Chapter LXVII (3)

We know these latter chiefly from the evidence of Plato, their pronounced enemy; yet even his evidence, when construed candidly and taken as a whole, will not be found to justify the charges of corrupt and immoral teaching, impostrous pretence of knowledge, etc., which the modern historians pour forth in loud chorus against them. I know few characters in history who have been so hardly dealt with as these so-called sophists. They bear the penalty of their name, in its modern sense; a misleading association, from which few modern writers take pains to emancipate either themselves or their readers, though the English or French word sophist is absolutely inapplicable to Protagoras or Gorgias, who ought to be called rather “professors, or public teachers.” It is really surprising to read the expositions prefixed by learned men like Stallbaum and others, to the Platonic dialogues entitled Protagoras, Gorgias, Euthydêmus, Theætêtus, etc., where Plato introduces Sokratês either in personal controversy with one or other of these sophists, or as canvassing their opinions. We continually read from the pen of the expositor, such remarks as these: “Mark, how Plato puts down the shallow and worthless sophist;” the obvious reflection, that it is Plato himself who plays both games on the chess-board, being altogether overlooked. And again: “This or that argument, placed in the mouth of Sokratês, is not to be regarded as the real opinion of Plato: he only takes it up and enforces it at this moment, in order to puzzle and humiliate an ostentatious pretender;”[572] a remark which converts Plato into an insincere disputant, and a sophist in the modern sense, at the very moment when the commentator is extolling his pure and lofty morality as an antidote against the alleged corruption of Gorgias and Protagoras.

[572] Stallbaum, Proleg. ad Platon. Protagor. p. 23: “Hoc vero
ejus judicio ita utitur Socrates, ut eum dehinc dialecticâ
subtilitate in summam consilii inopiam conjiciat. Colligit enim
inde _satis captiose_ rebus ita comparatis justitiam, quippe quæ
a sanctitate diversa sit, plane nihil sanctitatis habituram, ac
vicissim sanctitati nihil fore commune cum justitiâ. Respondet
quidem ad hæc Protagoras, justitiam ac sanctitatem non per omnia
sibi similes esse, nec tamen etiam prorsus dissimiles videri. Sed
etsi _verissima est hæc ejus sententia_, tamen comparatione illâ
a partibus faciei repetitâ, _in fraudem inductus_, et quid sit,
in quo omnis virtutis natura contineatur, ignarus, sese ex his
difficultatibus adeo non potest expedire,” etc.

Again, p. 24: “Itaque Socrates, missâ hujus rei disputatione,
_repente ad alia progreditur_, scilicet _similibus laqueis
hominem deinceps denuo irretiturus_.” ... “Nemini facile obscurum
erit, hoc quoque loco, Protagoram _argutis conclusiunculis deludi
atque callide eo permoveri_,” etc. ... p. 25: “Quanquam nemo
erit, quin videat _callide deludi Protagoram_,” etc. ... p. 34:
“Quod si autem ea, quæ in Protagorâ _Sophistæ ridendi causâ_
e vulgi atque sophistarum ratione disputantur, in Gorgiâ ex
ipsius philosophi mente et sententiâ vel brevius proponuntur vel
copiosius disputantur,” etc.

Compare similar observations of Stallbaum, in his Prolegom. ad
Theætet. pp. 12, 22; ad Menon. p. 16; ad Euthydemum, pp. 26, 30;
ad Lachetem, p. 11; ad Lysidem, pp. 79, 80, 87; ad Hippiam Major.
pp. 154-156.

“Facile apparet Socratem _argutâ_, quæ verbo φαίνεσθαι inest,
_diologiâ interlocutorem_ (Hippiam Sophistam) _in fraudem
inducere_.” ... “Illud quidem pro certo et explorato habemus, non
serio sed _ridendi verandique Sophistæ gratiâ gravissimam illam
sententiam in dubitationem vocari_, ideoque iis conclusiunculis
labefactari, quas quilibet paulo attentior facile intelligat non
ad fidem faciendam, sed ad lusum jocumque, esse comparatas.”

Plato has devoted a long and interesting dialogue to the inquiry, What is a sophist?[573] and it is curious to observe that the definition which he at last brings out suits Sokratês himself, intellectually speaking, better than any one else whom we know. Cicero defines the sophist to be one who pursues philosophy for the sake of ostentation or of gain;[574] which, if it is to be held as a reproach, will certainly bear hard upon the great body of modern teachers, who are determined to embrace their profession and to discharge its important duties, like other professional men, by the prospect either of deriving an income or of making a figure in it, or both, whether they have any peculiar relish for the occupation or not. But modern writers, in describing Protagoras or Gorgias, while they adopt the sneering language of Plato against teaching for pay, low purposes, tricks to get money from the rich, etc., use terms which lead the reader to believe that there was something in these sophists peculiarly greedy, exorbitant, and truckling; something beyond the mere fact of asking and receiving remuneration. Now not only there is no proof that any of them were thus dishonest or exorbitant, but in the case of Protagoras, even his enemy Plato furnishes a proof that he was not so. In the Platonic dialogue termed Protagoras, that sophist is introduced as describing the manner in which he proceeded respecting remuneration from his pupils. “I make no stipulation beforehand: when a pupil parts from me, I ask from him such a sum as I think the time and the circumstances warrant; and I add, that if he deems the demand too great, he has only to make up his own mind what is the amount of improvement which my company has procured to him, and what sum he considers an equivalent for it. I am content to accept the sum so named by himself, only requiring him to go into a temple and make oath that it is his sincere belief.”[575] It is not easy to imagine a more dignified way of dealing than this, nor one which more thoroughly attests an honorable reliance on the internal consciousness of the scholar, on the grateful sense of improvement realized, which to every teacher constitutes a reward hardly inferior to the payment that proceeds from it, and which, in the opinion of Sokratês, formed the only legitimate reward. Such is not the way in which the corruptors of mankind go to work.

[573] Plato, Sophistes, c. 52, p. 268.

