Though writing was less the business of these sophists than personal teaching, several of them published treatises. Thrasymachus and Theodôrus both set forth written precepts on the art of rhetoric;[579] precepts which have not descended to us, but which appear to have been narrow and special, bearing directly upon practice, and relating chiefly to the proper component parts of an oration. To Aristotle, who had attained that large and comprehensive view of the theory of rhetoric which still remains to instruct us in his splendid treatise, the views of Thrasymachus appeared unimportant, serving to him only as hints and materials. But their effect must have been very different when they first appeared, and when young men were first enabled to analyze the parts of an harangue, to understand the dependence of one upon the other, and call them by their appropriate names; all illustrated, let us recollect, by oral exposition on the part of the master, which was the most impressive portion of the whole.
Prodikus, again, published one or more treatises intended to elucidate the ambiguities of words, and to point out the different significations of terms apparently, but not really, equivalent. For this Plato often ridicules him, and the modern historians of philosophy generally think it right to adopt the same tone. Whether the execution of the work was at all adequate to its purpose, we have no means of judging; but assuredly the purpose was one preëminently calculated to aid Grecian thinkers and dialecticians; for no man can study their philosophy without seeing how lamentably they were hampered by enslavement to the popular phraseology, and by inferences founded on mere verbal analogy. At a time when neither dictionary nor grammar existed, a teacher who took care, even punctilious care, in fixing the meaning of important words of his discourse, must be considered as guiding the minds of his hearers in a salutary direction; salutary, we may add, even to Plato himself, whose speculations would most certainly have been improved by occasional hints from such a monitor.
Protagoras, too, is said to have been the first who discriminated and gave names to the various modes and forms of address, an analysis well calculated to assist his lessons on right speaking:[580] he appears also to have been the first who distinguished the three genders of nouns. We hear further of a treatise which he wrote on wrestling, or most probably on gymnastics generally, as well as a collection of controversial dialogues.[581] But his most celebrated treatise was one entitled “Truth,” seemingly on philosophy generally. Of this treatise, we do not even know the general scope or purport. In one of his treatises, he confessed his inability to satisfy himself about the existence of the gods, in these words:[582] “Respecting the gods, I neither know whether they exist, nor what are their attributes: the uncertainty of the subject, the shortness of human life, and many other causes, debar me from this knowledge.” That the believing public of Athens were seriously indignant at this passage, and that it caused the author to be threatened with prosecution, and forced to quit Athens, we can perfectly understand; though there seems no sufficient proof of the tale that he was drowned in his outward voyage. But that modern historians of philosophy, who consider the pagan gods to be fictions, and the religion to be repugnant to any reasonable mind, should concur in denouncing Protagoras on this ground as a corrupt man, is to me less intelligible. Xenophanês,[583] and probably many other philosophers, had said the same thing before him. Nor is it easy to see what a superior man was to do, who could not adjust his standard of belief to such fictions; or what he could say, if he said anything, less than the words cited above from Protagoras; which appear, as far as we can appreciate them, standing without the context, to be a brief mention, in modest and circumspect phrases, of the reason why he said nothing about the gods, in a treatise where the reader would expect to find much upon the subject.[584] Certain it is that in the Platonic dialogue, called “Protagoras,” that sophist is introduced speaking about the gods exactly in the manner that any orthodox pagan might naturally adopt.
