Intelligence did not figure largely in anything he did and was often conspicuously absent.

The end, the tale of what happened to the Trojan women when Troy fell, comes from a play by Sophocles’ fellow playwright, Euripides. It is a curious contrast to the martial spirit of the Aeneid. To Virgil as to all Roman poets, war was the noblest and most glorious of human activities. Four hundred years before Virgil a Greek poet looked at it differently. What was the end of that far-famed war? Euripides seems to ask. Just this, a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women.

Never, not in the brightest days of the Renaissance, has learning appeared in such a radiant light as it did to the gay young men of imperial Athens. Listen to one of them talking to Socrates, just waked up in the early dawn by a persistent hammering at his door: “What’s here?” he cries out, still half asleep. “O Socrates,” and the voice is that of a lad he knows well, “Good news, good news!” “It ought to be at this unearthly hour. Well, out with it.” The young fellow is in the house now. “O Socrates, Protagoras has come. I heard it yesterday evening. And I was going to you at once but it was so late — ” “What’s it all about — Protagoras? Has he stolen something of yours?” The boy bursts out laughing. “Yes, yes, that’s just it. He’s robbing me of wisdom. He has it — wisdom, and he can give it to me. Oh, come and go with me to him. Start now.” That eager, delightful boy in love with learning can be duplicated in nearly every dialogue of Plato. Socrates has but to enter a gymnasium; exercise, games, are forgotten. A crowd of ardent young men surround him. Tell us this. Teach us that, they clamor. What is Friendship? What is Justice? We will not let you off, Socrates. The truth — we want the truth. “What delight,” they say to each other, “to hear wise men talk!” “Egypt and Phœnicia love money,” Plato remarks in a discussion on how nations differ. “The special characteristic of our part of the world is the love of knowledge.