[574] Cicero, Academ. iv, 23. Xenophon, at the close of his
treatise De Venatione (c. 13), introduces a sharp censure upon
the sophists, with very little that is specific or distinct. He
accuses them of teaching command and artifice of words, instead
of communicating useful maxims; of speaking for purposes of
deceit, or for their own profit, and addressing themselves to
rich pupils for pay; while the _philosopher_ gives his lessons to
every one gratuitously, without distinction of persons. This is
the same distinction as that taken by Sokratês and Plato, between
the sophist and the philosopher: compare Xenoph. De Vectigal. v,
4.

[575] Plato, Protagoras, c. 16, p. 328, B. Diogenes Laërtius (ix,
58) says that Protagoras demanded one hundred minæ as pay: little
stress is to be laid upon such a statement, nor is it possible
that he could have had one fixed rate of pay. The story told by
Aulus Gellius (v, 10) about the suit at law between Protagoras
and his disciple Euathlus, is at least amusing and ingenious.
Compare the story of the rhetor Skopelianus, in Philostratus,
Vit. Sophist. i, 21, 4.

Isokratês (Or. xv, de Perm. sect. 166) affirms that the gains
made by Gorgias, or by any of the eminent sophists, had never
been very high; that they had been greatly and maliciously
exaggerated; that they were very inferior to those of the great
dramatic actors (sect. 168).

That which stood most prominent in the teaching of Gorgias and the other sophists, was, that they cultivated and improved the powers of public speaking in their pupils; one of the most essential accomplishments to every Athenian of consideration. For this, too, they have been denounced by Ritter, Brandis, and other learned writers on the history of philosophy, as corrupt and immoral. “Teaching their pupils rhetoric (it has been said), they only enabled them to second unjust designs, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to delude their hearers, by trick and artifice, into false persuasion and show of knowledge without reality. Rhetoric (argues Plato, in the dialogue called Gorgias) is no art whatever, but a mere unscientific knack, enslaved to the dominant prejudices, and nothing better than an impostrous parody on the true political art.” Now though Aristotle, following the Platonic vein, calls this power of making the worse appear the better reason, “the promise of Protagoras,”[576] the accusation ought never to be urged as if it bore specially against the teachers of the Sokratic age. It is an argument against rhetorical teaching generally; against all the most distinguished teachers of pupils for active life, throughout the ancient world, from Protagoras, Gorgias, Isokratês, etc., down to Quintilian. Not only does the argument bear equally against all, but it was actually urged against all. Isokratês[577] and Quintilian both defend themselves against it: Aristotle replies to it in the beginning of his treatise on rhetoric: nor was there ever any man, indeed, against whom it was pressed with greater bitterness of calumny than Sokratês, by Aristophanês, in his comedy of the “Clouds,” as well as by other comic composers. Sokratês complains of it in his defence before his judges;[578] characterizing such accusations in their true point of view, as being “the stock reproaches against all who pursue philosophy.” They are indeed only one of the manifestations, ever varying in form though the same in spirit, of the antipathy of ignorance against dissenting innovation or superior mental accomplishments; which antipathy, intellectual men themselves, when it happens to make on their side in a controversy, are but too ready to invoke. Considering that we have here the materials of defence, as well as of attack, supplied by Sokratês and Plato, it might have been expected that modern writers would have refrained from employing such an argument to discredit Gorgias or Protagoras; the rather, as they have before their eyes, in all the countries of modern Europe, the profession of lawyers and advocates, who lend their powerful eloquence without distinction to the cause of justice or injustice, and who, far from being regarded as the corrupters of society, are usually looked upon, for that very reason among others, as indispensable auxiliaries to a just administration of law.

[576] Aristot. Rhetoric. ii, 26. Ritter (p. 582) and Brandis
(p. 521) quote very unfairly the evidence of the “Clouds”
of Aristophanês, as establishing this charge, and that of
corrupt teaching generally, against the sophists as a body.
If Aristophanês is a witness against any one, he is a witness
against Sokratês, who is the person singled out for attack in the
“Clouds.” But these authors, not admitting Aristophanês as an
evidence against Sokratês, whom he _does_ attack, nevertheless
quote him as an evidence against men like Protagoras and Gorgias,
whom he _does not_ attack.

[577] Isokratês, Or. xv, (De Permut.) sect. 16, νῦν δὲ λέγει μὲν
(the accuser) ὡς ἐγὼ τοὺς ἥττους λόγους κρείττους δύναμαι ποιεῖν,
etc.

Ibid. sect. 32. πειρᾶταί με διαβάλλειν, ὡς διαφθείρω τοὺς
νεωτέρους, λέγειν διδάσκων καὶ παρὰ τὸ δίκαιον ἐν τοῖς ἀγῶσι
πλεονεκτεῖν, etc.

Again, sects. 59, 65, 95, 98, 187 (where he represents himself,
like Sokratês in his Defence, as vindicating philosophy generally
against the accusation of corrupting youth), 233, 256.

[578] Plato, Sok. Apolog. c. 10, p. 23, D. τὰ κατὰ πάντων τῶν
φιλοσοφούντων πρόχειρα ταῦτα λέγουσιν, ὅτι τὰ μετέωρα καὶ τὰ ὑπὸ
γῆς, καὶ θεοὺς μὴ νομίζειν, καὶ τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν
(διδάσκω). Compare a similar expression in Xenophon, Memorab. i,
2, 31. τὸ κοινῇ τοῖς φιλοσόφοις ὑπὸ τῶν πολλῶν ἐπιτιμώμενον, etc.

The same unfairness, in making this point tell against the
sophists exclusively, is to be found in Westermann, Geschichte
der Griech. Beredsamkeit sects. 30, 64.

Though writing was less the business of these sophists than personal teaching, several of them published treatises. Thrasymachus and Theodôrus both set forth written precepts on the art of rhetoric;[579] precepts which have not descended to us, but which appear to have been narrow and special, bearing directly upon practice, and relating chiefly to the proper component parts of an oration. To Aristotle, who had attained that large and comprehensive view of the theory of rhetoric which still remains to instruct us in his splendid treatise, the views of Thrasymachus appeared unimportant, serving to him only as hints and materials. But their effect must have been very different when they first appeared, and when young men were first enabled to analyze the parts of an harangue, to understand the dependence of one upon the other, and call them by their appropriate names; all illustrated, let us recollect, by oral exposition on the part of the master, which was the most impressive portion of the whole.

