Having thus drawn as complete a picture as the plan of our work would permit, of the physical training of the Greeks in all its branches, comprehending Gymnastics properly so called, together with those other exercises which under the name of field-sports were enjoyed rather than studied under the lead of no master but experience, we now return to that mental discipline, which for the most part exerted its influence in the developement of the intellectual faculties at the same time that the foregoing bodily discipline brought forth all the energies of the frame. We shall thus have traversed the whole circle of Hellenic education, when we shall have exhibited the youth passing through the schools of the philosophers and sophists into the world.^[794]

Their mode of teaching differed very materially from ours. It scarcely seemed an object with them to devour large quantities of learning, but going leisurely again and again over the same ground they appeared to give the lessons they received time to sink like gentle rain into their minds. Some advantage, too, arose from their method of teaching, as far as possible, orally. The master was to them instead of a library. A book has but one set of phrases for all. But the living teacher, if he found his pupils could not rise to his language, could lower it to meet them half-way, could be brief or expansive, or general or minute, as the necessities of the moment required. There was a familiarity, too, in the relation, scarcely compatible with our manners. The youth forgot he was learning, and rather supposed himself to be searching in the company of a friend for truths equally unknown to both. This appears to have been more particularly the case in their moral studies,^[795] at least in the Socratic schools, where all the pomp of wisdom was laid aside that it might be the more popular.

It has been already remarked that the first lessons in morals were learned from the poets, whom, in my opinion, Plato wrongs most egregiously when he arraigns their fables as so many sources of immorality.^[796] He appears, in fact, wilfully to confound them with those impostors, the purificators and diviners, who furnished the Popes with the original hint of penitences and indulgencies, and expiating crimes by proxy. But this is unjust. It is visiting the sins of low and sensual versifiers upon the divine heads of bards whom heaven itself had inspired. However this may be, upon the Greeks young and old no teachers exercised so powerful an influence as the poets, who, from Homer down to Callistratos,^[797] whether in epic or after-dinner song, wielded the empire of their feelings despotically, prompting them to actions pregnant with renown. And the avidity with which their lessons were imbibed, is compared to that of a swarm of bees alighting (ἐπιπτομένοι)^[798] on a bed of spring flowers. In fact, what Jason of Pheræ said of himself,—that he was devoured by the love of empire^[799]—appears to have been true of the Athenian youth, in their irrepressible thirst after knowledge. Such of them, at least, as were εὐφυεῖς καὶ ἱκανοὶἱκανοὶ, are said to have hungered fiercely after philosophy, and that not for any particular part but for the whole. And Socrates declares that he who while young is fastidious in his studies, rejecting this, disliking that, before mature reason has taught him which is useful and which is not, may consider himself what he pleases, but can never be great in learning or philosophy. To excel in these it is necessary insatiably to covet every kind of instruction, and joyfully to enter on the acquisition of it. He says, indeed, that they resemble sight-seers, greedy of every spectacle; or musical people, who are led by the ear wherever fiddling and singing are going forward; except that, with the latter pleasure is the sole motive, with the former an exalted passion for truth.^[800] But what truths are the object of philosophy? Those which have regard to the nature and attributes of goodness, from which, as from a fountain, flow all the usefulness and advantages of virtue. Philosophy in Greece comprehended religion, and to be religious was to act justly, benevolently, mercifully towards men, humbly and piously towards God. To live thus, that is, to be virtuous, they considered it necessary to possess a knowledge of the whole theory of ethics, since virtue, in their opinion, is incompatible with ignorance. But man, besides being a moral being, accountable to God, is a political being, accountable to the laws of his country. He has duties also to perform towards that country. To perform these properly he must comprehend the nature of a state, and the relations subsisting between the state and the individuals who compose it; that is, he must be acquainted with the science of politics. Again in all free states, reasoning and persuasion, not blind will and brute force, are the instruments of government. The citizen must, therefore, be versed in logic and eloquence,^[801] that he may think correctly and explain clearly and forcibly to others the convictions which determine his own judgment. We have thus a cycle of Greek studies with the reasons on which they were founded.

