Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/372

 B50 HISTORY OF GREECE. througn the political enemies of his great pupil, that he VTLS ostracized, or at least sentenced to banishment 1 Such men were competent companions for Anaxagoras and Zeno, and employed in part on the same studies ; the field of acquired knowledge being not then large enough to be divided into separate, exclusive compartments. While Euripides frequented the company, and acquainted himself with the opinions, of Anaxagoras, Ion of Chios, his rival as a tragic poet, as well as the friend of Kimon, bestowed so much thought upon physical subjects, as then con- ceived, that he set up a theory of his own, propounding the doc- trine of three elements in nature ; 2 air, fire, and earth. Now such musical teachers as Damon and the others above mentioned, were sophists, not merely in the natural and proper Greek sense of that word, but, to a certain extent, even in the special and restricted meaning which Plato afterwards thought proper to confer upon it. 3 A sophist, in the genuine sense of the word, was a wise man, a clever man ; one who stood prominently before the public as distinguished for intellect or talent of some kind. Thus Solon and Pythagoras are both called sophists ; 1 See Plato (Protagoras, c. 8, p. 316, D.; Laches, c. 3, p. 180, D.; Menex- enus, c. 3, p. 236, A; Alkibiad. i, c. 14, p. 118, C); Plutarch, Perikles, c. 4. Perikles had gone through dialectic practice in his youth (Xenoph. Me- mor. i, 2, 46). Compare Brandis, Gesch. der Gr. Rom. Philosophic, part i, sect. 48, p. 196. 3 Isokrates calls both Anaxagoras and Damon, sophists (Or. xv, DePerm. sect. 251), Plutarch, Perikles, c. 4. 'O <5e bdpuv IOLKEV, uxpof uv ffo^tor^f, Karadvecr&ai ftsv tig rb rrjc povoiKt/c ovopa, iniKpVK-oftevoc Trpoj roijf 7roA?.ot'f TT)V delVOTJJTCt. So Protagoras too (in the speech put into his mouth by Plato, Protag. c 8, p. 316) says, Tery truly, that there had been sophists from the earliest times of Greece. But he says also, what Plutarch says in the citation just above, that these earlier men refused, intentionally and deliberately, to call themselves sophists, for fear of the odium attached to the name ; and that he, Protagoras, was the first person to call himself openly a sophist. The denomination by which a man is known, however, seldom depends upon himself, but upon the general public, and upon his critics, frien ily 01 hostile. The unfriendly spirit of Plato did much more to attach the title f sophists specially to these teachers, than any assumption < their own,
 * Isokrates, -Or. xv. De Permutat. sect. 287.