Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/376

 354 HISTORY OF GREECE. Sjkrates was at once eminent as an intellectual teacher and per- sonally unpopular, not because he received pay, but on other grounds, which jvill be hereafter noticed : and this was the precise combination of qualities which the general public naturally ex- pressed by a sophist. Moreover, Plato not only stole the name out of general circulation, in order to fasten it specially upon his opponents, the paid teachers, but also connected with it express discreditable attributes, which formed no part of its primitive and recognized meaning, and were altogether distinct from, though grafted upon, the vague sentiment of dislike associated with it. Aristotle, following the example of his master, gave to the word sophist a definition substantially the same as that which it bears in the modern languages : l "an impostrous pretender to knowledge ; a man who employs what he knows to be fallacy, for the purpose of deceit and of getting money." And he did this at a time when he himself, with his estimable contemporary Isokrates, were considered at Athens to come under the designa- tion of sophists, and were called so by every one who disliked either their profession or their persons. 2 Great thinkers and writers, like Plato and Aristotle, have full right to define and employ words in a sense of their own, pro- vided they give due notice. But it is essential that the reader 1 Aristot. Rhetoric, i, 1, 4 ; where he explains the sophist to be a person who has the same powers as the dialectician, but abuses them for a bad purpose: r> yu.p aotiiariKri, owe kv rrj 6vvu.fj.ei, u"MC ev ry irpoaipeaei . '. . .'EfZ 6e, oofyiaTTjs [lev, KOTO. TTJV Trpoaipeffiv, tiiafeKTiKof 6e, ov na-ii TTJV -xpoaipeaiv u/Ua Kara TT/V 6vva/ntv. Again, in the first chapter of the treatise de So- phisticis Elenchis : 6 aotpiarrje, xpqpaTicrrfa unb $aivonevr)c ooQias, iari)v b^> i- ua&ij Kal [iiaijTdv virdpxovTa, KOI rb iroXvTifMjTov la-pilot iprius airoKeKfaiKora, irpbf 6s rovrotf, el; iruoav avhijv KOI orar wpdf 6e, yoc-'pipa ryov, oijtaprvTyv, inl aropa epo/ tvov iv
 * Respecting Isokrates, see his Orat. xv, De Permutatione, wherein it is