Now such musical teachers as Damon and the others above mentioned, were sophists, not merely in the natural and proper Greek sense of that word, but, to a certain extent, even in the special and restricted meaning which Plato afterwards thought proper to confer upon it.[556] A sophist, in the genuine sense of the word, was a wise man, a clever man; one who stood prominently before the public as distinguished for intellect or talent of some kind. Thus Solon and Pythagoras are both called sophists; Thamyras the skilful bard, is called a sophist:[557] Sokratês is so denominated, not merely by Aristophanês, but by Æschinês:[558] Aristotle himself calls Aristippus, and Xenophon calls Antisthenês, both of them disciples of Sokratês, by that name:[559] Xenophon,[560] in describing a collection of instructive books, calls them “the writings of the old poets and sophists,” meaning by the latter word prose-writers generally: Plato is alluded to as a sophist, even by Isokratês:[561] Isokratês himself was harshly criticized as a sophist, and defends both himself and his profession: lastly, Timon, the friend and admirer of Pyrrho, about 300-280 B.C., who bitterly satirized all the philosophers, designated them all, including Plato and Aristotle, by the general name of sophists.[562] In this large and comprehensive sense the word was originally used, and always continued to be so understood among the general public. But along with this idea, the title sophist also carried with it or connoted a certain invidious feeling. The natural temper of a people generally ignorant towards superior intellect,—the same temper which led to those charges of magic so frequent in the Middle Ages,—appears to be a union of admiration with something of an unfavorable sentiment;[563] dislike, or apprehension, as the case may be, unless where the latter element has become neutralized by habitual respect for an established profession or station: at any rate, the unfriendly sentiment is so often intended, that a substantive word, in which it is implied without the necessity of any annexed predicate, is soon found convenient. Timon, who hated the philosophers, thus found the word sophist exactly suitable, in sentiment as well as meaning, to his purpose in addressing them.
Now when (in the period succeeding 450 B.C.) the rhetorical and musical teachers came to stand before the public at Athens in such increased eminence, they of course, as well as other men intellectually celebrated, became designated by the appropriate name of sophists. But there was one characteristic peculiar to themselves, whereby they drew upon themselves a double measure of that invidious sentiment which lay wrapped up in the name. They taught for pay: of course, therefore, the most eminent among them taught only the rich, and earned large sums; a fact naturally provocative of envy, to some extent, among the many who benefited nothing by them, but still more among the inferior members of their own profession. But even great minds, like Sokratês and Plato, though much superior to any such envy, cherished in that age a genuine and vehement repugnance against receiving pay for teaching. We read in Xenophon,[564] that Sokratês considered such a bargain as nothing less than servitude, robbing the teacher of all free choice as to persons or proceeding; and that he assimilated the relation between teacher and pupil to that between two lovers or two intimate friends; which was thoroughly dishonored, robbed of its charm and reciprocity, and prevented from bringing about its legitimate reward of attachment and devotion, by the intervention of money payment. However little in harmony with modern ideas, such was the conscientious sentiment of Sokratês and Plato; who therefore considered the name sophists, denoting intellectual celebrity combined with an odious association, as preëminently suitable to the leading teachers for pay. The splendid genius, the lasting influence, and the reiterated polemics, of Plato, have stamped it upon the men against whom he wrote as if it were their recognized, legitimate, and peculiar designation: though it is certain, that if, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, any Athenian had been asked, “Who are the principal sophists in your city?” he would have named Sokratês among the first; for Sokratês was at once eminent as an intellectual teacher and personally unpopular, not because he received pay, but on other grounds, which will be hereafter noticed: and this was the precise combination of qualities which the general public naturally expressed by a sophist. Moreover, Plato not only stole the name out of general circulation, in order to fasten it specially upon his opponents, the paid teachers, but also connected with it express discreditable attributes, which formed no part of its primitive and recognized meaning, and were altogether distinct from, though grafted upon, the vague sentiment of dislike associated with it. Aristotle, following the example of his master, gave to the word sophist a definition substantially the same as that which it bears in the modern languages:[565] “an impostrous pretender to knowledge; a man who employs what he knows to be fallacy, for the purpose of deceit and of getting money.” And he did this at a time when he himself, with his estimable contemporary Isokratês, were considered at Athens to come under the designation of sophists, and were called so by every one who disliked either their profession or their persons.[566]
Great thinkers and writers, like Plato and Aristotle, have full right to define and employ words in a sense of their own, provided they give due notice. But it is essential that the reader should keep in mind the consequences of such change, and not mistake a word used in a new sense for a new fact or phenomenon. The age with which we are now dealing, the last half of the fifth century B.C., is commonly distinguished in the history of philosophy as the age of Sokratês and the sophists. The sophists are spoken of as a new class of men, or sometimes in language which implies a new doctrinal sect, or school, as if they then sprang up in Greece for the first time; ostentatious imposters, flattering and duping the rich youth for their own personal gain; undermining the morality of Athens, public and private, and encouraging their pupils to the unscrupulous prosecution of ambition and cupidity. They are even affirmed to have succeeded in corrupting the general morality, so that Athens had become miserably degenerated and vicious in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war, as compared with what she was in the time of Miltiadês and Aristeidês. Sokratês, on the contrary, is usually described as a holy man combating and exposing these false prophets, standing up as the champion of morality against their insidious artifices.[567] Now though the appearance of a man so very original as Sokratês was a new fact of unspeakable importance, the appearance of the sophists was no new fact; what was new was the peculiar use of an old word, which Plato took out of its usual meaning, and fastened upon the eminent paid teachers of the Sokratic age.
