Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/439

417 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT? GREECE. 417 nation. The art of speaking, which had hitherto afforded exercise only to practical life and its avocations, now became a subject of school-training, in connexion with various branches of knowledge, and with ideas and views of various kinds, such as seemed suitable to the design of guiding and ruling men by eloquence. All this taken together, constituted the lessons of the Sophists, which we shall contemplate more nearly hereafter; and which produced more important effects on the education and morals of the Greeks than anything else at that time. That the very principles of the sophists must have irritated an Athenian with the views and feelings of Aristophanes, and have at once produced a spirit of opposition, is sufficiently obvious : the new art of rhetoric, always eager for advantages, and especially when transferred to the dangerous ground of the Athenian democracy and the popular law-courts, could not fail to be regarded by Aristophanes as a perilous instrument in the hands of ambitious and selfish demagogues ; he saw with a glance how the very foundations of the old morality, upon wnich the weal of Athens appeared to him to rest, must be sapped and rooted up by a stream of oratory which had the skill to turn everything to its own ad- vantage. Accordingly, he makes repeated attacks on the whole race of the artificial orators and sceptical reasoners, and it is with them that he is principally concerned in the Clouds. The real object of this piece is stated by the poet himself in the para- basis to the Wasps, which was composed in the following year : he says that he had attacked the fiend which, like a night-mare, plagued fathers and grandfathers by night, besetting inexperienced and harmless people with all sorts of pleadings and pettifogging tricks* It is obvious that it is not the teachers of rhetoric who are alluded to here, but the young men who abused the facility of speaking which they had acquired in the schools by turning it to the ruin of their fellow citizens. The whole plan of the drama depends on this : an old Athenian, who is sore pressed by debts and duns, first labours to acquire a knowledge of the tricks and stratagems of the new rhetoric, and finding that he is too stiff and awk- ward for it, sends to this school his youthful son, who has hitherto spent his life in the ordinary avocations of a well-born cavalier. The conse- quence is, that his son, being initiated into the new scepticism, turns it against his own father, and not only beats him, but proves that he has done so justly. The error of Aristophanes in identifying the school of Socrates with that of the new-fangled rhetoric must have arisen from his putting Socrates on the same footing with sophists, like Protagoras and Gorgias, and then preferring to make his fellow citizen the butt of his witticisms, rather than his foreign colleagues, who paid only short visits to Athens. It cannot be denied that Aristophanes was mistaken. 2 E
 * Compare, by way of explanation, also Acharnians, 713. Birds, 1347. Frogs, 147.