Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/429

 CHANGES AT ATHENS UNDER PERHvLES. 405 judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers, — Sokrates carried on throughout his life a constant polemical warfare against the sophists and rhetors, in that negative vein in which he was unrivalled. And as the works of these latter have not re- mained, it is chiefly from the observations of their opponents that we know them ; so that they are in a situation such as that in which Sokrates himself would have been, if we had been com- pelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanes, or from those unfavorable impressions respecting his character, which we know, even from the Apologies of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens. This is not the op- portunity, however, for trying to distinguish the good from the evil in the working of the sophists and rhetors : at present, it is enough that they were the natural product of the age, — supply- ing those Avants, and answering to that stimulus, which arose partly from the delibex-ations of the ekklesia, but still more from the contentions before the dikastery, — in which latter a far greater number of citizens took active part, with or without their own consent. The public and frequent dikasteries constituted by Perikles,opened to the Athenian mind precisely that career of improvement which was best suited to its natural aptitude : they were essential to the development of that- demand out of which grew not only Grecian oratory, but also, as secondary products, Trjv jiev Tuv GO(j)t.aTi]v u-eKTelvare, on Kpirlav i<i)uv7} TVETratdevKug, tva Tu)v TpiuKovra tuv tuv 6^u.ov KarakvaavTuv. Among the sophists whom Isokrates severely criticizes, he e'V'idently seems to include Plato, as may be seen by the contrast between 66^a and cTTiaTTjfirj, which he particularly notes, and which is so conspicuouslj^ set forth in the Platonic writings (Isokrates cont. Sophistas, Or. xiii, p. 293; also p. 295). We know also that Lysias called both Plato and ^schines the disciple of Sokrates, by the name of sophists (Aristeides, Orat. Platonic, xlvi, 'TTrep TUV TETTupuv, p. 407, vol. u, cd. Dindorf). Aristeides remarks justly that the name sophist was a general name, including all the philosophers, teachers, and lettered men. The general name, sophists, in fact, included good, bad, and indifferent ; like " the philosophers, the political economists, the metaphysicians," etc. I shall take a futui-e opportunity of examining the indiscriminate censures against them as a class, which most modern writers have copied implicitly from the polemics of ancient times.