SCHOOLS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS AND SOPHISTS.
Having thus drawn as complete a picture as the plan of our work would
permit, of the physical training of the Greeks in all its branches,
comprehending Gymnastics properly so called, together with those other
exercises which under the name of field-sports were enjoyed rather
than studied under the lead of no master but experience, we now return
to that mental discipline, which for the most part exerted its
influence in the developement of the intellectual faculties at the
same time that the foregoing bodily discipline brought forth all the
energies of the frame. We shall thus have traversed the whole circle
of Hellenic education, when we shall have exhibited the youth passing
through the schools of the philosophers and sophists into the
world.[794]
Footnote 794:
Cf. M. Ant. Muret. Orat. vii. p. 70. sqq.
Their mode of teaching differed very materially from ours. It scarcely
seemed an object with them to devour large quantities of learning, but
going leisurely again and again over the same ground they appeared to
give the lessons they received time to sink like gentle rain into
their minds. Some advantage, too, arose from their method of teaching,
as far as possible, orally. The master was to them instead of a
library. A book has but one set of phrases for all. But the living
teacher, if he found his pupils could not rise to his language, could
lower it to meet them half-way, could be brief or expansive, or
general or minute, as the necessities of the moment required. There
was a familiarity, too, in the relation, scarcely compatible with our
manners. The youth forgot he was learning, and rather supposed himself
to be searching in the company of a friend for truths equally unknown
to both. This appears to have been more particularly the case in their
moral studies,[795] at least in the Socratic schools, where all the
pomp of wisdom was laid aside that it might be the more popular.
Footnote 795:
Vid. Ant. Muret. Orat. iv. 43. sqq.
It has been already remarked that the first lessons in morals were
learned from the poets, whom, in my opinion, Plato wrongs most
egregiously when he arraigns their fables as so many sources of
immorality.[796] He appears, in fact, wilfully to confound them with
those impostors, the purificators and diviners, who furnished the
Popes with the original hint of penitences and indulgencies, and
expiating crimes by proxy. But this is unjust. It is visiting the sins
of low and sensual versifiers upon the divine heads of bards whom
heaven itself had inspired. However this may be, upon the Greeks young
and old no teachers exercised so powerful an influence as the poets,
who, from Homer down to Callistratos,[797] whether in epic or
after-dinner song, wielded the empire of their feelings despotically,
prompting them to actions pregnant with renown. And the avidity with
which their lessons were imbibed, is compared to that of a swarm of
bees alighting (ἐπιπτομένοι)[798] on a bed of spring flowers. In fact,
what Jason of Pheræ said of himself,—that he was devoured by the love
of empire[799]—appears to have been true of the Athenian youth, in
their irrepressible thirst after knowledge. Such of them, at least, as
were εὐφυεῖς καὶ ἱκανοὶ, are said to have hungered fiercely after
philosophy, and that not for any particular part but for the whole.
And Socrates declares that he who while young is fastidious in his
studies, rejecting this, disliking that, before mature reason has
taught him which is useful and which is not, may consider himself what
he pleases, but can never be great in learning or philosophy. To excel
in these it is necessary insatiably to covet every kind of
instruction, and joyfully to enter on the acquisition of it. He says,
indeed, that they resemble sight-seers, greedy of every spectacle; or
musical people, who are led by the ear wherever fiddling and singing
are going forward; except that, with the latter pleasure is the sole
motive, with the former an exalted passion for truth.[800] But what
truths are the object of philosophy? Those which have regard to the
nature and attributes of goodness, from which, as from a fountain,
flow all the usefulness and advantages of virtue. Philosophy in Greece
comprehended religion, and to be religious was to act justly,
benevolently, mercifully towards men, humbly and piously towards God.
To live thus, that is, to be virtuous, they considered it necessary to
possess a knowledge of the whole theory of ethics, since virtue, in
their opinion, is incompatible with ignorance. But man, besides being
a moral being, accountable to God, is a political being, accountable
to the laws of his country. He has duties also to perform towards that
country. To perform these properly he must comprehend the nature of a
state, and the relations subsisting between the state and the
individuals who compose it; that is, he must be acquainted with the
science of politics. Again in all free states, reasoning and
persuasion, not blind will and brute force, are the instruments of
government. The citizen must, therefore, be versed in logic and
eloquence,[801] that he may think correctly and explain clearly and
forcibly to others the convictions which determine his own judgment.
We have thus a cycle of Greek studies with the reasons on which they
were founded.
Footnote 796:
Plat. de Rep. ii. t. i. p. 112. sqq. Stallb. Cf. Hardion, Dissert.
sur l’Eloquence, iii. Biblioth. Academ. t. iii. p. 194. p. 210. sqq.
Footnote 797:
See Schoel. Hist. de la Lit. Grecq. i. 288. Lowth. Poes. Sacr. Hebr.
p. 12. Leipz.
Footnote 798:
Plat. de Rep. ii. t. i. p. 115. Stallb. On the ardent and noble
temperament of Athenian youth, see the note of Valckennaer, ad
Xenoph. Mem. iii. 3. 13. p. 286. Schneid. Cf. Plat. de Rep. v. t. i.
p. 345.
Footnote 799:
Aristot. Polit. iii. 4.
Footnote 800:
Plat. de Rep. v. t. i. p. 393. seq. Stallb.
Footnote 801:
Plat. Gorg. t. iii. p. 27. De Rep. t. vi. p. 358. sqq. Bekk.
With regard to their religious education, which commenced in the
nursery and was interwoven with every other study, it may be observed
that without it no person at Athens could rise to any eminence, or
command, even in private life, the respect of his fellow-citizens. To
be in favour with them a man must be supposed to stand well with the
gods. They conceived, in fact, that while conscience remained
unstifled, there would be a sense of religion, and that when this
went, probity, for the most part, and honour fled along with it. For
regarding the deity in the light of a parent,—"we are all his
offspring,"—irreligion appeared to them something like a disposition
to parricide, a compound of injustice with the basest and most
atrocious ingratitude. Arrived at this pitch, a man to compass his
ends would scruple at nothing. They, therefore, regarded every symptom
of impiety as a blow aimed at the democracy, of which Zeus was king.
He who tramples on his country’s religion, which is the basis of all
its laws, will infallibly, if it be in his power, trample next on
those laws themselves, and next on his fellow-citizens whom the laws
protect. Hence the terror, the vengeance, and, indeed, the cruelty
arising out of the mutilation of the Hermæ, and the profanation of the
mysteries, and the prosecution which followed, of Alcibiades,
Andocides, and the rest. An attempt had been made to break down that
enclosure of reverential sanctity which surrounded the commonwealth,
and commended it to the protection of heaven. They considered the act
a formal renouncing of the Almighty, and feared,—so imperfect were
their notions,—lest the impiety of the few should redound to the
detriment of the whole.
The remark is common in the mouths[802] of men that the education of
the people should be conformable to the spirit of their institutions.
But this is a mere truism, and means no more than this,—that men
should not be enjoined one thing by their laws and political
constitution, and another by the habits and maxims taught in youth.
The grand difficulty, however, always has been to make them so to
harmonise in practice that they should be but two parts of the same
system.
