Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/279

 INTELLECTUAL TEACHING FORBIDDEN. 257 procure!: by Lysander, while his influence still continued unini paired. But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties of Athenian citizens that the Thirty made war. They were not less solicitous to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the city ; a project so perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and practice of Sparta, that they counted on the support of their foreign allies. Among the ordinances which they promulgated was one, expressly forbidding every one l " to teach the art of words, if I may be allowed to translate literally the Greek expression, which bore a most comprehensive signifi- cation, and denoted every intentional communication of logical, rhetorical, or argumentative improvement, of literary criticism and composition, and of command over those political and moral topics which formed the ordinary theme of discussion. Such was the species of instruction which Sokrates and other sophists, each in his own way, communicated to the Athenian youth. The great foreign sophists, not Athenian, such as Prodikus and Protagoras had been, though perhaps neither of these two was now alive, were doubtless no longer in the city, under the calamitous circumstances which had been weigh- ing upon every citizen since the defeat of JEgospotami. But there were abundance of native teachers, or sophists, inferior in merit to these distinguished names, yet still habitually employed, with more or less success, in communicating a species of instruc- tion held indispensable to every liberal Athenian. The edict of the Thirty was in fact a general suppression of the higher class 1 Xcnopli. Memor. i, 2, 31. Ka2 tv rolf vouoic typa-ipe, hoyuv Te%vrjv ur) v. Isokrates, cont. Sophist. Or. xiii, s. 12. TTJV naidevmv rqr run Plutarch (Thcmistoklesi, c. 19) affirms that the Thirty oligarchs, daring their rule, altered the position of the rostrum in tht Pnyx, the place where the dcmocratical public assemblies were held : the rostrum had before looted towards the sea, but they turned it so as to make it look towards tl.j land, because the maritime service and the associations connected with ifvscre the chief stimulants of dcmocratical sentiment. This story hai been often copied and reasserted, as if it were an undoubted foot ; but M. Forchhammcr (Topographic von Athcn, p. 289, in Kieler, Philol Studicn. 1841) has shown it to be untrue and even absurd. VOL. VIII. 7OC.