[579] See the last chapter of Aristotle De Sophisticis Elenchis.
He notices these early rhetorical teachers, also, in various
parts of the treatise on rhetoric.

Quintilian, however, still thought the precepts of Theodôrus and
Thrasymachus worthy of his attention (Inst. Orat. iii, 3).

Prodikus, again, published one or more treatises intended to elucidate the ambiguities of words, and to point out the different significations of terms apparently, but not really, equivalent. For this Plato often ridicules him, and the modern historians of philosophy generally think it right to adopt the same tone. Whether the execution of the work was at all adequate to its purpose, we have no means of judging; but assuredly the purpose was one preëminently calculated to aid Grecian thinkers and dialecticians; for no man can study their philosophy without seeing how lamentably they were hampered by enslavement to the popular phraseology, and by inferences founded on mere verbal analogy. At a time when neither dictionary nor grammar existed, a teacher who took care, even punctilious care, in fixing the meaning of important words of his discourse, must be considered as guiding the minds of his hearers in a salutary direction; salutary, we may add, even to Plato himself, whose speculations would most certainly have been improved by occasional hints from such a monitor.

Protagoras, too, is said to have been the first who discriminated and gave names to the various modes and forms of address, an analysis well calculated to assist his lessons on right speaking:[580] he appears also to have been the first who distinguished the three genders of nouns. We hear further of a treatise which he wrote on wrestling, or most probably on gymnastics generally, as well as a collection of controversial dialogues.[581] But his most celebrated treatise was one entitled “Truth,” seemingly on philosophy generally. Of this treatise, we do not even know the general scope or purport. In one of his treatises, he confessed his inability to satisfy himself about the existence of the gods, in these words:[582] “Respecting the gods, I neither know whether they exist, nor what are their attributes: the uncertainty of the subject, the shortness of human life, and many other causes, debar me from this knowledge.” That the believing public of Athens were seriously indignant at this passage, and that it caused the author to be threatened with prosecution, and forced to quit Athens, we can perfectly understand; though there seems no sufficient proof of the tale that he was drowned in his outward voyage. But that modern historians of philosophy, who consider the pagan gods to be fictions, and the religion to be repugnant to any reasonable mind, should concur in denouncing Protagoras on this ground as a corrupt man, is to me less intelligible. Xenophanês,[583] and probably many other philosophers, had said the same thing before him. Nor is it easy to see what a superior man was to do, who could not adjust his standard of belief to such fictions; or what he could say, if he said anything, less than the words cited above from Protagoras; which appear, as far as we can appreciate them, standing without the context, to be a brief mention, in modest and circumspect phrases, of the reason why he said nothing about the gods, in a treatise where the reader would expect to find much upon the subject.[584] Certain it is that in the Platonic dialogue, called “Protagoras,” that sophist is introduced speaking about the gods exactly in the manner that any orthodox pagan might naturally adopt.

[580] Quintilian, Inst. Orat. iii. 4, 10; Aristot. Rhetor. iii,
5. See the passages cited in Preller, Histor. Philos. ch. iv, p.
132, note _d_, who affirms respecting Protagoras: “alia inani
grammaticorum principiorum ostentatione novare conabatur,” which
the passages cited do not prove.

[581] Isokratês, Or. x, Encom. Helen. sect. 3; Diogen. Laërt. ix,
54.

[582] Diogen. Laërt. ix. 51; Sext. Empir. adv. Math. ix. 56. Περὶ
μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰπεῖν, οὔτε εἴ εἰσιν, οὐθ᾽ ὁποίοι τινές εἰσι·
πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντα εἰδέναι, ἥ τε ἀδηλότης, καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ
βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.

I give the words partly from Diogenes, partly from Sextus, as I
think they would be most likely to stand.

[583] Xenophanês ap. Sext. Emp. adv. Mathem. vii, 49.

[584] The satyrical writer Timon (ap. Sext. Emp. ix, 57),
speaking in very respectful terms about Protagoras, notices
particularly the guarded language which he used in this sentence
about the gods; though this precaution did not enable him to
avoid the necessity of flight. Protagoras spoke:—

~Πᾶσαν ἔχων φυλακὴν ἐπιεικείης~· τὰ μὲν οὐ οἱ
Χραίσμησ᾽, ἀλλὰ φυγῆς ἐπεμαίετο ὄφρα μὴ οὕτως
Σωκρατικὸν πίνων ψυχρὸν πότον Ἀΐδα δύῃ.

It would seem, by the last line as if Protagoras had survived
Sokratês.

The other fragment preserved of Protagoras, relates to his view of the cognitive process, and of truth generally. He taught, that “Man is the measure of all things; both of that which exists, and of that which does not exist:” a doctrine canvassed and controverted by Plato, who represents that Protagoras affirmed knowledge to consist in sensation, and considered the sensations of each individual man to be, to him, the canon and measure of truth. We know scarce anything of the elucidations or limitations with which Protagoras may have accompanied his general position: and if even Plato, who had good means of knowing them, felt it ungenerous to insult an orphan doctrine whose father was recently dead, and could no longer defend it,[585] much more ought modern authors, who speak with mere scraps of evidence before them, to be cautious how they heap upon the same doctrine insults much beyond those which Plato recognizes. In so far as we can pretend to understand the theory, it was certainly not more incorrect than several others then afloat, from the Eleatic school and other philosophers; while it had the merit of bringing into forcible relief, though in an erroneous manner, the essentially relative nature of cognition,[586] relative, not indeed to the sensitive faculty alone, but to that reinforced and guided by the other faculties of man, memorial and ratiocinative. And had it been even more incorrect than it really is, there would be no warrant for those imputations which modern authors build upon it, against the morality of Protagoras. No such imputations are countenanced in the discussion which Plato devotes to the doctrine: indeed, if the vindication which he sets forth against himself on behalf of Protagoras be really ascribable to that sophist, it would give an exaggerated importance to the distinction between Good and Evil, into which the distinction between Truth and Falsehood is considered by the Platonic Protagoras as resolvable. The subsequent theories of Plato and Aristotle respecting cognition, were much more systematic and elaborate, the work of men greatly superior in speculative genius to Protagoras: but they would not have been what they were, had not Protagoras, as well as others gone before them, with suggestions more partial and imperfect.