Footnote 802:
See on this part of the subject Destutt de Tracy. Com. sur l’Esprit
des Loix, p. 25. sqq.
In monarchies[803] a spirit of exclusion, something like that on which
the system of castes is built, must pervade the whole business of
education. The nobility must have schools to themselves, or, if
wealthy plebeians be suffered to mingle with them, superior honour and
consideration must be yielded to the former. The masters must look up
to them and to their families, not to the people for preferment and
advancement; and the plebeians, though superior in number, must be
weak in influence, and be taught to borrow their tone from the
privileged students.
Footnote 803:
In an ill-constituted state, observes Muretus, a good man cannot be
a good citizen, for he will desire to alter the government, which
being bad he cannot respect.—In Aristot. Eth. p. 398.
In an oligarchy, properly so called, there should be no mingling of
the classes at all. Schools must be established expressly for the
governors, and others for the governed. The basis of education should
be the notion that some men were born for rule and others for
subjection; that the happiness of individuals depends on uninquiring
submission to authority; that their rulers are wise and they unwise;
that all they have to do with the laws is to obey them; and all
teachers must be made to feel that their admission among the great
depends on the faithful advocacy of such notions.
In free states, again, the contrary course will best promote the ends
of government; the schools must be strictly public, and not merely
theoretically but practically open to all. There should be no
compulsion to attend them, but ignorance of the things there taught
should involve a forfeiture of civil rights as much as being of
unsound mind; for in truth, an ignorant man is not of sound mind, any
more than one unable to use all his limbs is of sound body. Here the
discipline must be very severe. A spirit rigidly puritanical must
pervade the studies and preside over the amusements. Every tendency
irreligious, immoral, ungentlemanly, as unworthy the dignity of
freedom, should be nipped in the bud. The students must be taught to
despise all other distinctions but those of virtue and genius, in
other words the power to serve the community. They should be taught to
contemplate humanity as in other respects wholly on the same level,
with nothing above it but the laws. The teachers must be dependent on
the people alone, and owe their success to their own abilities and
popular manners. And this last in a great measure was the spirit of
Athenian education.[804]
Footnote 804:
The advantages of which were so much coveted by foreigners, that
they sent their children in crowds to be educated at Athens.—Æsch.
Epist. Orat. Att. xii. 214.
The best proof[805] that could be furnished of the excellence of a
system of education would be its rendering a people almost independent
of government, that is swayed more by their habits than by the laws.
This was preëminently the case with the Athenians. They required to be
very little meddled with by their rulers. Instructed in their duties
and the reason which rendered them duties, accustomed from childhood
to perform them, they lived as moral and educated men live still,
independent of the laws.
Footnote 805:
A commonwealth, says Plato, once well constituted will proceed like
an ever rolling circle. For by persevering in good training and
instruction, the minds and disposition of the people will be
rendered good, and these again in their turn will improve the system
of training and instruction, and even the race of man itself, as the
breed of other animals, is rendered more excellent by care.—De Rep.
t. vi. p. 173. Cf. Isocrates, Areop. § 14. seq.
This was the effect. The causes must be sought in their discipline and
studies. I have observed that among them a principal subject of
investigation was the science of politics, that is the science
according to the principles of which states are framed and preserved.
Nor did they, as some do, conduct their studies in that cold manner in
which men investigate matters of mere curiosity, or things they are
never to do more than converse or write about. They studied it as a
profession, as a means of rising to power, and through power to fame,
that is with all the ardour and earnestness of which enthusiastic
youth is capable. Education by this means exerted an influence unknown
under other forms of government. A consciousness that they were
engaged in a sort of sacred contest, of which all Greece was
spectator, pervaded the youth of every rank, and impelled them
irresistibly into that course of studies which promised the greatest
probability of success. Hence, no doubt much of the enthusiasm with
which philosophy was cultivated. It was often not so much the abstract
love of wisdom as a conviction of the political value of that wisdom
which filled the schools of the great men who taught at Athens,
whether they were physiologists, mathematicians, masters of music, of
strategy, or of eloquence. The example of Pericles applying himself to
natural philosophy under Anaxagoras, and deriving thence those streams
of pure and masculine eloquence which overflowed the Pnyx, operated
forcibly on public opinion. By the same arts and studies men hoped to
mount to equal elevation, forgetting that Anaxagoras only watered the
plant spontaneously produced by nature.
However, the hopes and aspirations I have described filled the schools
first of the philosophers, then of the sophists. And this is the
natural course of things. Few pursue wisdom for its own sake, in order
that it may purify and render holy their own minds. And by this
dispensation of Providence society is a gainer; for, as man is
constituted, no sooner does he possess any mental excellence, any
knowledge or art or experience, which can be rendered available, than
he comes eagerly forward with it to extort praise or reward from the
community by conferring benefits upon it. The examples of reserve in
this matter are few, nor, in fact, are they to be commended who in
this or in any thing else hide their light under a bushel; and
therefore Plato is wrong when he teaches that wise men will as a rule
abstain from intermeddling with state affairs, unless constrained
thereto by fines and menaces. He confesses, indeed, that the worst of
all punishments is to be governed by evil men, and that to avoid this
even philosophers will consent to hold the reins of government.[806]
But where they do not, they are always in free states the masters of
those who do. Their schools were the colleges and universities of the
ancient world, and so long as freedom endured the great object of
their philosophy was to create able citizens and a happy state. On
this account their remains are still instinct with life. Their object
was gradually to ripen human nature into perfection by perfecting its
education and its institutions. They knew how completely a people is
in the power of its teachers for good or for evil, and accordingly,
with some few exceptions, applied themselves to elevate the
conceptions, the moral tone, the feelings of their countrymen, seldom
descending to trifling disquisitions excepting for relaxation in the
intervals of more important inquiries.
Footnote 806:
Repub. i. t. vi. p. 42. seq. Bekk.
The physical sciences,[807] save in the case of their earliest
cultivators, were regarded as simple handmaids to ethics and politics.
Nevertheless, in the study of them much earnestness was exhibited.
For, where knowledge is at all held in honour, men will always be
found sufficiently prone to the palpable and visible. But even these
pursuits assumed a peculiar form in Greece. The genius of the nation,
essentially creative, developed its force and its peculiar energy in
framing systems of physics, explaining the origin of the world, the
birth of the human race, its early fortunes and fabulous history.
Every great philosopher became, like an intellectual sun, the centre
of a system of physics, and his disciples like satellites revolved
around him, receiving and reflecting his light. This, despite of some
inconveniences, was highly favourable to science. It compelled men to
the study of the philosophical art of attack and defence. Each school
became the reviewers and critics of its rivals, sought out their weak
points, studied them profoundly, called up all its acuteness, all its
subtlety, both to assault others and defend itself; and thus, whatever
became of the system, the professors of it carried, as far as might be
towards perfection, their intellectual powers, invested their
reasonings with every grace of which they were susceptible, culled
from the most recondite arts and hidden resources of style and
eloquence.
Footnote 807:
Vid. Athen. ii. 18.—That geography entered but very little into
their studies may be inferred from Thucydides, vii. 1.