With regard to their religious education, which commenced in the nursery and was interwoven with every other study, it may be observed that without it no person at Athens could rise to any eminence, or command, even in private life, the respect of his fellow-citizens. To be in favour with them a man must be supposed to stand well with the gods. They conceived, in fact, that while conscience remained unstifled, there would be a sense of religion, and that when this went, probity, for the most part, and honour fled along with it. For regarding the deity in the light of a parent,—"we are all his offspring,"—irreligion appeared to them something like a disposition to parricide, a compound of injustice with the basest and most atrocious ingratitude. Arrived at this pitch, a man to compass his ends would scruple at nothing. They, therefore, regarded every symptom of impiety as a blow aimed at the democracy, of which Zeus was king. He who tramples on his country’s religion, which is the basis of all its laws, will infallibly, if it be in his power, trample next on those laws themselves, and next on his fellow-citizens whom the laws protect. Hence the terror, the vengeance, and, indeed, the cruelty arising out of the mutilation of the Hermæ, and the profanation of the mysteries, and the prosecution which followed, of Alcibiades, Andocides, and the rest. An attempt had been made to break down that enclosure of reverential sanctity which surrounded the commonwealth, and commended it to the protection of heaven. They considered the act a formal renouncing of the Almighty, and feared,—so imperfect were their notions,—lest the impiety of the few should redound to the detriment of the whole.

The remark is common in the mouths^[802] of men that the education of the people should be conformable to the spirit of their institutions. But this is a mere truism, and means no more than this,—that men should not be enjoined one thing by their laws and political constitution, and another by the habits and maxims taught in youth. The grand difficulty, however, always has been to make them so to harmonise in practice that they should be but two parts of the same system.

In monarchies^[803] a spirit of exclusion, something like that on which the system of castes is built, must pervade the whole business of education. The nobility must have schools to themselves, or, if wealthy plebeians be suffered to mingle with them, superior honour and consideration must be yielded to the former. The masters must look up to them and to their families, not to the people for preferment and advancement; and the plebeians, though superior in number, must be weak in influence, and be taught to borrow their tone from the privileged students.

In an oligarchy, properly so called, there should be no mingling of the classes at all. Schools must be established expressly for the governors, and others for the governed. The basis of education should be the notion that some men were born for rule and others for subjection; that the happiness of individuals depends on uninquiring submission to authority; that their rulers are wise and they unwise; that all they have to do with the laws is to obey them; and all teachers must be made to feel that their admission among the great depends on the faithful advocacy of such notions.

In free states, again, the contrary course will best promote the ends of government; the schools must be strictly public, and not merely theoretically but practically open to all. There should be no compulsion to attend them, but ignorance of the things there taught should involve a forfeiture of civil rights as much as being of unsound mind; for in truth, an ignorant man is not of sound mind, any more than one unable to use all his limbs is of sound body. Here the discipline must be very severe. A spirit rigidly puritanical must pervade the studies and preside over the amusements. Every tendency irreligious, immoral, ungentlemanly, as unworthy the dignity of freedom, should be nipped in the bud. The students must be taught to despise all other distinctions but those of virtue and genius, in other words the power to serve the community. They should be taught to contemplate humanity as in other respects wholly on the same level, with nothing above it but the laws. The teachers must be dependent on the people alone, and owe their success to their own abilities and popular manners. And this last in a great measure was the spirit of Athenian education.^[804]

The best proof^[805] that could be furnished of the excellence of a system of education would be its rendering a people almost independent of government, that is swayed more by their habits than by the laws. This was preëminently the case with the Athenians. They required to be very little meddled with by their rulers. Instructed in their duties and the reason which rendered them duties, accustomed from childhood to perform them, they lived as moral and educated men live still, independent of the laws.

This was the effect. The causes must be sought in their discipline and studies. I have observed that among them a principal subject of investigation was the science of politics, that is the science according to the principles of which states are framed and preserved. Nor did they, as some do, conduct their studies in that cold manner in which men investigate matters of mere curiosity, or things they are never to do more than converse or write about. They studied it as a profession, as a means of rising to power, and through power to fame, that is with all the ardour and earnestness of which enthusiastic youth is capable. Education by this means exerted an influence unknown under other forms of government. A consciousness that they were engaged in a sort of sacred contest, of which all Greece was spectator, pervaded the youth of every rank, and impelled them irresistibly into that course of studies which promised the greatest probability of success. Hence, no doubt much of the enthusiasm with which philosophy was cultivated. It was often not so much the abstract love of wisdom as a conviction of the political value of that wisdom which filled the schools of the great men who taught at Athens, whether they were physiologists, mathematicians, masters of music, of strategy, or of eloquence. The example of Pericles applying himself to natural philosophy under Anaxagoras, and deriving thence those streams of pure and masculine eloquence which overflowed the Pnyx, operated forcibly on public opinion. By the same arts and studies men hoped to mount to equal elevation, forgetting that Anaxagoras only watered the plant spontaneously produced by nature.

