Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/421

 SOKRATES. 399 tiew the best attributes of the Greek, especially the Athenian mind. It exhibits those qualities of which Perikles made emphatic boast in his celebrated funeral oration ; ' conception of public speech as a practical thing, not meant as an excuse for inaction, but combined with energetic action, and turning it to good account by full and open discussion beforehand ; profound sensibility to the charm of manifested intellect, without enervat- ing the powers of execution or endurance. Assuredly, a man like Protagoras, arriving in a city with all this train of admira- tion laid before him, must have known very little of his own interest or position, if he began to preach a low or corrupt morality. If it be true generally, as Voltaire has remarked, that " any man who should come to preach a -relaxed morality would be pelted," much more would it be true of a sophist like Protagoras, arriving in a foreign city with all the prestige of a great intellectual name, and with the imagination of youths on rire to hear and converse with him, that any similar doctrine would destroy his reputation at once. Numbers of teacherj have made their reputation by inculcating overstrained asceti cism; it will be hard to find an example of success in the opposite vein. CHAPTER LXVIII. SOKRATES. THAT the professional teachers called sophists, in Greece, were intellectual and moral corruptors, and that much corruption grew up under their teaching in the Athenian mind, are com- mon statements, which I have endeavored to show to be errone- ous. Corresponding to these statements is another, which repre- 1 Thucyd. ii, 40. ^i^.oao^>ov^.ev uiev //aAaA'af ov roi'f ?.6}'ovf ruif I yoi( 3fa[lfiv iiyovpevot dtaQepovruf 6e Kdi roJe l^ofjev, (Lore TO/.JIQV TF oi tvrol pul-iara nal irrrt uv tTTix c 'P'l ao f iv lK%oyi&o&at.