But, while this golden currency was circulating through Greece,
enriching its mind and augmenting its chances of independence and
happiness, a race of men sprang up, who brought into use a number of
ingenious and beautiful counters,—I mean the sophists.[808] The
influence of these men in the education of the Greeks has seldom been
correctly appreciated. It has been more common to vituperate than to
study them. They corrupted, we are told, the mind and manners of
youth. But how? No one, as far as I know, has observed that to them is
to be traced the extinction of the republican spirit and the opening
of a way for despotism.[809] That they created the yearning after
innovation I will not affirm; but their epoch constituted a period of
transition from republican to monarchical institutions, and the only
way in which they can be said to have corrupted the youth was by
undermining that love of liberty and of country, the feeling of
disinterestedness on which chiefly a commonwealth must be founded, and
inculcating in lieu thereof a system of ethics more in conformity with
the modifications of civil polity prevalent in modern times. In this
way only did they corrupt and undermine the morals of their country.
But in so far they effected it, and that the more easily, in that
circumstances conspired, about the time they arose, to fling the whole
business of teaching into their hands, insomuch that to be a sophist,
and to teach youth, grew to be synonymous terms.[810]
Footnote 808:
Vid. Herod. i. 29. And Cf. Schœll. Hist. de la Lit. Grecq. ii. 134.
Isoc. de Perm. § 26. Muret. in Arist. Ethic. p. 477. Menag. ad Diog.
Laert. p. 5. a. b. &c.
Footnote 809:
Hobbes, the great representative of this class of men in modern
times, living under the despotism of the Stuarts, sought to turn the
tables upon the philosophers, and accused them of corrupting the
minds of youth. “As to rebellion, in particular against monarchy,
one of the most frequent causes of it is the reading of the books of
policy and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans; from which
young men, and all others that are unprovided of the antidote of
solid reason, receiving a strong and delightful impression of the
great exploits of war, achieved by the conductors of their armies,
receive withal a pleasing idea of all they have done besides; and
imagine their great prosperity not to have proceeded from the
emulation of particular men, but from the virtue of their popular
form of government.”—Leviathan, pt. ii. c. 29. vol. iii. p.
315.—Edition of Sir William Molesworth.
Footnote 810:
Poll. iv. 17.
They were themselves, however, but a corruption of what in its origin
was good, and always continued in the opinion of the undiscerning to
be confounded with the men they aped.[811] Whether we have sophists
among us at the present day, I will not determine; but this is the way
they arose in Greece. It was soon discovered by shrewd and calculating
men, that since philosophy excited much admiration and rendered its
teachers objects of mark and reverence, it might by a little ingenuity
be converted into a source of profit.[812] But by what means?—The
philosophers at the outset were in possession of the popular ear, more
through the sanctity of their lives, of which all could judge, than
through their doctrines, necessarily comprehended in their fullest
extent by few. They despaired, therefore, of the people. There
existed, however, in Greece, and will ever exist in free states, young
men of immeasurable ambition, who, impatient of the restraint of laws,
would gladly cast them off, seize the reins of government, and become
the tyrants of their country. The mere conception of such a design
implies the possession of wealth and powerful friends. Eager for any
help they enthusiastically welcomed all who seemed capable of
promoting their views, and when the sophists appeared, enriched with a
variety of knowledge, specious, eloquent, unscrupulous, they eagerly
threw themselves into their arms, became their pupils, and in
conjunction with them framed the subjugation of Greece.
Footnote 811:
Plat. de Rep. t. vi. p. 286. seq. Cf. Schol. Aristoph. Nub. 331.
Footnote 812:
That money was the sole object of the sophists is observed by
Isocrates, Hel. Encom. § 4. Elsewhere, with a stroke of sly humour
not usual with him, he says, they would sell anything short of
immortality for three or four minæ.—Cont. Sophist. § 3, p. 576. See
on the whole subject of the Sophists, Hard. Dissert. v. Bibl. Acad.
t. iii. p. 240. sqq. Muret. in Arist. Ethic. p. 533. Cressol. Theat.
Rhet. v. iii. p. 447.
In tracing this class of men to their origin, we must look back a
great way, and endeavour to detect them, under a variety of forms,
different from that in which they ultimately settled. They arose with
the first philosophers, or the first poet who made self the centre of
his researches, and sought to render the investigation of science a
means of personal aggrandisement. Protagoras describes in Plato the
rise of his own art; where, though a side blow be wrongfully aimed at
poetry itself, the truth of the accusation against a number of poets
cannot be denied. He makes good at the very outset what I have
asserted above. They travelled, he says, over all Greece, alluring the
noblest youths to abandon the company of their friends and
fellow-citizens, to become their pupils, and be guided wholly by their
maxims, the nature of which I shall presently unfold. The feelings
they thus excited, he denominates envy and malevolence, though in
truth it was nothing more than that patriotic and parental jealousy
and hatred experienced by the good when they behold those they love
led astray. The better to escape this hostility, the ancient sophists
adopted various disguises, sometimes enveloping their art in the folds
of poetry as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, on other occasions
affecting to be the interpreters of foreign rites and oracles, as
Orpheus and Musæus; while a third class concealed the features of
their art under the less suspected mask of gymnastics, such as Iccos
of Tarentum, and that Herodicos of Silymbria a man of Megarean origin
who in the art of sophistry was second to none of his age.
Occasionally they made their entrance into cities as professors of
music. In this capacity Damon conversed with Pericles, and Agathocles,
an Athenian by birth, diffused through the state the seeds of
sophistry; Pythocleides, too, the Coan, pursued the same course; and
thus a youth, while ostensibly engaged in gaining a proficiency on the
lyre or cithara, was initiated in the mysteries of tyranny, irreligion
and injustice.[813]
Footnote 813:
Plat. Protag. t. i. p. 163. seq. Bekk.
By degrees, however, it was discovered that all disguise might be very
safely laid aside.[814] In fact the object at first aimed at,—to
escape the notice of men in power,—was found impracticable; and as to
the people, against whom all these shafts were directed, it was easy
to delude them, since what their leaders recommended they praised.
Protagoras, accordingly, boldly professed himself a sophist, trusting
for safety to his eloquence, and that growing laxity of manners which
was rapidly undermining the old republican constitution and preparing
the way for a new order of things. His candour was praiseworthy, but
lamentable were the circumstances which rendered it safe.
Footnote 814:
At a late period, by a decree of Sophocles, the sophists were driven
out of Attica.—Athen. xiii. 92. Cf. Cressol. Theat. Rhet. i. 12. p.
87.
I would not, however, be understood to share the opinions of those,
who can discern nothing but evil in the doctrines of the sophists. On
many points their notions harmonised altogether with those of the
wisest philosophers. Accordingly it was not precisely what they
inculcated, but the principles which regulated their teaching, that
rendered them sophists. They taught with a view to enrich themselves,
which is wholly incompatible with a strict allegiance to truth; since,
with such views, men will always be found to prophesy agreeably in
order that they may effect their purpose.