[585] Plato, Theætet. 18, p. 164, E. Οὔτι ἄν, οἶμαι, ὦ φίλε,
εἴπερ γε ὁ πατὴρ τοῦ ἑτέρου μύθου ἔζη—ἀλλὰ πολλὰ ἂν ἤμυνε· νῦν
δὲ ὄρφανον αὐτὸν ὄντα ἡμεῖς προπηλακίζομεν ... ἀλλὰ δὴ ~αὐτοὶ
κινδυνεύσομεν τοῦ δικαίου ἕνεκ᾽~ αὐτῷ βοηθεῖν.

This theory of Protagoras is discussed in the dialogue called
Theætetus, p. 152, _seq._, in a long but desultory way.

See Sextus Empiric. Pyrrhonic. Hypol. i. 216-219, et contra
Mathematicos, vii, 60-64. The explanation which Sextus gives
of the Protagorean doctrine, in the former passage, cannot be
derived from the treatise of Protagoras himself; since he makes
use of the word ὕλη in the philosophical sense, which was not
adopted until the days of Plato and Aristotle.

It is difficult to make out what Diogenes Laërtius states about
other tenets of Protagoras, and to reconcile them with the
doctrine of “man being the measure of all things,” as explained
by Plato (Diog. Laërt. ix, 51, 57).

[586] Aristotle (in one of the passages of his Metaphysica,
wherein he discusses the Protagorean doctrine, x, i, p. 1053, B.)
says that this doctrine comes to nothing more than saying, that
man, so far as cognizant, or so far as percipient, is the measure
of all things; in other words, that knowledge, or perception,
is the measure of all things. This, Aristotle says, is trivial,
and of no value, though it sounds like something of importance:
Πρωταγόρας δ᾽ ἄνθρωπόν φησι πάντων εἶναι μέτρον, ὥσπερ ἂν εἰ τὸν
ἐπιστήμονα εἰπὼν ἢ τὸν αἰσθανόμενον· τούτους δ᾽ ὅτι ἔχουσιν ὁ μὲν
αἴσθησιν ὁ δὲ ἐπιστήμην· ἅ φαμεν εἶναι μέτρα τῶν ὑποκειμένων.
Οὐθὲν δὴ λέγων περιττὸν φαίνεταί τι λέγειν.

It appears to me, that to insist upon the essentially relative
nature of cognizable truth, was by no means a trivial or
unimportant doctrine, as Aristotle pronounces it to be;
especially when we compare it with the unmeasured conceptions
of the objects and methods of scientific research which were so
common in the days of Protagoras.

Compare Metaphysic. iii, 5, pp. 1008, 1009, where it will be seen
how many other thinkers of that day carried the same doctrine,
seemingly, further than Protagoras.

Protagoras remarked that the observed movements of the heavenly
bodies did not coincide with that which the astronomers
represented them to be, and to which they applied their
mathematical reasonings. This remark was a criticism on the
mathematical astronomers of his day—ἐλέγχων τοὺς γεωμέτρας
(Aristot. Metaph. iii, 2, p. 998, A). We know too little how far
his criticism may have been deserved, to assent to the general
strictures of Ritter, Gesch. der Phil. vol. i, p. 633.

From Gorgias there remains one short essay, preserved in one of the Aristotelian, or Pseudo-Aristotelian treatises,[587] on a metaphysical thesis. He professes to demonstrate that nothing exists: that if anything exist, it is unknowable; and granting it even to exist and to be knowable by any one man, he could never communicate it to others. The modern historians of philosophy here prefer the easier task of denouncing the skepticism of the sophist, instead of performing the duty incumbent on them of explaining his thesis in immediate sequence with the speculations which preceded it. In our sense of the words, it is a monstrous paradox: but construing them in their legitimate filiation from the Eleatic philosophers immediately before him, it is a plausible, not to say conclusive, deduction from principles which they would have acknowledged.[588] The word existence, as they understood it, did not mean phenomenal, but ultra-phenomenal existence. They looked upon the phenomena of sense as always coming and going, as something essentially transitory, fluctuating, incapable of being surely known, and furnishing at best grounds only for conjecture. They searched by cogitation for what they presumed to be the really existent something or substance—the noumenon, to use a Kantian phrase—lying behind or under the phenomena, which noumenon they recognized as the only appropriate subject of knowledge. They discussed much, as I have before remarked, whether it was one or many; noumenon in the singular, or noumena in the plural. Now the thesis of Gorgias related to this ultra-phenomenal existence, and bore closely upon the arguments of Zeno and Melissus, the Eleatic reasoners of his elder contemporaries. He denied that any such ultra-phenomenal something, or noumenon, existed, or could be known, or could be described. Of this tripartite thesis, the first negation was neither more untenable, nor less untenable, than that of those philosophers who before him had argued for the affirmative: on the two last points, his conclusions were neither paradoxical nor improperly skeptical, but perfectly just, and have been ratified by the gradual abandonment, either avowed or implied, of such ultra-phenomenal researches among the major part of philosophers. It may fairly be presumed that these doctrines were urged by Gorgias for the purpose of diverting his disciples from studies which he considered as unpromising and fruitless: just as we shall find his pupil Isokratês afterwards enforcing the same view, discouraging speculations of this nature, and recommending rhetorical exercise as preparation for the duties of an active citizen.[589] Nor must we forget that Sokratês himself discouraged physical speculations even more decidedly than either of them.

[587] See the treatise entitled De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgiâ
in Bekker’s edition of Aristotle’s Works, vol. i, p. 979, _seq._;
also the same treatise, with a good preface and comments, by
Mullach, p. 62 _seq._: compare Sextus Emp. adv. Mathemat. vii,
65, 87.

[588] See the note of Mullach, on the treatise mentioned in the
preceding note, p. 72. He shows that Gorgias followed in the
steps of Zeno and Melissus.