The other fragment preserved of Protagoras, relates to his view of the cognitive process, and of truth generally. He taught, that “Man is the measure of all things; both of that which exists, and of that which does not exist:” a doctrine canvassed and controverted by Plato, who represents that Protagoras affirmed knowledge to consist in sensation, and considered the sensations of each individual man to be, to him, the canon and measure of truth. We know scarce anything of the elucidations or limitations with which Protagoras may have accompanied his general position: and if even Plato, who had good means of knowing them, felt it ungenerous to insult an orphan doctrine whose father was recently dead, and could no longer defend it,[585] much more ought modern authors, who speak with mere scraps of evidence before them, to be cautious how they heap upon the same doctrine insults much beyond those which Plato recognizes. In so far as we can pretend to understand the theory, it was certainly not more incorrect than several others then afloat, from the Eleatic school and other philosophers; while it had the merit of bringing into forcible relief, though in an erroneous manner, the essentially relative nature of cognition,[586] relative, not indeed to the sensitive faculty alone, but to that reinforced and guided by the other faculties of man, memorial and ratiocinative. And had it been even more incorrect than it really is, there would be no warrant for those imputations which modern authors build upon it, against the morality of Protagoras. No such imputations are countenanced in the discussion which Plato devotes to the doctrine: indeed, if the vindication which he sets forth against himself on behalf of Protagoras be really ascribable to that sophist, it would give an exaggerated importance to the distinction between Good and Evil, into which the distinction between Truth and Falsehood is considered by the Platonic Protagoras as resolvable. The subsequent theories of Plato and Aristotle respecting cognition, were much more systematic and elaborate, the work of men greatly superior in speculative genius to Protagoras: but they would not have been what they were, had not Protagoras, as well as others gone before them, with suggestions more partial and imperfect.
From Gorgias there remains one short essay, preserved in one of the Aristotelian, or Pseudo-Aristotelian treatises,[587] on a metaphysical thesis. He professes to demonstrate that nothing exists: that if anything exist, it is unknowable; and granting it even to exist and to be knowable by any one man, he could never communicate it to others. The modern historians of philosophy here prefer the easier task of denouncing the skepticism of the sophist, instead of performing the duty incumbent on them of explaining his thesis in immediate sequence with the speculations which preceded it. In our sense of the words, it is a monstrous paradox: but construing them in their legitimate filiation from the Eleatic philosophers immediately before him, it is a plausible, not to say conclusive, deduction from principles which they would have acknowledged.[588] The word existence, as they understood it, did not mean phenomenal, but ultra-phenomenal existence. They looked upon the phenomena of sense as always coming and going, as something essentially transitory, fluctuating, incapable of being surely known, and furnishing at best grounds only for conjecture. They searched by cogitation for what they presumed to be the really existent something or substance—the noumenon, to use a Kantian phrase—lying behind or under the phenomena, which noumenon they recognized as the only appropriate subject of knowledge. They discussed much, as I have before remarked, whether it was one or many; noumenon in the singular, or noumena in the plural. Now the thesis of Gorgias related to this ultra-phenomenal existence, and bore closely upon the arguments of Zeno and Melissus, the Eleatic reasoners of his elder contemporaries. He denied that any such ultra-phenomenal something, or noumenon, existed, or could be known, or could be described. Of this tripartite thesis, the first negation was neither more untenable, nor less untenable, than that of those philosophers who before him had argued for the affirmative: on the two last points, his conclusions were neither paradoxical nor improperly skeptical, but perfectly just, and have been ratified by the gradual abandonment, either avowed or implied, of such ultra-phenomenal researches among the major part of philosophers. It may fairly be presumed that these doctrines were urged by Gorgias for the purpose of diverting his disciples from studies which he considered as unpromising and fruitless: just as we shall find his pupil Isokratês afterwards enforcing the same view, discouraging speculations of this nature, and recommending rhetorical exercise as preparation for the duties of an active citizen.[589] Nor must we forget that Sokratês himself discouraged physical speculations even more decidedly than either of them.
If the censures cast upon the alleged skepticism of Gorgias and Protagoras are partly without sufficient warrant, partly without any warrant at all, much more may the same remark be made respecting the graver reproaches heaped upon their teaching on the score of immorality or corruption. It has been common with recent German historians of philosophy to translate from Plato and dress up a fiend called “Die Sophistik,” (Sophistic,) whom they assert to have poisoned and demoralized, by corrupt teaching, the Athenian moral character, so that it became degenerate at the end of the Peloponnesian war, compared with what it had been in the time of Miltiadês and Aristeidês.