This circumstance has not been sufficiently considered by the writers
who undertake their apology. They compare them with the literary men
of modern times, and imagine this comparison a defence. But does it
not rather substantiate the accusation? It is true that, like modern
literary men, they haunted the houses of the great, whom they regarded
as their patrons; that to them, rather than to the people, they looked
for support; that, like them, they worshipped wealth and abhorred
poverty; that their studies, their discourses, their writings,
diffused far and wide through society a taste for arts and elegance;
that they furnished the public in their declamations, satires, novels,
of which they were the inventors, with inexhaustible sources of
amusement:—but what virtue did they inculcate? On whom did they urge
the necessity of sacrificing private to public good? On what occasion
did they dare to stem the torrent of immorality, of impiety, of
unpatriotic maxims, which the base and the selfish were pouring forth
against the old bulwarks of freedom? That among them there were men of
a very high order of genius, it is impossible to deny. Gorgias of
Leontium, from whose name we have borrowed an epithet to express
whatever is most glorious in nature or dazzling and elaborate in art,
Protagoras, Prodicos, Hippias of Elis, Polos of Agrigentum,
Thrasymachos of Chalcedon, have left behind them an imperishable
memory;[815] but so have Busiris and Phalaris and Catiline. They are
remembered for the good they might have done, and the evil they did.
Footnote 815:
Muretus considers the word sophist to be synonymous with a teacher
of eloquence: “Sophista, id est, dicendi magister;” and, speaking of
this same Thrasymachos, cites a passage from Cicero which attributes
to him the invention of the rhetorical style. Orat. § 12. Suidas
regards Thrasymachos as the first who made use of the period and the
colon; and supposes him to have been pupil to Plato and Isocrates,
whereas he preceded both.—Muret. Comm. p. 631. seq.
Since, however, the sophists acted so important a part in the
education of the Greeks, the space I devote to them is clearly their
due: it is necessary to the thorough comprehension of the subject.
Almost from the moment they arose they aimed at a monopoly of the art
of teaching, and the father of the art, properly so called, was
Gorgias. Few names of antiquity, as Geel[816] has well observed, are
better known or more celebrated than that of this distinguished
sophist, among the causes of whose amazing popularity must be reckoned
the number of great men whom he instructed in eloquence, and the
splendid vices of style which his example and precept brought into
vogue. The exact date of his birth is not known:[817] he is, however,
supposed to have been born at Leontium in Sicily, about the
seventy-third Olympiad. His father’s name was Charmantes.[818] Nearly
all the particulars of his early life are unknown, the ancients having
been as much too negligent as we are too lavish of biographical
details. Under whom he studied, with whom he conversed, how much he
owed to others, and how much to his own genius and industry, are
points not easy to be determined, though we cannot adopt the opinion
of Ælian,[819] who sends him to school to Philolaos; or of Diogenes
Laertius, who will have Empedocles to have been his teacher, since the
latter was very little older than himself, and the former much
younger. Empedocles is indeed said to have invented the art of
rhetoric, in which case we might suppose Gorgias to have been his
scholar. But how invented? He may have been the first who sought to
reduce it into an art, or who so called it; but as Aristotle observes,
every man who reasons persuasively is a rhetorician, whether his
eloquence be based on the formal study of the art or not. In
philosophy, indeed, he would seem[820] to have been the disciple of
Empedocles; but in rhetoric they both very probably derived
instruction from Corax and Tisias, who flourished and taught rhetoric
in Sicily about the period of their youth.[821]
Footnote 816:
Hist. Sophist. p. 13.
Footnote 817:
Clinton, Fast. Hellen. ii. 28. 65. 67. Geel (Hist. Sophist. p. 14)
assumes the seventieth Olympiad as the date of his birth; but as it
seems to result from the text of Pausanias that he was still living
in 380. B.C. this would extend the duration of his life beyond that
assigned to it by any ancient writer.
Footnote 818:
Of whom, as Muretus (Comm. p. 631. seq.) observes, no mention occurs
save in Plato de Repub. i. § 2. t. i. p. 8. Stallb.
Footnote 819:
Var. Hist. i. 23. Diog. Laert. viii. 58.—Mr. Clinton, however,
adopts the opinion of Diogenes (Fast. Hell. ii. 365); and, to render
it probable, supposes Empedocles to have been a few years older than
his pupil.
Footnote 820:
Plat. Men. p. 14. g.
Footnote 821:
Cic. Brut. § 12. Geel, Hist. Sophist. p. 15. seq. Sext. Empir. p.
306. seq.
These, however, are mere conjectures. He would probably have died in
obscurity, and been forgotten with the kings who reigned _ante
Agamemnona_, had not the misfortunes of his country brought him, in
old age, to the great workshop of Fame. The immediate occasion was
this; the people of Leontium having engaged and been worsted in war by
the Syracusans, sent ambassadors to demand succour of the Athenian
people, and among these the principal speaker was Gorgias. Practised
in a style of oratory new at Athens, indulging in a profusion of
metaphors and other figures bordering on the licences of poetry, he
immediately hurried away captive his hearers, fulfilled the desires of
his fellow citizens, and established for himself a reputation[822]
where all men most desired to possess one. To augment his glory it has
not been unusual to enumerate Pericles and Thucydides among those who
became his scholars. But this embassy took place in the fifth year of
the Peloponnesian war when Pericles had been dead two years. That
Thucydides heard him, however, is not at all improbable, since his
exile did not take place[823] till the eighth year of the war. Among
his admirers are mentioned two other men, whose principles and history
afford the best illustration of what fruit the teaching of the
sophists was likely to produce,—Critias and Alcibiades, whose ability,
courage, and profligacy rendered them the scourges of their country.
It has been with great probability supposed that, having on his return
to Leontium rendered an account of his mission, he quitted Sicily for
ever, for the purpose of becoming a professor of eloquence in Greece.
This is Diodorus’s account, but the Scholiast on Hermogenes supposes
him to have remained at Athens. Whether this was the case or not, he
soon considered one city, however great or celebrated, too confined a
theatre for the display of his merit. He, therefore, adopted the
profession of an itinerant lecturer, with the double view of
gratifying his vanity and filling his purse. And he thoroughly
understood the art of dazzling mankind, for, not supposing it enough
to unfold before his auditors his magazines of tropes and figures,
stored up, like theatrical thunder and lightning, to be introduced at
the proper moment, he had recourse to other dramatic arts for
producing effect, appearing in magnificent attire, flowing purple
robes, embroidered sandals, his fingers sparkling with gold and gems.
But though the oldest of the sophists, he was not the first who
adopted this course. Protagoras, and perhaps others, had previously
commenced their peregrinations, and begun to practise on the credulity
and weakness of the multitude. Among the Athenians they were paid
chiefly with praise; “the solid pudding” was to be sought elsewhere.
And accordingly we find, as Plato sarcastically expresses it, that
upon the advent of the sophists, the Thessalians, usually celebrated
for their full purses and fine horses,[824] grew all at once
remarkable for their love of wisdom, that is, paid the sophists
handsomely, in the hope of thus enticing knowledge to remain among
them. In fact they supposed that wisdom is like a candle and lantern,
by which you may have light,—or a saint’s shirt, by wearing which you
infallibly become holy,—or the lamp of Epictetus, which a rich man
bought at three thousand drachmas, in the hope that it would light him
into the very adyta of philosophy. However this may be, it is very
certain that the Thessalians became the patrons of the sophists, who
disposed in that country of more wisdom and eloquence than in any
other part of Greece, and the principal purchasers of it were of the
rich family of the Aleuadæ, the earliest Mæcenases, I believe, on
record.
