Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/378

 356 HISTORY OF GREECE. youth for the duties, the pursuits, and the successes, of active life, both private and public. Others had done this before ; bul these teachers brought to the task a larger range of knowledge with a greater multiplicity of scientific and other topics; not only more impressive powers of composition and speech, serving as a personal example to the pupil, but also a comprehension of the elements of good speaking, so as to be able to give him precepts conducive to thp.t accomplishment ; ! a considerable treasure of accumulated thought on moral and political subjects, calculated to make their conversation very instructive, and discourse ready prepared, on general heads or common places, for their pupils to learn by heart. 2 But this, though a very important extension, was nothing more than an extension, differ- ing merely in degree of that which Damon and others had done before them. It arose from the increased demand which had grown up among the Athenian youth, for a larger measure of education and other accomplishments ; from an elevation in the standard of what was required from every man who aspired to occupy a place in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. Protagoras, Gorgias, and the rest, supplied this demand with an ability and success unknown before their time ; hence they gained a dis- tinction such as none of their predecessors had attained, were prized all over Greece, travelled from city to city with general admiration, and obtained considerable pay. While such success, among men personally strangers to them, attests unequivocally their talent and personal dignity, of course it also laid them open to increased jealousy, as well from inferior teachers as from the lovers of ignorance generally : such jealousy manifesting itself, as I have before explained, by a greater readiness to stamp them with the obnoxious title of sophists. The hostility of Plato against these teachers, for it is he, and not Sokrates, who was peculiarly hostile to them, as may be seen by the absence of any such marked antithesis in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, may be explained without at all supposing in them that corruption which modern writers have been so ready not only to admit but to magnify. It ^ 1 Compare Isokrates, Orat. xiii. cont. Sophistas, sccu
 * Aristot. Sophist. Elench. c. 33 ; Cicero, Brut. c. 13