Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/379

 PI ATO AND THE SOPHISTS. 357 the radical difference between his point of view and theirs. He was a great reformer and theorist ; they undertook to qualify young men for doing themselves credit, and rendering service to others, in active Athenian life. Not only is there room for the concurrent operation of both these veins of thought and action, in every progressive society, but the intellectual outfit of the society can never be complete without the one as well as the other. It was the glory of Athens that both were there ade- quately represented, at the period which we have now reached. Whoever peruses Plato's immortal work, " The Republic." will see that he dissented from society, both democratical and oli- garchical, on some of the most fundamental points of public and private morality ; and throughout most of his dialogues his quarrel is not less with the statesmen, past as well as present, than with the paid teachers of Athens. Besides this ardent desire for radical reform of the state, on principles of his own, distinct from every recognized political party or creed, Plato was also unrivalled as a speculative genius and as a dialectician; both which capacities he put forth, to amplify and illustrate the ethical theory and method first struck out by Sokrates, as well as to establish comprehensive generalities of his own. Now his reforming, as well as his theorizing tendencies, brought him into polemical controversy with all the leading agents by whom the business of practical life at Athens was carried on. In so far as Protagoras or Gorgias talked the language of theory, they -were doubtless much inferior to Plato, nor would their doctrines be likely to hold against his acute dialectics. But it was neither their duty, nor their engagement, to reform the state, or discover and vindicate the best theory on ethics. They professed to qualify young Athenians for an active and honorable life, private as well as public, in Athens, or in any other given city ; they taught them " to think, speak, and act," in Athens ; they of course accepted, as the basis of their teaching, that type of character which estimable men exhibited and which the public approved, in Athens ; not undertaking to recast the type, but to arm it with new capacities and adorn it with fresh accomplishments. Their direct business was with ethical precept, not. with ethical theory ; all that was required of them, as to the latter, was, that their theory should b sufficiently sound to lead