Footnote 822:
Diod. Sicul. xii. 53.
Footnote 823:
I cannot, therefore, see the reason of Geel’s doubt.—Hist. Sophist.
p. 18. Cf. Clint. Fast. Hellen. ii. p. 68.
Footnote 824:
Plat. Hip. Maj. t. v. p. 416.
But the sophists, to their credit be it acknowledged, were no misers.
What they easily gained they spent freely; and not merely so, but in
many instances converted the effects of their personal vanity into
public ornaments of the whole country. Thus Gorgias, enriched by the
spoils of Thessaly, erected at Delphi a golden statue[825] of himself,
which argued a more generous spirit than he would have shown by
setting it afloat in the channels of trade or husbandry or usury, in
the hope of rendering himself a great capitalist.
Footnote 825:
Cressol. Theat. Rhet. i. 8.
Gorgias was long absent from Athens, and visited during his travels
the most considerable cities of Greece. Among other places he came to
Delphi, where from the steps of the altar, probably during the games,
he delivered that oration called the Pythian, in celebration of which
he erected the above-mentioned statue.[826] From thence perhaps,—for
the chronology of his journey is not exactly known,—he proceeded to
Olympia, where he also assisted at the games for the purpose of
exhibiting his oratorical talents in the presence of all Greece, and
reaping as it were in an hour a harvest of glory. This declamation,
delivered during the Peloponnesian war, had at least the
recommendation of being patriotic. Standing in front of the temple of
Zeus, the god of concord and of peace, he earnestly recommended union
and harmony.[827] If war they must have, there were the
barbarians,—let their arms be turned against them. With what success
he spoke, history has informed us; but the satirists of antiquity,
ever naturally addicted to scandal, are careful to remark that this
great advocate of concord and unanimity kept up a civil war in his own
house, where the charms of some beautiful-cheeked θεραπαινίδιον[828]
excited the jealousy of Madame. At the same time the old gentleman, to
adopt the most moderate computation, must have been hard upon
three-score and ten, though some would make him eighty.
Footnote 826:
Geel, Hist. Sophist. p. 23.
Footnote 827:
They sometimes selected more humble subjects for their panegyric,
for example, the bumble-bee, or salt.—Isocrat. Hel. Encom. § 4. p.
461. Plutarch, too, speaks of a learned work on salt, which he
considered very edifying.—Sympos. § 5. A French author of the same
class devoted twenty years of his life to a treatise on the
nightingale. Another member of this confraternity is celebrated by
Rousseau:—“On dit qu’un allemand a fait un livre sur un zeste de
citron; j’en aurais fait un sur chaque gramen des prés, sur chaque
mousse des bois, sur chaque lichen qui tapisse les rochers; enfin,
je ne voulais pas laisser un poil d’herbe, pas un atome végétal qui
ne fût amplement décrit.”—Réveries, t. iii. p. 106. On the verbal
trifling of the sophists see Muret. in Aristot. Ethic. p. 79. By Le
Conte, in his Commentary on the Anabasis, Gorgias is transformed
into “a prudent and experienced officer,” because Proxenos is said
to have studied under him.—t. i. p. 246.
Footnote 828:
Plut. Conj. Præcept. § 43. whom Geel follows.—Hist. Sophist. p. 25.
But Isocrates, who had been himself a hearer of Gorgias in Thessaly
(Cic. Orat. § 22), relates that he was never married, and had no
children.—De Permut. § 26. 10. Another tradition however speaks of
his son Philip as having been condemned by the Heliasts.—Schol.
Aristoph. Av. 1700.
Over the latter days of Gorgias[829] hovers the same darkness which
conceals from view the commencement. It is known with no degree of
certainty where he spent the close of his long life or where he died,
though as no account exists of his return to Sicily, it probably was
in Greece.
Footnote 829:
See Athen. xii. 71.
Next to Gorgias in reputation was Protagoras, whose history is still
less known. In the opinion of some writers he was the oldest of the
sophists. Though the date of his birth be later than that of Gorgias,
he preceded him in the profession of the art. He was certainly, I
think, born much earlier than is supposed either by Clinton or by
Geel, who take him to have been almost exactly of Socrates’ age, that
is to have come into the world about 479 B. C. But in this opinion I
cannot concur. It is in direct contradiction with a passage in
Plato[830] who, however careless in matters of chronology, would, I am
persuaded, never push his negligence so far as to make one man say to
another, born in the same year with himself, that he was old enough to
be his father. To me, therefore it appears necessary that we throw
back ten or twelve years the date of his birth. He was ten years, it
is admitted, older than Democritos. The latter, who had made
considerable progress in philosophy when he saw Protagoras in the
capacity of a wood-carrier and undertook to initiate him in his
system, could hardly have been less than seven or eight and twenty, so
that the former was little short of forty. He exercised the profession
of sophist during forty years, and died about 406 B. C. He must
therefore have been born about 484–485 B. C.[831]
Footnote 830:
Addressing Socrates, among many others, he says in one place, ἀλλὰ
πότερον ὑμῖν, ὡς πρεσβύτερος νεωτέροις, μῦθον λέγων ἐπιδείξω. κ. τ.
λ.—Protag. i. 170. But this is nothing to what he elsewhere says:
οὐδενὸς ὅτου οὐ πάντων ἂν ὑμῶν καθ᾽ ἡλικίαν πατὴρ εἴην.—Id. p.
165.—which without extreme absurdity a man could not say to a person
exactly of his own age. Meiners. (Hist. des Arts et des Sciences,
iii. 258), evidently refers to this passage; as does also Hardion.
Dissert. vii. Bib. Acad. iii. 295. Yet it must have wholly escaped
Geel, who (Hist. Sophist. p. 71) says: “Deinde _nescimus_ quomodo
efficiatur e Platonis Protagorâ, sophistam ejusdem nominis _multo_
majorem fuisse Socrate.”
Footnote 831:
Diog. Laert. ix. 55. observes that, according to some writers, he
died, at the age of 90, during a journey.—Geel, p. 81. It is
sufficiently remarkable that most of the Sophists attained to a very
great old age, and the same thing may be said generally of the
philosophers of antiquity. Lord Bacon undertakes to account for the
fact. Having given the palm of long life to hermits and anchorites,
he says: “Next unto this is a life led in good letters, such as was
that of Philosophers, Rhetoricians, Grammarians. This life is also
led in leisure, and in those thoughts which, seeing they are severed
from the affairs of the world, bite not, but rather delight through
their vanity and impertinency: they live also at their pleasure,
spending their time in such things as like them best, and for the
most part in the company of young men, which is ever the most
cheerful.”—History of Life and Death, p. 24.