The paid teachers, with whom, under the name of The Sophists, he brings Sokratês into controversy, were Protagoras of Abdêra, Gorgias of Leontini, Polus of Agrigentum, Hippias of Elis, Prodikus of Keos, Thrasymachus of Chalkêdon, Euthydêmus and Dionysodorus of Chios; to whom Xenophon adds Antiphon of Athens. These men—whom modern writers set down as the sophists, and denounce as the moral pestilence of their age—were not distinguished in any marked or generic way from their predecessors. Their vocation was to train up youth for the duties, the pursuits, and the successes, of active life, both private and public. Others had done this before; but these teachers brought to the task a larger range of knowledge with a greater multiplicity of scientific and other topics; not only more impressive powers of composition and speech, serving as a personal example to the pupil, but also a comprehension of the elements of good speaking, so as to be able to give him precepts conducive to that accomplishment;[568] a considerable treasure of accumulated thought on moral and political subjects, calculated to make their conversation very instructive, and discourse ready prepared, on general heads or common places, for their pupils to learn by heart.[569] But this, though a very important extension, was nothing more than an extension, differing merely in degree of that which Damon and others had done before them. It arose from the increased demand which had grown up among the Athenian youth, for a larger measure of education and other accomplishments; from an elevation in the standard of what was required from every man who aspired to occupy a place in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. Protagoras, Gorgias, and the rest, supplied this demand with an ability and success unknown before their time; hence they gained a distinction such as none of their predecessors had attained, were prized all over Greece, travelled from city to city with general admiration, and obtained considerable pay. While such success, among men personally strangers to them, attests unequivocally their talent and personal dignity, of course it also laid them open to increased jealousy, as well from inferior teachers as from the lovers of ignorance generally: such jealousy manifesting itself, as I have before explained, by a greater readiness to stamp them with the obnoxious title of sophists.
The hostility of Plato against these teachers,—for it is he, and not Sokratês, who was peculiarly hostile to them, as may be seen by the absence of any such marked antithesis in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,—may be explained without at all supposing in them that corruption which modern writers have been so ready not only to admit but to magnify. It arose from the radical difference between his point of view and theirs. He was a great reformer and theorist; they undertook to qualify young men for doing themselves credit, and rendering service to others, in active Athenian life. Not only is there room for the concurrent operation of both these veins of thought and action, in every progressive society, but the intellectual outfit of the society can never be complete without the one as well as the other. It was the glory of Athens that both were there adequately represented, at the period which we have now reached. Whoever peruses Plato’s immortal work, “The Republic,” will see that he dissented from society, both democratical and oligarchical, on some of the most fundamental points of public and private morality; and throughout most of his dialogues his quarrel is not less with the statesmen, past as well as present, than with the paid teachers of Athens. Besides this ardent desire for radical reform of the state, on principles of his own, distinct from every recognized political party or creed, Plato was also unrivalled as a speculative genius and as a dialectician; both which capacities he put forth, to amplify and illustrate the ethical theory and method first struck out by Sokratês, as well as to establish comprehensive generalities of his own.
Now his reforming, as well as his theorizing tendencies, brought him into polemical controversy with all the leading agents by whom the business of practical life at Athens was carried on. In so far as Protagoras or Gorgias talked the language of theory, they were doubtless much inferior to Plato, nor would their doctrines be likely to hold against his acute dialectics. But it was neither their duty, nor their engagement, to reform the state, or discover and vindicate the best theory on ethics. They professed to qualify young Athenians for an active and honorable life, private as well as public, in Athens, or in any other given city; they taught them “to think, speak, and act,” in Athens; they of course accepted, as the basis of their teaching, that type of character which estimable men exhibited and which the public approved, in Athens; not undertaking to recast the type, but to arm it with new capacities and adorn it with fresh accomplishments. Their direct business was with ethical precept, not with ethical theory; all that was required of them, as to the latter, was, that their theory should be sufficiently sound to lead to such practical precepts as were accounted virtuous by the most estimable society in Athens. It ought never to be forgotten, that those who taught for active life were bound, by the very conditions of their profession, to adapt themselves to the place and the society as it stood. With the theorist Plato, not only there was no such obligation, but the grandeur and instructiveness of his speculations were realized only by his departing from it, and placing himself on a loftier pinnacle of vision; and he himself[570] not only admits, but even exaggerates, the unfitness and repugnance of men, taught in his school, for practical life and duties.
To understand the essential difference between the practical and the theoretical point of view, we need only look to Isokratês, the pupil of Gorgias, and himself a sophist. Though not a man of commanding abilities, Isokratês was one of the most estimable men of Grecian antiquity. He taught for money; and taught young men to “think, speak, and act,” all with a view to an honorable life of active citizenship; not concealing his marked disparagement[571] of speculative study and debate, such as the dialogues of Plato and the dialectic exercises generally. He defends his profession much in the same way as his master Gorgias, or Protagoras, would have defended it, if we had before us vindications from their pens. Isokratês at Athens, and Quintilian, a man equally estimable at Rome, are, in their general type of character and professional duty, the fair counterpart of those whom Plato arraigns as the sophists.
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.
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.
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.