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.
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.
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.
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]]
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.
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]]
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.
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.