However, the hopes and aspirations I have described filled the schools first of the philosophers, then of the sophists. And this is the natural course of things. Few pursue wisdom for its own sake, in order that it may purify and render holy their own minds. And by this dispensation of Providence society is a gainer; for, as man is constituted, no sooner does he possess any mental excellence, any knowledge or art or experience, which can be rendered available, than he comes eagerly forward with it to extort praise or reward from the community by conferring benefits upon it. The examples of reserve in this matter are few, nor, in fact, are they to be commended who in this or in any thing else hide their light under a bushel; and therefore Plato is wrong when he teaches that wise men will as a rule abstain from intermeddling with state affairs, unless constrained thereto by fines and menaces. He confesses, indeed, that the worst of all punishments is to be governed by evil men, and that to avoid this even philosophers will consent to hold the reins of government.^[806] But where they do not, they are always in free states the masters of those who do. Their schools were the colleges and universities of the ancient world, and so long as freedom endured the great object of their philosophy was to create able citizens and a happy state. On this account their remains are still instinct with life. Their object was gradually to ripen human nature into perfection by perfecting its education and its institutions. They knew how completely a people is in the power of its teachers for good or for evil, and accordingly, with some few exceptions, applied themselves to elevate the conceptions, the moral tone, the feelings of their countrymen, seldom descending to trifling disquisitions excepting for relaxation in the intervals of more important inquiries.

The physical sciences,^[807] save in the case of their earliest cultivators, were regarded as simple handmaids to ethics and politics. Nevertheless, in the study of them much earnestness was exhibited. For, where knowledge is at all held in honour, men will always be found sufficiently prone to the palpable and visible. But even these pursuits assumed a peculiar form in Greece. The genius of the nation, essentially creative, developed its force and its peculiar energy in framing systems of physics, explaining the origin of the world, the birth of the human race, its early fortunes and fabulous history. Every great philosopher became, like an intellectual sun, the centre of a system of physics, and his disciples like satellites revolved around him, receiving and reflecting his light. This, despite of some inconveniences, was highly favourable to science. It compelled men to the study of the philosophical art of attack and defence. Each school became the reviewers and critics of its rivals, sought out their weak points, studied them profoundly, called up all its acuteness, all its subtlety, both to assault others and defend itself; and thus, whatever became of the system, the professors of it carried, as far as might be towards perfection, their intellectual powers, invested their reasonings with every grace of which they were susceptible, culled from the most recondite arts and hidden resources of style and eloquence.

But, while this golden currency was circulating through Greece, enriching its mind and augmenting its chances of independence and happiness, a race of men sprang up, who brought into use a number of ingenious and beautiful counters,—I mean the sophists.^[808] The influence of these men in the education of the Greeks has seldom been correctly appreciated. It has been more common to vituperate than to study them. They corrupted, we are told, the mind and manners of youth. But how? No one, as far as I know, has observed that to them is to be traced the extinction of the republican spirit and the opening of a way for despotism.^[809] That they created the yearning after innovation I will not affirm; but their epoch constituted a period of transition from republican to monarchical institutions, and the only way in which they can be said to have corrupted the youth was by undermining that love of liberty and of country, the feeling of disinterestedness on which chiefly a commonwealth must be founded, and inculcating in lieu thereof a system of ethics more in conformity with the modifications of civil polity prevalent in modern times. In this way only did they corrupt and undermine the morals of their country. But in so far they effected it, and that the more easily, in that circumstances conspired, about the time they arose, to fling the whole business of teaching into their hands, insomuch that to be a sophist, and to teach youth, grew to be synonymous terms.^[810]

