Since, however, the sophists acted so important a part in the education of the Greeks, the space I devote to them is clearly their due: it is necessary to the thorough comprehension of the subject. Almost from the moment they arose they aimed at a monopoly of the art of teaching, and the father of the art, properly so called, was Gorgias. Few names of antiquity, as Geel[[816]] has well observed, are better known or more celebrated than that of this distinguished sophist, among the causes of whose amazing popularity must be reckoned the number of great men whom he instructed in eloquence, and the splendid vices of style which his example and precept brought into vogue. The exact date of his birth is not known:[[817]] he is, however, supposed to have been born at Leontium in Sicily, about the seventy-third Olympiad. His father’s name was Charmantes.[[818]] Nearly all the particulars of his early life are unknown, the ancients having been as much too negligent as we are too lavish of biographical details. Under whom he studied, with whom he conversed, how much he owed to others, and how much to his own genius and industry, are points not easy to be determined, though we cannot adopt the opinion of Ælian,[[819]] who sends him to school to Philolaos; or of Diogenes Laertius, who will have Empedocles to have been his teacher, since the latter was very little older than himself, and the former much younger. Empedocles is indeed said to have invented the art of rhetoric, in which case we might suppose Gorgias to have been his scholar. But how invented? He may have been the first who sought to reduce it into an art, or who so called it; but as Aristotle observes, every man who reasons persuasively is a rhetorician, whether his eloquence be based on the formal study of the art or not. In philosophy, indeed, he would seem[[820]] to have been the disciple of Empedocles; but in rhetoric they both very probably derived instruction from Corax and Tisias, who flourished and taught rhetoric in Sicily about the period of their youth.[[821]]
These, however, are mere conjectures. He would probably have died in obscurity, and been forgotten with the kings who reigned ante Agamemnona, had not the misfortunes of his country brought him, in old age, to the great workshop of Fame. The immediate occasion was this; the people of Leontium having engaged and been worsted in war by the Syracusans, sent ambassadors to demand succour of the Athenian people, and among these the principal speaker was Gorgias. Practised in a style of oratory new at Athens, indulging in a profusion of metaphors and other figures bordering on the licences of poetry, he immediately hurried away captive his hearers, fulfilled the desires of his fellow citizens, and established for himself a reputation[[822]] where all men most desired to possess one. To augment his glory it has not been unusual to enumerate Pericles and Thucydides among those who became his scholars. But this embassy took place in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian war when Pericles had been dead two years. That Thucydides heard him, however, is not at all improbable, since his exile did not take place[[823]] till the eighth year of the war. Among his admirers are mentioned two other men, whose principles and history afford the best illustration of what fruit the teaching of the sophists was likely to produce,—Critias and Alcibiades, whose ability, courage, and profligacy rendered them the scourges of their country. It has been with great probability supposed that, having on his return to Leontium rendered an account of his mission, he quitted Sicily for ever, for the purpose of becoming a professor of eloquence in Greece. This is Diodorus’s account, but the Scholiast on Hermogenes supposes him to have remained at Athens. Whether this was the case or not, he soon considered one city, however great or celebrated, too confined a theatre for the display of his merit. He, therefore, adopted the profession of an itinerant lecturer, with the double view of gratifying his vanity and filling his purse. And he thoroughly understood the art of dazzling mankind, for, not supposing it enough to unfold before his auditors his magazines of tropes and figures, stored up, like theatrical thunder and lightning, to be introduced at the proper moment, he had recourse to other dramatic arts for producing effect, appearing in magnificent attire, flowing purple robes, embroidered sandals, his fingers sparkling with gold and gems. But though the oldest of the sophists, he was not the first who adopted this course. Protagoras, and perhaps others, had previously commenced their peregrinations, and begun to practise on the credulity and weakness of the multitude. Among the Athenians they were paid chiefly with praise; “the solid pudding” was to be sought elsewhere. And accordingly we find, as Plato sarcastically expresses it, that upon the advent of the sophists, the Thessalians, usually celebrated for their full purses and fine horses,[[824]] grew all at once remarkable for their love of wisdom, that is, paid the sophists handsomely, in the hope of thus enticing knowledge to remain among them. In fact they supposed that wisdom is like a candle and lantern, by which you may have light,—or a saint’s shirt, by wearing which you infallibly become holy,—or the lamp of Epictetus, which a rich man bought at three thousand drachmas, in the hope that it would light him into the very adyta of philosophy. However this may be, it is very certain that the Thessalians became the patrons of the sophists, who disposed in that country of more wisdom and eloquence than in any other part of Greece, and the principal purchasers of it were of the rich family of the Aleuadæ, the earliest Mæcenases, I believe, on record.
But the sophists, to their credit be it acknowledged, were no misers. What they easily gained they spent freely; and not merely so, but in many instances converted the effects of their personal vanity into public ornaments of the whole country. Thus Gorgias, enriched by the spoils of Thessaly, erected at Delphi a golden statue[[825]] of himself, which argued a more generous spirit than he would have shown by setting it afloat in the channels of trade or husbandry or usury, in the hope of rendering himself a great capitalist.
Gorgias was long absent from Athens, and visited during his travels the most considerable cities of Greece. Among other places he came to Delphi, where from the steps of the altar, probably during the games, he delivered that oration called the Pythian, in celebration of which he erected the above-mentioned statue.[[826]] From thence perhaps,—for the chronology of his journey is not exactly known,—he proceeded to Olympia, where he also assisted at the games for the purpose of exhibiting his oratorical talents in the presence of all Greece, and reaping as it were in an hour a harvest of glory. This declamation, delivered during the Peloponnesian war, had at least the recommendation of being patriotic. Standing in front of the temple of Zeus, the god of concord and of peace, he earnestly recommended union and harmony.[[827]] If war they must have, there were the barbarians,—let their arms be turned against them. With what success he spoke, history has informed us; but the satirists of antiquity, ever naturally addicted to scandal, are careful to remark that this great advocate of concord and unanimity kept up a civil war in his own house, where the charms of some beautiful-cheeked θεραπαινίδιον[[828]] excited the jealousy of Madame. At the same time the old gentleman, to adopt the most moderate computation, must have been hard upon three-score and ten, though some would make him eighty.
