Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/128

 8o General History of Europe 120. Higher Education offered by the Sophists. On the other hand, there were serious-minded young men who spent their time on other things. Many a bright youth who had finished his music, reading, and writing at the old-fashioned private school annoyed his father by insisting that such schooling was not enough and by demanding money to pay for a course of lectures GREEK BOY PULLING OUT A THORN (A*) AND A LATER CARICATURE OF THE THORN PULLER (5) The graceful figure of the slender boy so seriously striving to remove the thorn was probably wrought not long after the Persian wars. It was very popular in antiquity, as it has also been in modern times. The comical caricature (B) in clay (terra cotta), though it has lost one foot, is a de- lightful example of Greek humor expressed in parody delivered by more modern private teachers called Sophists, a class of new and clever lecturers who wandered from city to city. In the lectures of the Sophists a higher education was for the first time open to young men. In the first place, the Sophists taught rhetoric and oratory with great success ; fathers who had no gift of speech had the pleasure of seeing their sons practiced public speakers. It was through the teaching of the Sophists also that the first successful writing of Greek prose began. In addition