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17/66 is poor and they are rich; his profession that he teaches nothing is opposed to their readiness to teach all things; his talking in the marketplace to their private instructions; his tarry-at-home life to their wandering from city to city. The tone which he assumes to- wards them is one of real friendliness, but also of concealed irony. Towards Anaxagoras, who had disappointed him in his hopes of learning about mind and nature, he shows a less kindly feeling, which is also the feeling of Plato in other passages (Laws). But An- axagoras had been dead thirty years, and was beyond the reach of persecution. It has been remarked that the prophecy of a new generation of teachers who would rebuke and exhort the Athenian people in harsher and more violent terms was, as far as we know, never ful- filled. No inference can be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first martyr of philo- sophy, that he would leave behind him many followers, accompan- ied by the not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words when emancipated from his control. The above remarks must be understood as applying with any de- gree of certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wis- dom of Critias, the poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to the imagination of Plato. The argu- ments of those who maintain that the Apology was composed dur- ing the process, resting on no evidence, do not require a serious re- futation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher, who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many