[589] Isokratês De Permutatione, Or. xv, s. 287; Xenoph. Memorab.
i, 1, 14.

If the censures cast upon the alleged skepticism of Gorgias and Protagoras are partly without sufficient warrant, partly without any warrant at all, much more may the same remark be made respecting the graver reproaches heaped upon their teaching on the score of immorality or corruption. It has been common with recent German historians of philosophy to translate from Plato and dress up a fiend called “Die Sophistik,” (Sophistic,) whom they assert to have poisoned and demoralized, by corrupt teaching, the Athenian moral character, so that it became degenerate at the end of the Peloponnesian war, compared with what it had been in the time of Miltiadês and Aristeidês.

Now, in the first place, if the abstraction “Die Sophistik” is to have any definite meaning, we ought to have proof that the persons styled sophists had some doctrines, principles, or method, both common to them all and distinguishing them from others. But such a supposition is untrue: there were no such common doctrines, or principles, or method, belonging to them; even the name by which they are known did not belong to them, any more than to Sokratês and others; they had nothing in common except their profession, as paid teachers, qualifying young men “to think, speak, and act,” these are the words of Isokratês, and better words it would not be easy to find, with credit to themselves as citizens. Moreover, such community of profession did not at that time imply near so much analogy of character as it does now, when the path of teaching has been beaten into a broad and visible high road, with measured distances and stated intervals: Protagoras and Gorgias found predecessors, indeed, but no binding precedents to copy; so that each struck out more or less a road of his own. And accordingly, we find Plato, in his dialogue called “Protagoras,” wherein Protagoras, Prodikus, and Hippias, are all introduced, imparting a distinct type of character and distinct method to each, not without a strong admixture of reciprocal jealousy between them; while Thrasymachus, in the Republic, and Euthydêmus, in the dialogue so called, are again painted each with colors of his own, different from all the three above named. We have not the least reason for presuming that Gorgias agreed in the opinion of Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things;” and we may infer, even from Plato himself, that Protagoras would have opposed the views expressed by Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic. It is impossible therefore to predicate anything concerning doctrines, methods, or tendencies, common and peculiar to all the sophists. There were none such; nor has the abstract word, “Die Sophistik,” any real meaning, except such qualities, whatever they may be, as are inseparable from the profession or occupation of public teaching. And if, at present, every candid critic would be ashamed to cast wholesale aspersions on the entire body of professional teachers, much more is such censure unbecoming in reference to the ancient sophists, who were distinguished from each other by stronger individual peculiarities.

If, then, it were true that in the interval between 480 B.C. and the end of the Peloponnesian war, a great moral deterioration had taken place in Athens and in Greece generally, we should have to search for some other cause than this imaginary abstraction called sophistic. But—and this is the second point—the matter of fact here alleged is as untrue, as the cause alleged is unreal. Athens, at the close of the Peloponnesian war, was not more corrupt than Athens in the days of Miltiadês and Aristeidês. If we revert to that earlier period, we shall find that scarcely any acts of the Athenian people have drawn upon them sharper censure—in my judgment, unmerited—than their treatment of these very two statesmen; the condemnation of Miltiadês, and the ostracism of Aristeidês. In writing my history of that time, far from finding previous historians disposed to give the Athenians credit for public virtue, I have been compelled to contend against a body of adverse criticism, imputing to them gross ingratitude and injustice. Thus the contemporaries of Miltiadês and Aristeidês, when described as matter of present history, are presented in anything but flattering colors; except their valor at Marathon and Salamis, which finds one unanimous voice of encomium. But when these same men have become numbered among the mingled recollections and fancies belonging to the past,—when a future generation comes to be present, with its appropriate stock of complaint and denunciation,—then it is that men find pleasure in dressing up the virtues of the past, as a count in the indictment against their own contemporaries. Aristophanês,[590] writing during the Peloponnesian war, denounced the Demos of his day as degenerated from the virtue of that Demos which had surrounded Miltiadês and Aristeidês: while Isokratês,[591] writing as an old man, between 350-340 B.C., complains in like manner of his own time, boasting how much better the state of Athens had been in his youth: which period of his youth fell exactly during the life of Aristophanês, in the last half of the Peloponnesian war.

[590] Aristophan. Equit. 1316-1321.

[591] Isokratês, Or. xv, De Permutation. s. 170.

Such illusions ought to impose on no one without a careful comparison of facts; and most assuredly that comparison will not bear out the allegation of increased corruption and degeneracy, between the age of Miltiadês and the end of the Peloponnesian war. Throughout the whole of Athenian history, there are no acts which attest so large a measure of virtue and judgment pervading the whole people, as the proceedings after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Nor do I believe that the contemporaries of Miltiadês would have been capable of such heroism; for that appellation is by no means too large for the case. I doubt whether they would have been competent to the steady self-denial of retaining a large sum in reserve during the time of peace, both prior to the Peloponnesian war and after the Peace of Nikias; or of keeping back the reserve fund of one thousand talents, while they were forced to pay taxes for the support of the war; or of acting upon the prudent, yet painfully trying, policy recommended by Periklês, so as to sustain an annual invasion without either going out to fight or purchasing peace by ignominious concessions. If bad acts such as Athens committed during the later years of the war, for example, the massacre of the Melian population, were not done equally by the contemporaries of Miltiadês, this did not arise from any superior humanity or principle on their part, but from the fact that they were not exposed to the like temptation, brought upon them by the possession of imperial power. The condemnation of the six generals after the battle of Arginusæ, if we suppose the same conduct on their part to have occurred in 490 B.C., would have been decreed more rapidly and more unceremoniously than it was actually decreed in 406 B.C. For at that earlier date there existed no psephism of Kannônus, surrounded by prescriptive respect; no graphê paranomôn; no such habits of established deference to a dikastery solemnly sworn, with full notice to defendants and full time of defence measured by the clock; none of those securities which a long course of democracy had gradually worked into the public morality of every Athenian, and which, as we saw in a former chapter, interposed a serious barrier to the impulse of the moment, though ultimately overthrown by its fierceness. A far less violent impulse would have sufficed for the same mischief in 490 B.C., when no such barriers existed. Lastly, if we want a measure of the appreciating sentiment of the Athenian public, towards a strict and decorous morality in the narrow sense, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, we have only to consider the manner in which they dealt with Nikias. I have shown, in describing the Sicilian expedition, that the gravest error which the Athenians ever committed, that which shipwrecked both their armament at Syracuse and their power at home, arose from their unmeasured esteem for the respectable and pious Nikias, which blinded them to the grossest defects of generalship and public conduct. Disastrous as such misjudgment was, it counts at least as a proof that the moral corruption alleged to have been operated in their characters, is a mere fiction. Nor let it be supposed that the nerve and resolution which once animated the combatants of Marathon and Salamis, had disappeared in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war. On the contrary, the energetic and protracted struggle of Athens, after the irreparable calamity at Syracuse, forms a worthy parallel to her resistance in the time of Xerxes, and maintained unabated that distinctive attribute which Periklês had set forth as the main foundation of her glory, that of never giving way before misfortune.[592] Without any disparagement to the armament at Salamis, we may remark that the patriotism of the fleet at Samos, which rescued Athens from the Four Hundred, was equally devoted and more intelligent; and that the burst of effort, which sent a subsequent fleet to victory at Arginusæ, was to the full as strenuous.

