("Crito," "Apol.," "Phaedo," etc) see Cobet, "Pros. Xen."

"But for all that," the accuser insists, "Socrates taught sons to pour
contumely upon their fathers[25] by persuading his young friends that
he could make them wiser than their sires, or by pointing out that the
law allowed a son to sue his father for aberration of mind, and to
imprison him, which legal ordinance he put in evidence to prove that
it might be well for the wiser to imprison the more ignorant."

[25] See "Apol." 20; Arist. "Clouds," 1407, where Pheidippides "drags
his father Strepsiades through the mire."

Now what Socrates held was, that if a man may with justice incarcerate
another for no better cause than a form of folly or ignorance, this
same person could not justly complain if he in his turn were kept in
bonds by his superiors in knowledge; and to come to the bottom of such
questions, to discover the difference between madness and ignorance
was a problem which he was perpetually working at. His opinion came to
this: If a madman may, as a matter of expediency to himself and his
friends, be kept in prison, surely, as a matter of justice, the man
who knows not what he ought to know should be content to sit at the
feet of those who know, and be taught.

But it was the rest of their kith and kin, not fathers only (according
to the accuser), whom Socrates dishonoured in the eyes of his circle
of followers, when he said that "the sick man or the litigant does not
derive assistance from his relatives,[26] but from his doctor in the
one case, and his legal adviser in the other." "Listen further to his
language about friends," says the accuser: "'What is the good of their
being kindly disposed, unless they can be of some practical use to