Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/377

 WHO THE SOPHISTS WERE. 35J should keep in mind the consequences of such change, and not mistake a word used in a new sense for a new fact or phenome- non. The age with which we are now dealing, the last half of the fifth century B.C., is commonly distinguished in the history of philosophy as the age of Sokrates and the sophists. The sophists are spoken of as a new class of men, or sometimes in language which implies a new doctrinal sect, or school, as if they then sprang up in Greece for the first time; ostentatious imposters, flattering and duping the rich youth for their own personal gain ; undermining the morality of Athens, public and private, and encouraging their pupils to the unscrupulous prosecution of ambition and cupidity. They are even affirmed to have succeed- ed in corrupting the general morality, so that Athens had become miserably degenerated and vicious in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war, as compared with what she was in the time of Miltiades and Aristeides. Sokrates, on the contrary, is usually described as a holy man combating and exposing these false prophets, standing up as the champion of morality against their insidious artifices. 1 Now though the appearance of a man so very original as Sokrates was a new fact of unspeakable importance, the appearance of the sophists was no new fact; what was new was the peculiar use of an old word, which Plato took out of its usual meaning, and fastened upon the eminent paid teachers of the Sokratic age. The paid teachers, with whom, under the name of The Sophists, he brings Sokrates into controversy, were Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Polus of Agrigentum, Hippias of Elis, Prodikus of Keos, Thrasymachus of Chalkedon, Euthy- demus and Dionysodorus of Chios ; to whom Xenophon adds Antiphon of Athens. These men whom modern writers set down as the sophists, and denounce as the moral pestilence of their age were not distinguished in any marked or generic way from their predecessors. Their vocation was to train up 1 In the general point of view here described, the sophists arc presented by Ritter, Geschichte der Griech. Philosophic, vol. i, book vi, chaps. 1-3, p. 677, seq., 629, seq. ; by Brandts, Gesch. der Gr. Rom. Thilos. sects. Ixxxiv- Ixxxvii, vol. i. p. 516, seq. ; by Zeller, Geschichte der Philosoph. ii, pp. 65^ 9, 165, etc. : anl. indeed, by almost all who treat of the sophists.