[592] Thucyd. ii, 64. γνῶτε δ᾽ ὄνομα μέγιστον αὐτὴν (τὴν πόλιν)
ἔχουσαν ἐν πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις, διὰ τὸ ταῖς ξυμφοραῖς μὴ εἴκειν.

If, then, we survey the eighty-seven years of Athenian history, between the battle of Marathon and the renovation of the democracy after the Thirty, we shall see no ground for the assertion, so often made, of increased and increasing moral and political corruption. It is my belief that the people had become both morally and politically better, and that their democracy had worked to their improvement. The remark made by Thucydidês, on the occasion of the Korkyræan bloodshed,—on the violent and reckless political antipathies, arising out of the confluence of external warfare with internal party-feud,[593]—wherever else it may find its application, has no bearing upon Athens: the proceedings after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty prove the contrary. And while Athens may thus be vindicated on the moral side, it is indisputable that her population had acquired a far larger range of ideas and capacities than they possessed at the time of the battle of Marathon. This, indeed, is the very matter of fact deplored by Aristophanês, and admitted by those writers, who, while denouncing the sophists, connect such enlarged range of ideas with the dissemination of the pretended sophistical poison. In my judgment, not only the charge against the sophists as poisoners, but even the existence of such poison in the Athenian system, deserves nothing less than an emphatic denial.

[593] Thucydidês (iii, 82) specifies very distinctly the cause to
which he ascribes the bad consequences which he depicts. He makes
no allusion to sophists or sophistical teaching; though Brandis
(Gesch. der Gr. Röm. Philos. i, p. 518, not. f.) drags in “the
sophistical spirit of the statesmen of that time,” as if it were
the cause of the mischief, and as if it were to be found in the
speeches of Thucydidês, i, 76, v, 105.

There cannot be a more unwarranted assertion; nor can a learned
man like Brandis be ignorant, that such words as “the sophistical
spirit,” (Der sophistische Geist,) are understood by a modern
reader in a sense totally different from its true Athenian sense.

Let us examine again the names of these professional teachers, beginning with Prodikus, one of the most renowned. Who is there that has not read the well-known fable called “The Choice of Hercules,” which is to be found in every book professing to collect impressive illustrations of elementary morality? Who does not know that its express purpose is, to kindle the imaginations of youth in favor of a life of labor for noble objects, and against a life of indulgence? It was the favorite theme on which Prodikus lectured, and on which he obtained the largest audience.[594] If it be of striking simplicity and effect even to a modern reader, how much more powerfully must it have worked upon the audience for whose belief it was specially adapted, when set off by the oral expansions of its author! Xenophon wondered that the Athenian dikasts dealt with Sokratês as a corruptor of youth,—Isokratês wondered that a portion of the public made the like mistake about him,—and I confess my wonder to be not less, that not only Aristophanês,[595] but even the modern writers on Grecian philosophy, should rank Prodikus in the same unenviable catalogue. This is the only composition[596] remaining from him; indeed, the only composition remaining from any one of the sophists, excepting the thesis of Gorgias, above noticed. It served, not merely as a vindication of Prodikus against such reproach, but also as a warning against implicit confidence in the sarcastic remarks of Plato,—which include Prodikus as well as the other sophists,—and in the doctrines which he puts into the mouth of the sophists generally, in order that Sokratês may confute them. The commonest candor would teach us, that if a polemical writer of dialogue chooses to put indefensible doctrine into the mouth of the opponent, we ought to be cautious of condemning the latter upon such very dubious proof.

[594] Xenoph. Memor. ii, 1, 21-34. Καὶ Πρόδικος δὲ ὁ σοφὸς
ἐν τῷ συγγράμματι τῷ περὶ Ἡρακλέους, ~ὅπερ δὴ καὶ πλείστοις
ἐπιδείκνυται~, ὡσαύτως περὶ τῆς ἀρετῆς ἀποφαίνεται, etc.

Xenophon here introduces Sokratês himself as bestowing much
praise on the moral teaching of Prodikus.

[595] See Fragment iii, of the Ταγηνισταὶ of Aristophanês,
Meineke, Fragment. Aristoph. p. 1140.

[596] Xenophon gives only the substance of Prodikus’s lecture,
not his exact words. But he gives what may be called the whole
substance, so that we can appreciate the scope as well as the
handling of the author. We cannot say the same of an extract
given (in the Pseudo-Platonic Dialogue Axiochus, c. 7, 8) from a
lecture said to have been delivered by Prodikus, respecting the
miseries of human life, pervading all the various professions
and occupations. It is impossible to make out distinctly, either
how much really belongs to Prodikus, or what was his scope and
purpose, if any such lecture was really delivered.

