After the discourse, the professor would go round: “‘What did you think of me to-day?’” says one in Epictetus.[176] “‘Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.’ ‘What did you think of my best passage?’ ‘Which was that?’ ‘Where I described Pan and the Nymphs.’ ‘Oh, it was excessively well done.’” Again, to quote another anecdote from Epictetus:[177] “‘A much larger audience to-day, I think,’ says the professor. ‘Yes: much larger.’ ‘Five hundred, I should guess.’ ‘Oh, nonsense; it could not have been less than a thousand.’ ‘Why that is more than Dio ever had: I wonder why it was: they appreciated what I said, too.’ ‘Beauty, sir, can move even a stone.’”
They made both money and reputation. The more eminent of them were among the most distinguished men of the time. They were the pets of society, and sometimes its masters.[178] They were employed on affairs of state at home and on embassies abroad.[179] They were sometimes placed on the free list of their city, and lived at the public expense. They were sometimes made senators—raised, as we might say, to the House of Lords—and sometimes governors of provinces.[180] When they died, and sometimes before their death, public statues were erected in their honour.[181] The inscriptions of some of them are recorded by historians, and some remain: “The Queen of Cities to the King of Eloquence,” was inscribed on the statue of Prohæresius at Rome.[182] “One of the Seven Wise Men, though he had not fulfilled twenty-five years,” is inscribed on an existing base of a statue at Attaleia;[183] and, beneath a representation of crowning, the words, “He subjects all things to eloquence,” are found on a similar base at Parion.[184]
They naturally sometimes gave themselves great airs. There are many stories about them. Philostratus tells one of the Emperor Antoninus Pius on arriving at Smyrna going, in accordance with imperial custom, to spend the night at the house which was at once the best house in the city and the house of the most distinguished man. It was that of the sophist Polemo, who happened on the Emperor’s arrival to be away from home; but he returned from his journey at night, and with loud exclamations against being kept out of his own, turned the Emperor out of doors.[185] The common epithet for them is ἀλαζών—a word with no precise English equivalent, denoting a cross between a braggart and a mountebank.
But the real grounds on which the more earnest men objected to them were those upon which Plato had objected to their predecessors: their making a trade of knowledge, and their unreality.
1. The making of discourses, whether literary or moral, was a thriving trade.[186] The fees given to a leading sophist were on the scale of those given to a prima donna in our own day.[187] But the objection to it was not so much the fact of its thriving, as the fact of its being a trade at all. “If they do what they do,” says Dio Chrysostom,[188] “as poets and rhetoricians, there is no harm perhaps; but if they do it as philosophers, for the sake of their own personal gain and glory, and not for the sake of benefiting you, there is harm.” The defence which Themistius[189] makes for himself is more candid than effective: “I do make money,” he says; “people give me sometimes one mina, sometimes two, sometimes as much as a talent: but, since I must speak about myself, let me ask you this—Did any one ever come away the worse for having heard me? Mark, I charge nothing: it is a voluntary contribution.”
2. The stronger ground of objection to them was their unreality. They had lost touch with life. They had made philosophy itself seem unreal. “They are not philosophers, but fiddlers,” said the sturdy old Stoic Musonius.[190] It is not necessary to suppose that they were all charlatans. There was then, as now, the irrepressible young man of good morals who wished to air his opinions. But the tendency to moralize had become divorced from practice. They preached, not because they were in grim earnest about the reformation of the world, but because preaching was a respectable profession, and the listening to sermons a fashionable diversion. “The mass of men,” says Plutarch,[191] “enjoy and admire a philosopher when he is discoursing about their neighbours; but if the philosopher, leaving their neighbours alone, speaks his mind about things that are of importance to the men themselves, they take offence and vote him a bore; for they think that they ought to listen to a philosopher in his lecture-room in the same bland way that they listen to tragedians in the theatre. This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them.”
Against this whole system of veneering rhetoric with philosophy, there was a strong reaction. Apart from the early Christian writers, with whom “sophist” is always a word of scorn, there were men, especially among the new school of Stoics, who were at open war with its unreality.[192] I will ask you to listen to the expostulation which the great moral reformer Epictetus addresses to a rhetorician who came to him:
“First of all, tell yourself what you want to be and then act accordingly. For this is what we see done in almost all other cases. Men who are practising for the games first of all decide what they mean to be, and then proceed to do the things that follow from their decision.... So then when you say, Come and listen to my lecture, first of all consider whether your action be not thrown away for want of an end, and then consider whether it be not a mistake, on account of your real end being a wrong one. Suppose I ask a man, ‘Do you wish to do good by your expounding, or to gain applause?’ Thereupon straightway you hear him saying, ‘What do I care for the applause of the multitude?’ And his sentiment is right: for in the same way, applause is nothing to the musician quâ musician, or to the geometrician quâ geometrician.
“You wish to do good, then,” I continue; “in what particular respect? tell me, that I too may hasten to your lecture-room. But can a man impart good to others without having previously received good himself?