222 HISTORICAL TALES.

cumstances, and becoming all things to all men.
While numbers of high-born Athenians admired him
for his extraordinary beauty of person, Socrates saw
in him admirable qualities of mind, and loved him
with a warm affection, which Alcibiades as warmly
returned. The philosopher gained the greatest in-
fluence over his youthful friend, taught him to de-
spise affectation and revere virtue, and did much to
develop in him noble qualities of thought and aspira-
tion.

Yet nature had made Alcibiades, and nature’s
work is hard to undo. He was a man of hasty
impulse and violent temper, a man destitute of the
spirit of patriotism, and in very great measure it
was to this brilliant son of Athens that that city
owed its lamentable fate.

No greater contrast could be imagined than was
shown by these almost inseparable friends. Alcibia-
des was tall, shapely, remarkably handsome, fond
of showy attire and luxurious surroundings, full of
animal spirits, rapid and animated in speech, and
aristocratic in sentiment; Socrates short, thick-sct,
remarkably ugly, careless in attire, destitute of all
courtly graces, democratic in the highest degree, and
despising utterly those arts and aims, loves and lux-
uries, which appealed so strongly to the soul of his
ardent friend. Yet the genius, the intellectual acute-
ness, the lofty aims, and wonderful conversational
power of Socrates overcame all his natural defects,
attracted Alcibiades irresistibly, and welded the two
together in an intellectual sympathy that set aside
all differences of form and character.