Welcker and other modern authors treat Prodikus as “the most innocent” of the sophists, and except him from the sentence which they pass upon the class generally. Let us see, therefore, what Plato himself says about the rest of them, and first about Protagoras. If it were not the established practice with readers of Plato to condemn Protagoras beforehand, and to put upon every passage relating to him not only a sense as bad as it will bear, but much worse than it will fairly bear, they would probably carry away very different inferences from the Platonic dialogue called by that sophist’s name, and in which he is made to bear a chief part. That dialogue is itself enough to prove that Plato did not conceive Protagoras either as a corrupt, or unworthy, or incompetent teacher. The course of the dialogue exhibits him as not master of the theory of ethics, and unable to solve various difficulties with which that theory is expected to grapple; moreover, as no match for Sokratês in dialectics, which Plato considered as the only efficient method of philosophical investigation. In so far, therefore, as imperfect acquaintance with the science or theory upon which rules of art, or the precepts bearing on practice, repose, disqualifies a teacher from giving instruction in such art or practice, to that extent Protagoras is exposed as wanting. And if an expert dialectician, like Plato, had passed Isokratês or Quintilian, or the large majority of teachers past or present, through a similar cross-examination as to the theory of their teaching, an ignorance not less manifest than that of Protagoras would be brought out. The antithesis which Plato sets forth, in so many of his dialogues, between precept or practice, accompanied by full knowledge of the scientific principles from which it must be deduced, if its rectitude be disputed,—and unscientific practice, without any such power of deduction or defence, is one of the most valuable portions of his speculations: he exhausts his genius to render it conspicuous in a thousand indirect ways, and to shame his readers, if possible, into the loftier and more rational walk of thought. But it is one thing to say of a man, that he does not know the theory of what he teaches, or of the way in which he teaches; it is another thing to say, that he actually teaches that which scientific theory would not prescribe as the best; it is a third thing, graver than both, to say that his teaching is not only below the exigences of science, but even corrupt and demoralizing. Now of these three points, it is the first only which Plato in his dialogue makes out against Protagoras: even the second, he neither affirms nor insinuates; and as to the third, not only he never glances at it, even indirectly, but the whole tendency of the discourse suggests a directly contrary conclusion. As if sensible that when an eminent opponent was to be depicted as puzzled and irritated by superior dialectics, it was but common fairness to set forth his distinctive merits also, Plato gives a fable, and expository harangue, from the mouth of Protagoras,[597] upon the question whether virtue is teachable. This harangue is, in my judgment, very striking and instructive; and so it would have been probably accounted, if commentators had not read it with a preëstablished persuasion that whatever came from the lips of a sophist must be either ridiculous or immoral.[598] It is the only part of Plato’s works wherein any account is rendered of the growth of that floating, uncertified, self-propagating body of opinion, upon which the cross-examining analysis of Sokratês is brought to bear, as will be seen in the following chapter.

[597] Plato, Protagoras, p. 320, D. c. 11, _et seq._, especially
p. 322, D, where Protagoras lays it down that no man is fit to
be a member of a social community, who has not in his bosom both
δίκη and αἰδὼς,—that is, a sense of reciprocal obligation and
right between himself and others,—and a sensibility to esteem or
reproach from others. He lays these fundamental attributes down
as what a good ethical theory must assume or exact in every man.

[598] Of the unjust asperity and contempt with which the Platonic
commentators treat the sophists, see a specimen in Ast, Ueber
Platons Leben und Schriften, pp. 70, 71, where he comments on
Protagoras and this fable.

Protagoras professes to teach his pupils “good counsel” in their domestic and family relations, as well as how to speak and act in the most effective manner for the weal of the city. Since this comes from Protagoras, the commentators of Plato pronounce it to be miserable morality; but it coincides, almost to the letter, with that which Isokratês describes himself as teaching, a generation afterwards, and substantially even with that which Xenophon represents Sokratês as teaching; nor is it easy to set forth, in a few words, a larger scheme of practical duty.[599] And if the measure of practical duty, which Protagoras devoted himself to teach, was thus serious and extensive, even the fraction of theory assigned to him in his harangue, includes some points better than that of Plato himself. For Plato seems to have conceived the ethical end, to each individual, as comprising nothing more than his own permanent happiness and moral health; and in this very dialogue, he introduces Sokratês as maintaining virtue to consist only in a right calculation of a man’s own personal happiness and misery. But here we find Protagoras speaking in a way which implies a larger, and, in my opinion, a juster, appreciation of the ethical end, as including not only reference to a man’s own happiness, but also obligations towards the happiness of others. Without at all agreeing in the harsh terms of censure which various critics pronounce upon that theory which Sokratês is made to set forth in the Platonic Protagoras, I consider his conception of the ethical end essentially narrow and imperfect, not capable of being made to serve as basis for deduction of the best ethical precepts. Yet such is the prejudice with which the history of the sophists has been written, that the commentators on Plato accuse the sophists of having originated what they ignorantly term, “the base theory of utility,” here propounded by Sokratês himself; complimenting the latter on having set forth those larger views which in this dialogue belong only to Protagoras.[600]

[599] Protagoras says: Τὸ δὲ μάθημά ἐστιν, εὐβουλία περὶ τε τῶν
οἰκείων ὅπως ἂν ἄριστα τὴν αὑτοῦ οἰκίαν διοικοῖ, καὶ περὶ τῶν
τῆς πόλεως, ὅπως τὰ τῆς πόλεως δυνατώτατος εἴη καὶ πράττειν καὶ
λέγειν. (Plato, Protagoras, c. 9, p. 318, E.)

A similar description of the moral teaching of Protagoras and the
other sophists, yet comprising a still larger range of duties,
towards parents, friends, and fellow-citizens in their private
capacities, is given in Plato, Meno. p. 91, B, E.

Isokratês describes the education which he wished to convey,
almost in the same words: Τοὺς τὰ τοιαῦτα μανθάνοντας καὶ
μελετῶντας ἐξ ὧν καὶ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον καὶ τὰ κοινὰ τὰ τῆς πόλεως
καλῶς διοικήσουσιν, ὧνπερ ἕνεκα καὶ πονητέον καὶ φιλοσοφητέον καὶ
πάντα πρακτέον ἐστί (Or. xv, De Permutat. s. 304; compare 289).

