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the throat of death.' With his accusers he will only fence and play, 
as he had fenced with other 'improvers of youth,' answering the 
Sophist according to his sophistry all his life long. He is serious 
when he is speaking of his own mission, which seems to distin- 
guish him from all other reformers of mankind, and originates in 
an accident. The dedication of himself to the improvement of his 
fellow-citizens is not so remarkable as the ironical spirit in which 
he goes about doing good only in vindication of the credit of the or- 
acle, and in the vain hope of finding a wiser man than himself. Yet 
this singular and almost accidental character of his mission agrees 
with the divine sign which, according to our notions, is equally ac- 
cidental and irrational, and is nevertheless accepted by him as the 
guiding principle of his life. Socrates is nowhere represented to us 
as a freethinker or sceptic. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity 
when he speculates on the possibility of seeing and knowing the 
heroes of the Trojan war in another world. On the other hand, his 
hope of immortality is uncertain;— he also conceives of death as a 
long sleep (in this respect differing from the Phaedo), and at last 
falls back on resignation to the divine will, and the certainty that 
no evil can happen to the good man either in life or death. His ab- 
solute truthfulness seems to hinder him from asserting positively 
more than this; and he makes no attempt to veil his ignorance in 
mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part of 
the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone 
of the conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not 
speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular de- 
fence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have composed for 
him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him. But he 
first procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words. He does not 
attack the Sophists; for they were open to the same charges as him- 
self; they were equally ridiculed by the Comic poets, and almost 
equally hateful to Anytus and Meletus. Yet incidentally the antag- 
onism between Socrates and the Sophists is allowed to appear. He