[556] Isokratês calls both Anaxagoras and Damon, sophists (Or. xv, De Perm. sect. 251), Plutarch, Periklês, c. 4. Ὁ δὲ Δάμων ἐοικεν, ἄκρος ὢν σοφιστὴς, καταδύεσθαι μὲν εἰς τὸ τῆς μουσικῆς ὄνομα, ἐπικρυπτόμενος πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς τὴν δεινότητα.
So Protagoras too (in the speech put into his mouth by Plato, Protag. c. 8, p. 316) says, very truly, that there had been sophists from the earliest times of Greece. But he says also, what Plutarch says in the citation just above, that these earlier men refused, intentionally and deliberately, to call themselves sophists, for fear of the odium attached to the name; and that he, Protagoras, was the first person to call himself openly a sophist.
The denomination by which a man is known, however, seldom depends upon himself, but upon the general public, and upon his critics, friendly or hostile. The unfriendly spirit of Plato did much more to attach the title of sophists specially to these teachers, than any assumption of their own.
[557] Herodot. i, 29; ii, 49; iv, 95. Diogenês of Apollonia, contemporary of Herodotus, called the Ionic philosophers or physiologists by the name sophists: see Brandis, Geschich. der Griech. Röm. Philosoph. c. lvii, note O. About Thamyras, see Welcker, Griech. Tragöd., Sophoklês, p. 421:—
Εἰτ᾽ οὖν σοφιστὴς καλὰ παραπαίων χέλυν, etc.
The comic poet Kratinus called all the poets, including Homer and Hesiod, σοφισταί: see the Fragments of his drama Ἀρχίλοχοι in Meineke, Fragm. Comicor. Græcor. vol. ii, p. 16.
[558] Æschinês cont. Timarch. c. 34. Æschinês calls Demosthenês also a sophist, c. 27.
We see plainly from the terms in Plato’s Politicus, c. 38, p. 299 B, μετεωρολόγον, ἀδολεσχήν τινα σοφιστὴν, that both Sokratês and Plato himself were designated as sophists by the Athenian public.
[559] Aristotel. Metaphysic. iii, 2, p. 996; Xenophon, Sympos. iv, 1.
Aristippus is said to have been the first of the disciples of Sokratês who took money for instruction (Diogen. Laërt. ii, 65).