Xenophon also describes, almost in the same words, the teaching
of Sokratês. Kriton and others sought the society of Sokratês:
οὐκ ἵνα δημηγορικοὶ ἢ δικανικοὶ γένοιντο, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα καλοί τε
κἀγαθοὶ γενόμενοι, καὶ οἴκῳ καὶ οἰκέταις καὶ οἰκείοις καὶ φίλοις
καὶ πόλει καὶ πολίταις δύναιντο καλῶς χρῆσθαι (Memor. i, 2,
48). Again, i, 2, 64: Φανερὸς ἦν Σωκράτης τῶν συνόντων τοὺς
πονηρὰς ἐπιθυμίας ἔχοντας, τούτων μὲν παύων, ~τῆς δὲ καλλίστης
καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεστάτης ἀρετῆς, ᾗ πόλεις τε καὶ οἴκοι εὖ οἰκοῦσι~,
προτρέπων ἐπιθυμεῖν. Compare also i, 6, 15; ii, 1, 19; iv, 1, 2;
iv, 5, 10.

When we perceive how much analogy Xenophon establishes—so far as
regards practical precept, apart from theory or method—between
Sokratês, Protagoras, Prodikus, etc., it is difficult to
justify the representations of the commentators respecting the
sophists; see Stallbaum, Proleg. ad Platon Menon. p. 8. “Etenim
virtutis nomen, cum propter ambitûs magnitudinem valde esset
ambiguum et obscurum, sophistæ interpretabantur sic, ut, missâ
veræ honestatis et probitatis vi, unice de prudentiâ civili
ac domesticâ cogitari vellent, eoque modo totam virtutem _ad
callidum quoddam utilitatis vel privatim vel publice consequendæ
artificium_ revocarent.” ... “Pervidit hanc _opinionis istius
perversitatem, ejusque turpitudinem_ intimo sensit pectore, vir
sanctissimi animi, Socratês, etc.” Stallbaum speaks to the same
purpose in his Prolegomena to the Protagoras, pp. 10, 11; and to
the Euthydemus, pp. 21, 22.

Those who, like these censors on the sophists, think it _base_
to recommend virtuous conduct by the mutual security and comfort
which it procures to all parties, must be prepared to condemn
on the same ground a large portion of what is said by Sokratês
throughout the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Μὴ καταφρόνει τῶν
οἰκονομικῶν ἀνδρῶν, etc. (ii, 4, 12); see also his Œconomic. xi,
10.

[600] Stallbaum, Prolegomena ad Platonis Menonem, p. 9: “Etenim
sophistæ, quum virtutis exercitationem et ad utilitates externas
referent, et facultate quâdam atque consuetudine ejus, quod utile
videretur, reperiendi, absolvi statuerent,—Socrates ipse, rejectâ
_utilitatis turpitudine_, vim naturamque virtutis unice ad id
quod bonum honestumque est, revocavit; voluitque esse in eo, ut
quis recti bonique sensu ac scientâ polleret, ad quam tanquam ad
certissimam normam atque regulam actiones suas omnes dirigeret
atque poneret.”

Whoever will compare this criticism with the Protagoras of Plato,
c. 36, 37, especially p. 357, B, wherein Sokratês identifies
good with pleasure and evil with pain, and wherein he considers
right conduct to consist in justly calculating the items of
pleasure and pain one against the other, ἡ μετρητικὴ τέχνη, will
be astonished how a critic on Plato could write what is above
cited. I am aware that there are other parts of Plato’s dialogues
in which he maintains a doctrine different from that just alluded
to. Accordingly, Stallbaum (in his Prolegomena to the Protagoras,
p. 30) contends that Plato is here setting forth a doctrine
not his own, but is reasoning on the principles of Protagoras,
for the purpose of entrapping and confounding him: “Quæ hic
de fortitudine disseruntur, ea item cavendum est ne protenus
pro decretis mere Platonicis habeantur. Disputat enim Socrates
pleraque omnia ad mentem ipsius Protagoræ, ita quidem ut eum per
suam ipsius rationem in fraudem et errorem inducat.”

I am happy to be able to vindicate Plato against the disgrace of
so dishonest a spirit of argumentation as that which Stallbaum
ascribes to him. Plato most certainly does not reason here upon
the doctrines or principles of Protagoras; for the latter begins
by positively denying the doctrine, and is only brought to admit
it in a very qualified manner, c. 35, p. 351, D. He says, in
reply to the question of Sokratês: Οὐκ οἶδα ἁπλῶς οὕτως, ὡς σὺ
ἐρωτᾷς, εἰ ἐμοὶ ἀποκριτέον ἐστὶν, ὡς τὰ ἡδέα τε ἀγαθά ἐστιν
ἅπαντα καὶ τὰ ἀνιαρὰ κακά· ἀλλὰ μοι δοκεῖ οὐ μόνον πρὸς τὴν νῦν
ἀπόκρισιν ἐμοὶ ἀσφαλέστερον εἶναι ἀποκρίνασθαι, ~ἀλλὰ καὶ πρὸς
πάντα τὸν ἄλλον βίον τὸν ἐμὸν~, ὅτι ἐστὶ μὲν ἃ τῶν ἡδέων οὔκ
ἐστιν ἀγαθὰ, ἐστὶ δὲ αὖ καὶ ἃ τῶν ἀνιαρῶν οὐκ ἐστι κακὰ, ἐστὶ δὲ
ἃ ἐστι, καὶ τρίτον ἃ οὐδέτερα, οὔτε κακὰ οὔτ᾽ ἀγαθά.

There is something peculiarly striking in this appeal of
Protagoras to his whole past life, as rendering it impossible for
him to admit what he evidently looked upon as a _base theory_,
as Stallbaum pronounces it to be. Yet the latter actually
ventures to take it away from Sokratês, who not only propounds
it confidently, but reasons it out in a clear and forcible
manner, and of fastening it on Protagoras, who first disclaims
it and then only admits it under reserve! I deny the theory to
be _base_, though I think it an imperfect theory of ethics.
But Stallbaum, who calls it so, was bound to be doubly careful
in looking into his proof before he ascribed it to any one.
What makes the case worse is, that he fastens it not only on
Protagoras, but on the sophists collectively, by that monstrous
fiction which treats them as a doctrinal sect.