Over the latter days of Gorgias[[829]] hovers the same darkness which conceals from view the commencement. It is known with no degree of certainty where he spent the close of his long life or where he died, though as no account exists of his return to Sicily, it probably was in Greece.
Next to Gorgias in reputation was Protagoras, whose history is still less known. In the opinion of some writers he was the oldest of the sophists. Though the date of his birth be later than that of Gorgias, he preceded him in the profession of the art. He was certainly, I think, born much earlier than is supposed either by Clinton or by Geel, who take him to have been almost exactly of Socrates’ age, that is to have come into the world about 479 B. C. But in this opinion I cannot concur. It is in direct contradiction with a passage in Plato[[830]] who, however careless in matters of chronology, would, I am persuaded, never push his negligence so far as to make one man say to another, born in the same year with himself, that he was old enough to be his father. To me, therefore it appears necessary that we throw back ten or twelve years the date of his birth. He was ten years, it is admitted, older than Democritos. The latter, who had made considerable progress in philosophy when he saw Protagoras in the capacity of a wood-carrier and undertook to initiate him in his system, could hardly have been less than seven or eight and twenty, so that the former was little short of forty. He exercised the profession of sophist during forty years, and died about 406 B. C. He must therefore have been born about 484–485 B. C.[[831]]
But I cannot here pursue the history of the sophists, which no further belongs to my work than as it is connected with the subject of education. On their writings, however, and manner of teaching it is necessary that I should be more explicit. Whether Gorgias first published or Protagoras is of little moment; both evidently wrote with the same aim, which was to confound truth and error, right and wrong, not perhaps through any enmity to truth or to virtue, but from the sheer vanity of being thought capable of any thing, and the desire of converting their talents to account. One distinguishing quality of the class was fertility. They piqued themselves on being able to pour forth volume after volume, treatise after treatise, speech after speech. This, indeed, it was that constituted their principal claim to superiority over the philosophers, a pains-taking race, among whom the period of intellectual gestation was longer than that of the elephant; whereas your true sophist, without meditation, study or experience, astonished his admirers by the copiousness of his invention, by imagery, gorgeous and glittering, generally stolen from the poets, and by a piquant air of profoundness and originality, which the art of seeming to doubt all that other men believe never fails to confer.
Besides, comprehending enough of human nature to know that whoever amuses is listened to, whatever atrocities he may utter, they were careful to invest their doctrine with a light and graceful exterior. No man ever excelled them at a joke. They in fact managed matters so that in their hands every thing became a joke, and to overthrow an antagonist demanded nothing more than to be able to raise a laugh at his expense; for, all the world over, in the opinion of the vulgar, whoever is ridiculous is wrong. From calculation, they eschewed the uphill task of correcting error, or advancing truth, or reforming manners. To upbraid men for their faults and counsel amendment, is to incur their enmity. Reformers, prophets, apostles of truth have always been persecuted, often put to death. The sophists felt no ambition to be martyrs. Poverty, too, and obscurity, spare diet, a coarse mantle, and the solitude in which the poor great man walks the world, they could not away with. To their happiness crowds of admirers, opulence, costly robes[[832]] and all the refinements of luxury formed a sine quâ non; and accordingly in the choice of their doctrines they were guided by one consideration only, viz. how they might amuse mankind, and reap all the advantages of popularity.
The eloquence which statesmen employed to recommend their measures, the sophists applied to fictitious uses, imagining themselves in impossible circumstances, reversing times, confounding manners, and attacking or defending men long since dead. In all such cases the interest would chiefly depend on the novelty or ingenuity of the thoughts and the subtle artifices of style. Hence the extravagance, the coldness, the perversion of imagery, the distortion and monkey tricks of language, for which their manner of compositions became remarkable. The false position they took up led, in philosophy, to results equally disastrous. To aim at truth, would have been to throw themselves into the wake of the philosophers, to share, without worldly compensation, their dangers, labours, and comparative insignificance. They struck out, therefore, a new course for themselves. Taking philosophy as it was, they undertook to dispute on all and every part of it; to show that for a skilful dialectician there was no proposition that might not with nearly equal facility be attacked or defended; that by means of syllogisms or enthymemes, artfully arranged, darkness may be proved to be light, and light darkness; that between lying and speaking the truth there is no difference; that in fact both veracity and falsehood are nonentities, all our notions being mere arbitrary fictions; and that to beat your dog and to beat your father is the same thing.
Of this novel and ingenious style of argumentation,[[833]] in which Hudibras was an adept, we are furnished with abundant examples by Plato, more especially in the Euthydemus, where two old fellows, with arguments longer than their beards, luxuriate in the felicitous inventions by which, like another Circe, they are enabled to transform their hearers into hogs and bulldogs. In humorous extravagance the dialogue scarcely falls short of an Aristophanic comedy or a Christmas pantomime. Socrates[[834]] plays the Clown, Ctesippos the Harlequin, and the blows dealt upon the magicians in the course of the piece, are such as, were they fully comprehended, would set all Drury Lane or Covent Garden in a roar. But the length of the scenes prevents their transplantation into my pages, and the abridgment of a joke is a very dull thing. Let us, however, hear by what logic they proved Socrates to have been a second “man without a navel.”