They were themselves, however, but a corruption of what in its origin was good, and always continued in the opinion of the undiscerning to be confounded with the men they aped.^[811] Whether we have sophists among us at the present day, I will not determine; but this is the way they arose in Greece. It was soon discovered by shrewd and calculating men, that since philosophy excited much admiration and rendered its teachers objects of mark and reverence, it might by a little ingenuity be converted into a source of profit.^[812] But by what means?—The philosophers at the outset were in possession of the popular ear, more through the sanctity of their lives, of which all could judge, than through their doctrines, necessarily comprehended in their fullest extent by few. They despaired, therefore, of the people. There existed, however, in Greece, and will ever exist in free states, young men of immeasurable ambition, who, impatient of the restraint of laws, would gladly cast them off, seize the reins of government, and become the tyrants of their country. The mere conception of such a design implies the possession of wealth and powerful friends. Eager for any help they enthusiastically welcomed all who seemed capable of promoting their views, and when the sophists appeared, enriched with a variety of knowledge, specious, eloquent, unscrupulous, they eagerly threw themselves into their arms, became their pupils, and in conjunction with them framed the subjugation of Greece.

In tracing this class of men to their origin, we must look back a great way, and endeavour to detect them, under a variety of forms, different from that in which they ultimately settled. They arose with the first philosophers, or the first poet who made self the centre of his researches, and sought to render the investigation of science a means of personal aggrandisement. Protagoras describes in Plato the rise of his own art; where, though a side blow be wrongfully aimed at poetry itself, the truth of the accusation against a number of poets cannot be denied. He makes good at the very outset what I have asserted above. They travelled, he says, over all Greece, alluring the noblest youths to abandon the company of their friends and fellow-citizens, to become their pupils, and be guided wholly by their maxims, the nature of which I shall presently unfold. The feelings they thus excited, he denominates envy and malevolence, though in truth it was nothing more than that patriotic and parental jealousy and hatred experienced by the good when they behold those they love led astray. The better to escape this hostility, the ancient sophists adopted various disguises, sometimes enveloping their art in the folds of poetry as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, on other occasions affecting to be the interpreters of foreign rites and oracles, as Orpheus and Musæus; while a third class concealed the features of their art under the less suspected mask of gymnastics, such as Iccos of Tarentum, and that Herodicos of Silymbria a man of Megarean origin who in the art of sophistry was second to none of his age. Occasionally they made their entrance into cities as professors of music. In this capacity Damon conversed with Pericles, and Agathocles, an Athenian by birth, diffused through the state the seeds of sophistry; Pythocleides, too, the Coan, pursued the same course; and thus a youth, while ostensibly engaged in gaining a proficiency on the lyre or cithara, was initiated in the mysteries of tyranny, irreligion and injustice.^[813]

By degrees, however, it was discovered that all disguise might be very safely laid aside.^[814] In fact the object at first aimed at,—to escape the notice of men in power,—was found impracticable; and as to the people, against whom all these shafts were directed, it was easy to delude them, since what their leaders recommended they praised. Protagoras, accordingly, boldly professed himself a sophist, trusting for safety to his eloquence, and that growing laxity of manners which was rapidly undermining the old republican constitution and preparing the way for a new order of things. His candour was praiseworthy, but lamentable were the circumstances which rendered it safe.

I would not, however, be understood to share the opinions of those, who can discern nothing but evil in the doctrines of the sophists. On many points their notions harmonised altogether with those of the wisest philosophers. Accordingly it was not precisely what they inculcated, but the principles which regulated their teaching, that rendered them sophists. They taught with a view to enrich themselves, which is wholly incompatible with a strict allegiance to truth; since, with such views, men will always be found to prophesy agreeably in order that they may effect their purpose.

