if not a trifle feminine. Plato would have these pairs of friends fight side by side to inspire each other with courage. But this relation, as we all know, had its dangers and often lapsed to homosexuality and inversion. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, that most beautiful and alluring of male coquettes, describes Socrates as a paragon of chastity because he remained cold and unmoved by all the seductive blandishments he could bring to bear upon him. This vice, now so fully explored by Krafft-Ebing, Tarnowski, Moll, Ellis, and Freud and his disciples, is favored by war, the seclusion of women as in Turkey, and even by female virtue; but the Platonic view was that true love was a wisdom or philosophy, although possibly they did not realize that even the custom of the Sophists, who first took pay for teaching--a practice they thought profanation--was nevertheless a step toward the reform of degraded boy love.