Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/393

 ATHENS NOT CORRUPTED. 371 and Euthydemus, in the dialogue so called, are again painted each with colors of his own, different from all the three above named. We have not the least reason for presuming that Gor- gias agreed in the opinion of Protagoras : " Man is the measure of all things ;" and we may infer, even from Plato himself, that Protagoras would have opposed the views expressed by Thra- symachus in the first book of the Republic. It is impossible therefore to predicate anything concerning doctrines, methods, or tendencies, common and peculiar to all the sophists. There were none such ; nor has the abstract word, " Die Sophistik," any real meaning, except such qualities, whatever they may be, as are inseparable from the profession or occupation of public teaching. And if, at present, every candid critic would be ashamed to cast wholesale aspersions on the entire body of professional teachers, much more is such censure unbecoming in reference to the an- cient sophists, who were distinguished from each other by stronger individual peculiarities. If, then, it were true that in the interval between 480 B.C. and the end of the Peloponnesian war, a great moral deterioration had taken place in Athens and in Greece generally, we should have to search for some other cause than this imaginary abstraction called sophistic. But and this is the second point the matter of fact here alleged is as untrue, as the cause alleged is unreal. Athens, at the close of the Peloponnesian war, was not more cor- rupt than Athens in the days of Miltiades and Aristeides. If we revert to that earlier period, we shall find that scarcely any acts >f the Athenian people have drawn upon them sharper censure in my judgment, unmerited than their treatment of these very two statesmen ; the condemnation of Miltiades, and the os- tracism of Aristeides. In writing my history of that time, far from finding previous historians disposed to give the Athenians credit for public virtue, I have been compelled to contend against a body of adverse criticism, imputing to them gross ingratitude and injustice. Thus the contemporaries of Miltiades and Aris- teides, when described as matter of present history, are presented in anything but flattering colors ; except their valor at Marathon and Salamis, which finds one unanimous voice of encomium. But when these same men have become numbered among the mingled recollections and fancies belonging to the past, when a future