This circumstance has not been sufficiently considered by the writers who undertake their apology. They compare them with the literary men of modern times, and imagine this comparison a defence. But does it not rather substantiate the accusation? It is true that, like modern literary men, they haunted the houses of the great, whom they regarded as their patrons; that to them, rather than to the people, they looked for support; that, like them, they worshipped wealth and abhorred poverty; that their studies, their discourses, their writings, diffused far and wide through society a taste for arts and elegance; that they furnished the public in their declamations, satires, novels, of which they were the inventors, with inexhaustible sources of amusement:—but what virtue did they inculcate? On whom did they urge the necessity of sacrificing private to public good? On what occasion did they dare to stem the torrent of immorality, of impiety, of unpatriotic maxims, which the base and the selfish were pouring forth against the old bulwarks of freedom? That among them there were men of a very high order of genius, it is impossible to deny. Gorgias of Leontium, from whose name we have borrowed an epithet to express whatever is most glorious in nature or dazzling and elaborate in art, Protagoras, Prodicos, Hippias of Elis, Polos of Agrigentum, Thrasymachos of Chalcedon, have left behind them an imperishable memory;^[815] but so have Busiris and Phalaris and Catiline. They are remembered for the good they might have done, and the evil they did.

Since, however, the sophists acted so important a part in the education of the Greeks, the space I devote to them is clearly their due: it is necessary to the thorough comprehension of the subject. Almost from the moment they arose they aimed at a monopoly of the art of teaching, and the father of the art, properly so called, was Gorgias. Few names of antiquity, as Geel^[816] has well observed, are better known or more celebrated than that of this distinguished sophist, among the causes of whose amazing popularity must be reckoned the number of great men whom he instructed in eloquence, and the splendid vices of style which his example and precept brought into vogue. The exact date of his birth is not known:^[817] he is, however, supposed to have been born at Leontium in Sicily, about the seventy-third Olympiad. His father’s name was Charmantes.^[818] Nearly all the particulars of his early life are unknown, the ancients having been as much too negligent as we are too lavish of biographical details. Under whom he studied, with whom he conversed, how much he owed to others, and how much to his own genius and industry, are points not easy to be determined, though we cannot adopt the opinion of Ælian,^[819] who sends him to school to Philolaos; or of Diogenes Laertius, who will have Empedocles to have been his teacher, since the latter was very little older than himself, and the former much younger. Empedocles is indeed said to have invented the art of rhetoric, in which case we might suppose Gorgias to have been his scholar. But how invented? He may have been the first who sought to reduce it into an art, or who so called it; but as Aristotle observes, every man who reasons persuasively is a rhetorician, whether his eloquence be based on the formal study of the art or not. In philosophy, indeed, he would seem^[820] to have been the disciple of Empedocles; but in rhetoric they both very probably derived instruction from Corax and Tisias, who flourished and taught rhetoric in Sicily about the period of their youth.^[821]

These, however, are mere conjectures. He would probably have died in obscurity, and been forgotten with the kings who reigned ante Agamemnona, had not the misfortunes of his country brought him, in old age, to the great workshop of Fame. The immediate occasion was this; the people of Leontium having engaged and been worsted in war by the Syracusans, sent ambassadors to demand succour of the Athenian people, and among these the principal speaker was Gorgias. Practised in a style of oratory new at Athens, indulging in a profusion of metaphors and other figures bordering on the licences of poetry, he immediately hurried away captive his hearers, fulfilled the desires of his fellow citizens, and established for himself a reputation^[822] where all men most desired to possess one. To augment his glory it has not been unusual to enumerate Pericles and Thucydides among those who became his scholars. But this embassy took place in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian war when Pericles had been dead two years. That Thucydides heard him, however, is not at all improbable, since his exile did not take place^[823] till the eighth year of the war. Among his admirers are mentioned two other men, whose principles and history afford the best illustration of what fruit the teaching of the sophists was likely to produce,—Critias and Alcibiades, whose ability, courage, and profligacy rendered them the scourges of their country. It has been with great probability supposed that, having on his return to Leontium rendered an account of his mission, he quitted Sicily for ever, for the purpose of becoming a professor of eloquence in Greece. This is Diodorus’s account, but the Scholiast on Hermogenes supposes him to have remained at Athens. Whether this was the case or not, he soon considered one city, however great or celebrated, too confined a theatre for the display of his merit. He, therefore, adopted the profession of an itinerant lecturer, with the double view of gratifying his vanity and filling his purse. And he thoroughly understood the art of dazzling mankind, for, not supposing it enough to unfold before his auditors his magazines of tropes and figures, stored up, like theatrical thunder and lightning, to be introduced at the proper moment, he had recourse to other dramatic arts for producing effect, appearing in magnificent attire, flowing purple robes, embroidered sandals, his fingers sparkling with gold and gems. But though the oldest of the sophists, he was not the first who adopted this course. Protagoras, and perhaps others, had previously commenced their peregrinations, and begun to practise on the credulity and weakness of the multitude. Among the Athenians they were paid chiefly with praise; “the solid pudding” was to be sought elsewhere. And accordingly we find, as Plato sarcastically expresses it, that upon the advent of the sophists, the Thessalians, usually celebrated for their full purses and fine horses,^[824] grew all at once remarkable for their love of wisdom, that is, paid the sophists handsomely, in the hope of thus enticing knowledge to remain among them. In fact they supposed that wisdom is like a candle and lantern, by which you may have light,—or a saint’s shirt, by wearing which you infallibly become holy,—or the lamp of Epictetus, which a rich man bought at three thousand drachmas, in the hope that it would light him into the very adyta of philosophy. However this may be, it is very certain that the Thessalians became the patrons of the sophists, who disposed in that country of more wisdom and eloquence than in any other part of Greece, and the principal purchasers of it were of the rich family of the Aleuadæ, the earliest Mæcenases, I believe, on record.