But I cannot here pursue the history of the sophists, which no further
belongs to my work than as it is connected with the subject of
education. On their writings, however, and manner of teaching it is
necessary that I should be more explicit. Whether Gorgias first
published or Protagoras is of little moment; both evidently wrote with
the same aim, which was to confound truth and error, right and wrong,
not perhaps through any enmity to truth or to virtue, but from the
sheer vanity of being thought capable of any thing, and the desire of
converting their talents to account. One distinguishing quality of the
class was fertility. They piqued themselves on being able to pour
forth volume after volume, treatise after treatise, speech after
speech. This, indeed, it was that constituted their principal claim to
superiority over the philosophers, a pains-taking race, among whom the
period of intellectual gestation was longer than that of the elephant;
whereas your true sophist, without meditation, study or experience,
astonished his admirers by the copiousness of his invention, by
imagery, gorgeous and glittering, generally stolen from the poets, and
by a piquant air of profoundness and originality, which the art of
seeming to doubt all that other men believe never fails to confer.
Besides, comprehending enough of human nature to know that whoever
amuses is listened to, whatever atrocities he may utter, they were
careful to invest their doctrine with a light and graceful exterior.
No man ever excelled them at a joke. They in fact managed matters so
that in their hands every thing became a joke, and to overthrow an
antagonist demanded nothing more than to be able to raise a laugh at
his expense; for, all the world over, in the opinion of the vulgar,
whoever is ridiculous is wrong. From calculation, they eschewed the
uphill task of correcting error, or advancing truth, or reforming
manners. To upbraid men for their faults and counsel amendment, is to
incur their enmity. Reformers, prophets, apostles of truth have always
been persecuted, often put to death. The sophists felt no ambition to
be martyrs. Poverty, too, and obscurity, spare diet, a coarse mantle,
and the solitude in which the poor great man walks the world, they
could not away with. To their happiness crowds of admirers, opulence,
costly robes[832] and all the refinements of luxury formed a _sine quâ
non_; and accordingly in the choice of their doctrines they were
guided by one consideration only, viz. how they might amuse mankind,
and reap all the advantages of popularity.
Footnote 832:
Herault de Sechelles, who, had he lived, would have excelled Boswell
in biography, describes with singular felicity the passion of that
arch-sophist, Buffon, for the splendours of dress. Even among the
peasants of Montbar, a race of primitive simplicity, the French
Hippias would never appear but in an embroidered suit, curled and
decorated as if at court. He had nicely calculated the effect of
external appearances on the mind; and we must forgive him, since he
shared the weakness with Lord Bacon and Aristotle.—See Voyage à
Montbar, p. 42, seq.
The eloquence which statesmen employed to recommend their measures,
the sophists applied to fictitious uses, imagining themselves in
impossible circumstances, reversing times, confounding manners, and
attacking or defending men long since dead. In all such cases the
interest would chiefly depend on the novelty or ingenuity of the
thoughts and the subtle artifices of style. Hence the extravagance,
the coldness, the perversion of imagery, the distortion and monkey
tricks of language, for which their manner of compositions became
remarkable. The false position they took up led, in philosophy, to
results equally disastrous. To aim at truth, would have been to throw
themselves into the wake of the philosophers, to share, without
worldly compensation, their dangers, labours, and comparative
insignificance. They struck out, therefore, a new course for
themselves. Taking philosophy as it was, they undertook to dispute on
all and every part of it; to show that for a skilful dialectician
there was no proposition that might not with nearly equal facility be
attacked or defended; that by means of syllogisms or enthymemes,
artfully arranged, darkness may be proved to be light, and light
darkness; that between lying and speaking the truth there is no
difference; that in fact both veracity and falsehood are nonentities,
all our notions being mere arbitrary fictions; and that to beat your
dog and to beat your father is the same thing.
Of this novel and ingenious style of argumentation,[833] in which
Hudibras was an adept, we are furnished with abundant examples by
Plato, more especially in the Euthydemus, where two old fellows, with
arguments longer than their beards, luxuriate in the felicitous
inventions by which, like another Circe, they are enabled to transform
their hearers into hogs and bulldogs. In humorous extravagance the
dialogue scarcely falls short of an Aristophanic comedy or a Christmas
pantomime. Socrates[834] plays the Clown, Ctesippos the Harlequin, and
the blows dealt upon the magicians in the course of the piece, are
such as, were they fully comprehended, would set all Drury Lane or
Covent Garden in a roar. But the length of the scenes prevents their
transplantation into my pages, and the abridgment of a joke is a very
dull thing. Let us, however, hear by what logic they proved Socrates
to have been a second “man without a navel.”
Footnote 833:
Another example may be found in Athen. iii. 54.
Footnote 834:
Socrates has been confounded with the Sophists, because he
frequented their company to refute them; but there was between them
the same difference, as between a thief-taker and a thief.
“Answer me,” cried Dionysidoros.
“Well then,” replied Socrates, “I answer that Iolaus was the nephew of
Heracles, and, as far as I can see, no nephew of mine. For my brother
Patrocles was not his father, but quite another guess sort of person,
Iphicles the brother of Heracles.”
“And Patrocles was your brother?”
“By the mother, not by the father.”
“Then he was your brother, and not your brother?”
“By the father’s side he was not,” answered Socrates, “since he was
the son of Charidemos, and I of Sophroniscos.”
“But Sophroniscos, no less than Charidemos, was a father.”
“Exactly; the former was my father, the latter Patrocles’.”
“Then was Charidemos other than a father?”
“He was other than mine.”
“Then he was a father, and not a father? But, come, are you the same
thing as a stone?”
“I fear,” replied Socrates, “I shall appear to be no better in your
hands, though I do not discover the identity.”
“Well, being other than a stone, you are not a stone; being other than
gold, you are not gold. And must not the same thing happen to
Charidemos? Being something else than a father, he is not a father.”
“So it seems,” replied the philosopher.
“And what is true of Charidemos,” replied the younger sophist, “must
be true of Sophroniscos. Being other than a father, he is not a
father: from which, my good friend, it follows that you never had any
father at all![835]”
Footnote 835:
Plat. Opp. iii. 444, seq.
Socrates being thus placed on a level with the first man, his friend
Ctesippos took up the ball, and sent it with so much force into the
face of the sophists, that it somewhat startled them.
“Come, then,” said he, “is not your own father in precisely the same
circumstances? Is he not different from my father?”
“Not at all,” answered Euthydemos.
“What, then, he is the same?”
“Exactly.”
“I should be sorry to think so. However, is he my father only, or is
he everybody else’s father?”
“Everybody’s, of course; for can you imagine him to be a father, and
not a father?”
“I should have thought so,” answered Ctesippos.
“What! that gold is not gold, and that a man is not a man?”
“Not so, friend Euthydemos; but you do not, as the saying is, mingle
flax with flax; and your assertion, that your father is the father of
all men, seems very extraordinary.”
“But he is, though.”
“Very good; but is he not only the father of men but of horses and
every other animal?”
“Of everything!”
“And your mother, in like manner, is the mother of all things?”
“Certainly.”
“Then she is the mother of the sea-hedgehog.”
“And so is yours!”
“And you are the full brother of gudgeons, cubs, and sucking-pigs.”
“So are you!”
