Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/179

 The Sophists. 169 earlier age in the treatise Kara rav 2o$nw. I should not have referred at all to the statements of this vain foolish rhetorician, whose choice of a word or phrase would, I should think, in most cases have been determined by the number of its syllables, its value in rounding off a period, by the most paltry considerations of vanity or personal liking, or the reverse in short by anything rather than the truth and justice of the impression they would convey, had not the language of the first sections of the last- named work corresponded so nearly in substance with the state- ments of higher authorities that I thought it worth while to throw them into the scale with the rest valeant quantum. We have now gone through the principal writers who speak of the Sophists, and have endeavoured to trace in them all certain general features which they unite in ascribing to them as a class. These characteristics are, as we have seen, quackery and osten- tation, fallacious reasoning for the purpose of deception, vast pretensions and slender performance in their profession of teach- ing, to which Plato adds philosophical and practical principles subversive of public and private morality, and Xenophon the courting of wealthy youth with a view to their own pecuniary advantage. We have now to notice certain special traits and doctrines attributed to individuals of the class 15. We will begin with Protagoras, the most important, and apparently the most influential. This Sophist has an especial claim to our attention as the author and maintainer of the famous philosophical theory, tt&vtcov fitrpov av$pa>7ros, some of the consequences of which, as they are deduced by Plato, we have already touched upon. It seems to have been common in its spirit, if not in the letter, to most of the class. Mr Grote in his discussion of this doctrine, pp. 5046, ob- serves that we know scarcely any thing of the elucidations or limitations with which Protagoras may have accompanied his general position ; and that modern authors have no right to heap insults upon it beyond those which Plato, who had good means was a pupil of Gorgias, and himself phists as they are delineated by Plato I called a Sophist, and in this instance at may refer my readers i miei venticinque least the Athenian public cannot be lettori, as Manzoni says to Mr Grote's charged with any very undue extension own chapter, though his copy of Plato's of the use of the term. portrait is, I think, a good deal more 15 For the characters of these So- favourable than the original.