But the sophists, to their credit be it acknowledged, were no misers. What they easily gained they spent freely; and not merely so, but in many instances converted the effects of their personal vanity into public ornaments of the whole country. Thus Gorgias, enriched by the spoils of Thessaly, erected at Delphi a golden statue^[825] of himself, which argued a more generous spirit than he would have shown by setting it afloat in the channels of trade or husbandry or usury, in the hope of rendering himself a great capitalist.

Gorgias was long absent from Athens, and visited during his travels the most considerable cities of Greece. Among other places he came to Delphi, where from the steps of the altar, probably during the games, he delivered that oration called the Pythian, in celebration of which he erected the above-mentioned statue.^[826] From thence perhaps,—for the chronology of his journey is not exactly known,—he proceeded to Olympia, where he also assisted at the games for the purpose of exhibiting his oratorical talents in the presence of all Greece, and reaping as it were in an hour a harvest of glory. This declamation, delivered during the Peloponnesian war, had at least the recommendation of being patriotic. Standing in front of the temple of Zeus, the god of concord and of peace, he earnestly recommended union and harmony.^[827] If war they must have, there were the barbarians,—let their arms be turned against them. With what success he spoke, history has informed us; but the satirists of antiquity, ever naturally addicted to scandal, are careful to remark that this great advocate of concord and unanimity kept up a civil war in his own house, where the charms of some beautiful-cheeked θεραπαινίδιον^[828] excited the jealousy of Madame. At the same time the old gentleman, to adopt the most moderate computation, must have been hard upon three-score and ten, though some would make him eighty.

Over the latter days of Gorgias^[829] hovers the same darkness which conceals from view the commencement. It is known with no degree of certainty where he spent the close of his long life or where he died, though as no account exists of his return to Sicily, it probably was in Greece.

Next to Gorgias in reputation was Protagoras, whose history is still less known. In the opinion of some writers he was the oldest of the sophists. Though the date of his birth be later than that of Gorgias, he preceded him in the profession of the art. He was certainly, I think, born much earlier than is supposed either by Clinton or by Geel, who take him to have been almost exactly of Socrates’ age, that is to have come into the world about 479 B. C. But in this opinion I cannot concur. It is in direct contradiction with a passage in Plato^[830] who, however careless in matters of chronology, would, I am persuaded, never push his negligence so far as to make one man say to another, born in the same year with himself, that he was old enough to be his father. To me, therefore it appears necessary that we throw back ten or twelve years the date of his birth. He was ten years, it is admitted, older than Democritos. The latter, who had made considerable progress in philosophy when he saw Protagoras in the capacity of a wood-carrier and undertook to initiate him in his system, could hardly have been less than seven or eight and twenty, so that the former was little short of forty. He exercised the profession of sophist during forty years, and died about 406 B. C. He must therefore have been born about 484–485 B. C.^[831]