Now, in the first place, if the abstraction “Die Sophistik” is to have any definite meaning, we ought to have proof that the persons styled sophists had some doctrines, principles, or method, both common to them all and distinguishing them from others. But such a supposition is untrue: there were no such common doctrines, or principles, or method, belonging to them; even the name by which they are known did not belong to them, any more than to Sokratês and others; they had nothing in common except their profession, as paid teachers, qualifying young men “to think, speak, and act,” these are the words of Isokratês, and better words it would not be easy to find, with credit to themselves as citizens. Moreover, such community of profession did not at that time imply near so much analogy of character as it does now, when the path of teaching has been beaten into a broad and visible high road, with measured distances and stated intervals: Protagoras and Gorgias found predecessors, indeed, but no binding precedents to copy; so that each struck out more or less a road of his own. And accordingly, we find Plato, in his dialogue called “Protagoras,” wherein Protagoras, Prodikus, and Hippias, are all introduced, imparting a distinct type of character and distinct method to each, not without a strong admixture of reciprocal jealousy between them; while Thrasymachus, in the Republic, and Euthydêmus, in the dialogue so called, are again painted each with colors of his own, different from all the three above named. We have not the least reason for presuming that Gorgias agreed in the opinion of Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things;” and we may infer, even from Plato himself, that Protagoras would have opposed the views expressed by Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic. It is impossible therefore to predicate anything concerning doctrines, methods, or tendencies, common and peculiar to all the sophists. There were none such; nor has the abstract word, “Die Sophistik,” any real meaning, except such qualities, whatever they may be, as are inseparable from the profession or occupation of public teaching. And if, at present, every candid critic would be ashamed to cast wholesale aspersions on the entire body of professional teachers, much more is such censure unbecoming in reference to the ancient sophists, who were distinguished from each other by stronger individual peculiarities.
If, then, it were true that in the interval between 480 B.C. and the end of the Peloponnesian war, a great moral deterioration had taken place in Athens and in Greece generally, we should have to search for some other cause than this imaginary abstraction called sophistic. But—and this is the second point—the matter of fact here alleged is as untrue, as the cause alleged is unreal. Athens, at the close of the Peloponnesian war, was not more corrupt than Athens in the days of Miltiadês and Aristeidês. If we revert to that earlier period, we shall find that scarcely any acts of the Athenian people have drawn upon them sharper censure—in my judgment, unmerited—than their treatment of these very two statesmen; the condemnation of Miltiadês, and the ostracism of Aristeidês. In writing my history of that time, far from finding previous historians disposed to give the Athenians credit for public virtue, I have been compelled to contend against a body of adverse criticism, imputing to them gross ingratitude and injustice. Thus the contemporaries of Miltiadês and Aristeidês, when described as matter of present history, are presented in anything but flattering colors; except their valor at Marathon and Salamis, which finds one unanimous voice of encomium. But when these same men have become numbered among the mingled recollections and fancies belonging to the past,—when a future generation comes to be present, with its appropriate stock of complaint and denunciation,—then it is that men find pleasure in dressing up the virtues of the past, as a count in the indictment against their own contemporaries. Aristophanês,[590] writing during the Peloponnesian war, denounced the Demos of his day as degenerated from the virtue of that Demos which had surrounded Miltiadês and Aristeidês: while Isokratês,[591] writing as an old man, between 350-340 B.C., complains in like manner of his own time, boasting how much better the state of Athens had been in his youth: which period of his youth fell exactly during the life of Aristophanês, in the last half of the Peloponnesian war.