“And your father is a dog.”
“And yours, too!”
It was now evident they were in anger, and accordingly Dionysidoros
interposed, and observed jocularly,—
“Provided you will answer me, Ctesippos, I undertake to make you
confess that your father is just what my brother has said. So, tell
me, have you a dog?”
“I have, and a snappish cur he is, too.”
“And has he young ones?”
“Ay, and they are more snappish than himself.”
“Well, now, is not the dog their father?”
“No doubt.”
“And the dog is yours?”
“Certainly.”
“It follows then, if he be a father and yours, that he must be your
father; so that his cubs are your brothers.”
Before the young man could reply to this compliment the sophist
proceeded:
“Answer me, Ctesippos, a little longer. Do you ever beat that dog?”
“That I do,” replied Ctesippos laughing; “and I wish I could
administer the same discipline to you in your turn.”
“Then you beat your own father!”
“The beating,” answered the young man, “would be more justly inflicted
on yours, for having knowingly let loose two such sages upon
mankind!”[836]
Footnote 836:
Plat. Opp. t. iii. p. 245.—The amusing manner of teaching introduced
by these sophists was sometimes imitated by the philosophers. Thus
Theophrastus, who, before proceeding to his school, used to anoint
himself with oil and perform his exercises, had recourse to
extraordinary drollery for the purpose of charming his pupils,
adapting all his gestures and movements to his discourses; so that
when describing the manners and character of a glutton, he used,
like a comic actor, to thrust out his tongue and lick his
lips.—Athen. i. 38.
But these, after all, were but laughing sophists, who, though they had
succeeded in confounding and obliterating from their own minds every
trace of difference between right and wrong, fell short of that superb
degree of wickedness at which Polos, Callicles, and Thrasymachos
arrived, at least in speculation. The former were mere babblers, who
corrupted a pupil or two whom bad luck threw in their way.
Thrasymachos flew at higher game. His sophistry was political,[837]
and his aim the destruction of freedom, by extinguishing that sense of
justice on which it must ever be based. The genius of the man was
considerable. He had deep thoughts, and investigated boldly; but his
sympathies having somehow been early perverted, he grew sombre,
fierce, and unsociable, and without the slightest disguise advocated,
like our Hobbes,[838] tyrannical maxims and morals. Money, like the
rest, he of course worshipped. Nay, in the conversation at the house
of Cephalos he even ventures to sneer rudely at Socrates’ poverty;
upon which Glaucon[839] observes:—"Don’t fear to go unpaid for the
instruction you may give him, for we will enter into a subscription on
his behalf."[840] Thrasymachos, however, was still more vain than
avaricious. He thirsted to exhibit his notions in order to enjoy the
satisfaction arising from shocking those who heard him. He maintained
that justice is nothing more than what in any state the rulers think
proper to establish; and that, consequently, the ordinances of a
tyrant are as binding and as just as the laws of a free state, since
by nature all actions are indifferent.
Footnote 837:
Cf. Dem. Lacrit. § 10. Sch. Aristoph. Nub. 113.
Footnote 838:
The modern Thrasymachos is as frank in his hatred of philosophers as
the ancient. He compares their enthusiasm in favour of freedom to
the virus imparted by the bite of a mad dog, imagining that nothing
is so sedulously to be guarded against as liberty. He would, if
possible, have the study of ancient statesmen and historians
prohibited, or at least that care should be taken to counteract
their maxims by the teaching of discreet sophists. “I cannot
imagine,” he says, “how anything can be more prejudicial to a
monarchy than the allowing of such books to be publicly read,
without present applying such correctives of discreet masters, as
are fit to take away their venom; which venom I will not doubt to
compare to the biting of a mad dog, which is a disease the
physicians call _hydrophobia_, or _fear of water_. For, as he that
is so bitten has a continual torment of thirst, and yet abhorreth
water, and is in such an estate, as if the poison endeavoured to
convert him into a dog; so, when a monarchy is once bitten to the
quick, by those democratical writers, that continually snarl at that
estate, it wanteth nothing more than a strong monarch, which,
nevertheless, out of a certain _tyrannophobia_ or fear of being
strongly governed, when they have him, they abhor.”—Leviathan, Pt.
ii. c. 29. iii. 315. Count Capo D’Istrias, if he was ignorant of the
language of ancient Greece, appears at least to have understood
something of the spirit of ancient philosophy, for, designing to
establish a tyranny, he prohibited the reading of Plato in the
public schools. He may possibly have learned his maxims of
government from Hobbes, as well as that the master of the academy
deserved his hatred.—Thiersch. Etat. Act. de la Grèce, ii. 121.
Footnote 839:
Plat. Rep. i. § 11. t. i. p. 41. Stallb.
Footnote 840:
Ἔρανος. Cf. Sympos. t. iv. p. 379. Bekk.
It was, in fact, a part of the sophistical doctrine, to maintain in
politics, what Hobbes afterwards advocated, the right of the
stronger:—
—--"The good old rule, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can."
But because there is in every man’s heart a rooted prejudice in favour
of justice, they were fain to argue that all governors, in as far as
they deserved the name, would ordain what was best for themselves, and
that, whatever it might be, was just:[841] a very satisfactory
doctrine, which has never grown wholly out of fashion. They laughed to
scorn, as persons who required nurses to look after them and wipe
their noses,[842] whomsoever they found entertaining the notion that
governments were instituted for the good of the governed.
Footnote 841:
Upon this point Father Paul observes:—"We must reduce under the
title of justice everything that may contribute to the service of
the state; for the prince has no greater justice than to preserve to
himself the quality of prince, and, in order to this, to keep his
subjects in a dutiful subjection to his authority."—Max. of the Gov.
of Venice, chap. i. § 1.
Footnote 842:
Plat. Rep. t. vi. p. 34.
Their staple comparison was always a flock or a herd. What shepherd,
they inquired, ever looked after his flock for their benefit, and not
for his own use? In like manner magistrates, who, as is proper, hold
the chief place in cities, look on the public exactly as if they are
so many sheep or oxen, and think of nothing, night or day, but how
they may derive most advantage from them. Justice, therefore, is what
promotes the interests of the governors, though it may be loss to the
governed. The man, esteemed just and pious and holy by the
philosopher, was merely, in their opinion, a fool. Whenever anything
is to be gained he gets less than any man, and when anything is to be
done for the community he does more. He is always ready with his purse
whenever anything is to be paid; always out of the way when gain is
afloat. The unjust man, on the contrary, knows what he is about. He
pays and does as little as possible for the public, and takes from it
all he can. The former renders himself disagreeable to his friends and
domestics, by refusing to commit any unjust action on their behalf.
The latter, on the other hand, unscrupulous in acquisition, is able to
oblige many by his wealth if he happens to require their services.
Thus even in private life and small matters injustice is to be
preferred; but when it operates on a grand scale, plunders whole
cities, and usurps over them supreme authority, it reaches the acme of
felicity, is saluted by the name of prince, and becomes an object of
envy to all mankind.