But I cannot here pursue the history of the sophists, which no further belongs to my work than as it is connected with the subject of education. On their writings, however, and manner of teaching it is necessary that I should be more explicit. Whether Gorgias first published or Protagoras is of little moment; both evidently wrote with the same aim, which was to confound truth and error, right and wrong, not perhaps through any enmity to truth or to virtue, but from the sheer vanity of being thought capable of any thing, and the desire of converting their talents to account. One distinguishing quality of the class was fertility. They piqued themselves on being able to pour forth volume after volume, treatise after treatise, speech after speech. This, indeed, it was that constituted their principal claim to superiority over the philosophers, a pains-taking race, among whom the period of intellectual gestation was longer than that of the elephant; whereas your true sophist, without meditation, study or experience, astonished his admirers by the copiousness of his invention, by imagery, gorgeous and glittering, generally stolen from the poets, and by a piquant air of profoundness and originality, which the art of seeming to doubt all that other men believe never fails to confer.

Besides, comprehending enough of human nature to know that whoever amuses is listened to, whatever atrocities he may utter, they were careful to invest their doctrine with a light and graceful exterior. No man ever excelled them at a joke. They in fact managed matters so that in their hands every thing became a joke, and to overthrow an antagonist demanded nothing more than to be able to raise a laugh at his expense; for, all the world over, in the opinion of the vulgar, whoever is ridiculous is wrong. From calculation, they eschewed the uphill task of correcting error, or advancing truth, or reforming manners. To upbraid men for their faults and counsel amendment, is to incur their enmity. Reformers, prophets, apostles of truth have always been persecuted, often put to death. The sophists felt no ambition to be martyrs. Poverty, too, and obscurity, spare diet, a coarse mantle, and the solitude in which the poor great man walks the world, they could not away with. To their happiness crowds of admirers, opulence, costly robes^[832] and all the refinements of luxury formed a sine quâ non; and accordingly in the choice of their doctrines they were guided by one consideration only, viz. how they might amuse mankind, and reap all the advantages of popularity.

The eloquence which statesmen employed to recommend their measures, the sophists applied to fictitious uses, imagining themselves in impossible circumstances, reversing times, confounding manners, and attacking or defending men long since dead. In all such cases the interest would chiefly depend on the novelty or ingenuity of the thoughts and the subtle artifices of style. Hence the extravagance, the coldness, the perversion of imagery, the distortion and monkey tricks of language, for which their manner of compositions became remarkable. The false position they took up led, in philosophy, to results equally disastrous. To aim at truth, would have been to throw themselves into the wake of the philosophers, to share, without worldly compensation, their dangers, labours, and comparative insignificance. They struck out, therefore, a new course for themselves. Taking philosophy as it was, they undertook to dispute on all and every part of it; to show that for a skilful dialectician there was no proposition that might not with nearly equal facility be attacked or defended; that by means of syllogisms or enthymemes, artfully arranged, darkness may be proved to be light, and light darkness; that between lying and speaking the truth there is no difference; that in fact both veracity and falsehood are nonentities, all our notions being mere arbitrary fictions; and that to beat your dog and to beat your father is the same thing.

Of this novel and ingenious style of argumentation,^[833] in which Hudibras was an adept, we are furnished with abundant examples by Plato, more especially in the Euthydemus, where two old fellows, with arguments longer than their beards, luxuriate in the felicitous inventions by which, like another Circe, they are enabled to transform their hearers into hogs and bulldogs. In humorous extravagance the dialogue scarcely falls short of an Aristophanic comedy or a Christmas pantomime. Socrates^[834] plays the Clown, Ctesippos the Harlequin, and the blows dealt upon the magicians in the course of the piece, are such as, were they fully comprehended, would set all Drury Lane or Covent Garden in a roar. But the length of the scenes prevents their transplantation into my pages, and the abridgment of a joke is a very dull thing. Let us, however, hear by what logic they proved Socrates to have been a second “man without a navel.”

“Answer me,” cried Dionysidoros.

“Well then,” replied Socrates, “I answer that Iolaus was the nephew of Heracles, and, as far as I can see, no nephew of mine. For my brother Patrocles was not his father, but quite another guess sort of person, Iphicles the brother of Heracles.”

“And Patrocles was your brother?”

“By the mother, not by the father.”

“Then he was your brother, and not your brother?”

“By the father’s side he was not,” answered Socrates, “since he was the son of Charidemos, and I of Sophroniscos.”