Such illusions ought to impose on no one without a careful comparison of facts; and most assuredly that comparison will not bear out the allegation of increased corruption and degeneracy, between the age of Miltiadês and the end of the Peloponnesian war. Throughout the whole of Athenian history, there are no acts which attest so large a measure of virtue and judgment pervading the whole people, as the proceedings after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Nor do I believe that the contemporaries of Miltiadês would have been capable of such heroism; for that appellation is by no means too large for the case. I doubt whether they would have been competent to the steady self-denial of retaining a large sum in reserve during the time of peace, both prior to the Peloponnesian war and after the Peace of Nikias; or of keeping back the reserve fund of one thousand talents, while they were forced to pay taxes for the support of the war; or of acting upon the prudent, yet painfully trying, policy recommended by Periklês, so as to sustain an annual invasion without either going out to fight or purchasing peace by ignominious concessions. If bad acts such as Athens committed during the later years of the war, for example, the massacre of the Melian population, were not done equally by the contemporaries of Miltiadês, this did not arise from any superior humanity or principle on their part, but from the fact that they were not exposed to the like temptation, brought upon them by the possession of imperial power. The condemnation of the six generals after the battle of Arginusæ, if we suppose the same conduct on their part to have occurred in 490 B.C., would have been decreed more rapidly and more unceremoniously than it was actually decreed in 406 B.C. For at that earlier date there existed no psephism of Kannônus, surrounded by prescriptive respect; no graphê paranomôn; no such habits of established deference to a dikastery solemnly sworn, with full notice to defendants and full time of defence measured by the clock; none of those securities which a long course of democracy had gradually worked into the public morality of every Athenian, and which, as we saw in a former chapter, interposed a serious barrier to the impulse of the moment, though ultimately overthrown by its fierceness. A far less violent impulse would have sufficed for the same mischief in 490 B.C., when no such barriers existed. Lastly, if we want a measure of the appreciating sentiment of the Athenian public, towards a strict and decorous morality in the narrow sense, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, we have only to consider the manner in which they dealt with Nikias. I have shown, in describing the Sicilian expedition, that the gravest error which the Athenians ever committed, that which shipwrecked both their armament at Syracuse and their power at home, arose from their unmeasured esteem for the respectable and pious Nikias, which blinded them to the grossest defects of generalship and public conduct. Disastrous as such misjudgment was, it counts at least as a proof that the moral corruption alleged to have been operated in their characters, is a mere fiction. Nor let it be supposed that the nerve and resolution which once animated the combatants of Marathon and Salamis, had disappeared in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war. On the contrary, the energetic and protracted struggle of Athens, after the irreparable calamity at Syracuse, forms a worthy parallel to her resistance in the time of Xerxes, and maintained unabated that distinctive attribute which Periklês had set forth as the main foundation of her glory, that of never giving way before misfortune.[592] Without any disparagement to the armament at Salamis, we may remark that the patriotism of the fleet at Samos, which rescued Athens from the Four Hundred, was equally devoted and more intelligent; and that the burst of effort, which sent a subsequent fleet to victory at Arginusæ, was to the full as strenuous.
If, then, we survey the eighty-seven years of Athenian history, between the battle of Marathon and the renovation of the democracy after the Thirty, we shall see no ground for the assertion, so often made, of increased and increasing moral and political corruption. It is my belief that the people had become both morally and politically better, and that their democracy had worked to their improvement. The remark made by Thucydidês, on the occasion of the Korkyræan bloodshed,—on the violent and reckless political antipathies, arising out of the confluence of external warfare with internal party-feud,[593]—wherever else it may find its application, has no bearing upon Athens: the proceedings after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty prove the contrary. And while Athens may thus be vindicated on the moral side, it is indisputable that her population had acquired a far larger range of ideas and capacities than they possessed at the time of the battle of Marathon. This, indeed, is the very matter of fact deplored by Aristophanês, and admitted by those writers, who, while denouncing the sophists, connect such enlarged range of ideas with the dissemination of the pretended sophistical poison. In my judgment, not only the charge against the sophists as poisoners, but even the existence of such poison in the Athenian system, deserves nothing less than an emphatic denial.