Nor did they pause even here. It was not enough to show the happiness
of vice as vice; they undertook to prove that vice is virtue and
virtue vice, which may be considered as their magnum opus. They went
to work boldly, but, like the fox of Archilochos,[843] always kept
something of their figure concealed, that, if any necessity arose,
they might be able to retreat by treating their whole chain of
argumentation as a mere rhetorical exercise. “You appear to be in
earnest,” observed Socrates on one occasion. “What does it signify to
you whether I am in earnest or not,” replied the sophist, “if you
cannot refute what I advance?” With this prudent reserve, they taught
that injustice is a powerful and beautiful principle, reckoning it
among the virtues, and attributing to it all the characteristics
usually attributed to justice.[844] Pascal, in developing the morals
of the Jesuits, describes their principles exactly. They patronised
even cutting purses, providing the operator had the ingenuity to
conceal his performance. No doubt, in thus arguing, they did violence
to their secret convictions, and might, by an able dialectician, be
made to feel, though never to acknowledge, the deformity of their
doctrines, as Thrasymachos, driven up in a corner by the logic of
Socrates, blushes and is chap-fallen;[845] but as sophistry was their
occupation, the misery and degradation was, that, convinced or not
convinced, they must still sing the old song. It is evident, in fact,
that, like many sophists of other days, they were bold with the lips
while the heart within trembled. The light of conscience could not be
wholly quenched. They conceived the gods to be armed with power and
disposed to exert it, not only against evil doers but against evil
speakers also. Pressed upon this point, whether the bad be not
obnoxious and the good agreeable to the deities, Thrasymachos would
not deny it. And why? Lest he should render himself hateful to them,
ἴνα μὴ τοῖς δὲ ἀπέχθωμαι. So that in the worst times of paganism,
religion, how corrupt soever, failed not to preserve some influence
over men’s minds, to save them from the bestial recklessness into
which they seemed desirous to plunge.[846]
Footnote 843:
Plat. Rep. t. vi. p. 72. Bekk.
Footnote 844:
Id. i. t. vi. p. 44. seq.
Footnote 845:
Plat. de Rep. vi. 49. i. 76. Stallb. Cf. Vict. Var. Lect. iii. v.
Footnote 846:
Plat. Rep. t. vi. p. 52.
Nevertheless, the sophists on many points did but methodise, condense
and embody in florid language the maxims and modes of thinking current
in corrupt ages among the vulgar. Their doctrines were but an echo of
what was heard in the ecclesiæ, in the law courts, in the theatres,
and in the camps. It would have been to little purpose, therefore, to
have silenced them, unless, at the same time, the above schools could
have been purified, wherein young and old, men and women, imbibed the
opinions, maxims, prejudices, which constituted the system of the
sophists.[847] And Plato, who observes this, supplies us, in doing so,
with a fresh proof that women frequented the theatre. In one of these
four places, he says, they were corrupted: but they were not soldiers,
and, therefore, not in the camp; they were not dicasts, and,
therefore, not in the law courts; they were neither orators nor
voters, and, therefore, not in the ecclesiæ. The evil doctrines they
imbibed, therefore, must have been imbibed at the theatre.[848] Here,
too, the youth, disciplined and principled in better things by his
philosophical teachers, received a new education which overthrew the
former. Deeds and words, condemned by his teachers, he often found to
be greeted here with rapturous applause, re-echoed by rocks and walls;
while hisses, sneers, or vociferous vituperation would, perhaps, be
showered on things he had been taught most to revere. In his feelings,
therefore, and internal convictions a revolution was soon effected. He
grew ashamed of the notions implanted in him at school. Every
lingering sentiment of honour seemed to him an unfortunate prejudice
despised by men of the world, and he hastened to shift his notions as
a clown does his dress to prepare for admittance into fashionable
company.
Footnote 847:
Id. vi. 290.
Footnote 848:
Plat. Rep. vi. t. vi. p. 289. Cf. Athen. ii. 54.
The sophists, skilled in the study of mankind, soon discovered, that
to please and ultimately to rule the ignorant, it was necessary to
humour their failings, and, in appearance at least, to adopt their
opinions. In a commonwealth, governed by wholesome principles, great
men obtain influence, not by resembling the majority but by
differing from them. They are popular by the authority of their
virtues. They are reverenced with the reverence due to a father from
his child, who confides in him from long experience in his love and
implicit faith in his honour, and will submit to be rebuked and
chastised, and determined by him in his actions from the conviction
that his superior wisdom and probity and affection entitle him to
rule. But the sophists, and their political disciples, despaired of
thus governing the people. In their manners there was none of the
dignity, in their minds none of the wisdom, in their resolutions
none of that inflexible firmness arising from consciousness of
right, which neither threats nor clamour can subdue. They regarded
the populace as a huge beast, whose ways and temper they must study,
whose passions and desires they must know how to raise and how to
satisfy; by what arts they might safely enter his den, stroke his
terrible paws, or mount, if they thought proper, on his back and
direct his irresistible might against their enemies. And this they
esteemed as wisdom, and upon those who excelled in it they bestowed
the name of statesmen and philosophers.[849] Among the arts by which
this influence was acquired were flattery and boasting; by the
former they disposed people to listen, by the latter they sought to
justify them for listening, by dwelling on the wonders they could
perform. If they might be believed, they could convert fools into
wise men, which philosophers regarded in the light of a miracle.
This disposition τὸ θρασὺ καὶ τὸ ἰταμὸν,[850] as Basilius expresses
it, is admirably painted by Plato in the character of Thrasymachos.
And the contrast afforded by Socrates makes good, as Muretus
observes, the wise remark of Thucydides ὅτι ἀμαθία μὲν θάρσος,
φρόνησις δ᾽ ὄκνον φέρει.
Footnote 849:
Plat. de Rep. vi. 293.
Footnote 850:
Plat. de Rep. vi. 333. Cf. Muret. Adnot. in Repub. p. 667, seq. 677,
seq.
Such, however, as they were, the reputation of the sophists spread far
and wide. Even among the barbarians of Asia a desire was felt to have
the ear tickled by their eloquence, as we may gather from the letter
of Amytocrates, an Indian king, to Antiochos, requesting him to ship
off for India as soon as possible, some boiled wine, dried figs, and a
sophist, observing that he would very willingly pay the price of him.
But Antiochos, either loth to part with so useful a servant of the
monarchy, or out of pity for the Indians, whom he suspected to be
already sufficiently tormented, replied, that as for boiled wine and
figs he might be supplied to his heart’s content, but that with
respect to sophists the law prohibited their exportation.[851] He had
all the while, however, without knowing it, abundant specimens of the
race in his own realms, where the Brahmins have, time out of mind,
cultivated and thriven by the same arts, and maintained the same
opinions, as conferred celebrity on the followers of Gorgias and
Protagoras. Their practices, indeed, as well as those of the Yoghis,
are in India modified by the state of society and public opinion. The
wonder which among the Greeks was excited by the advocacy of monstrous
doctrines, on the banks of the Ganges, arises out of physical pranks.
The Greek sophist tortured his mind, the Indian tortures his body for
the edification of the public, but the result is the same; the
practitioners thus contrive to subsist in idleness on the earnings of
the industrious and credulous.
Footnote 851:
Athen. xiv. 67.