humanists devoted a larger portion of their energies to definitely rhetorical instruction.

Prodicus of Ceos has been called the earliest of the pessimists.1 He was frail of body, but with a powerful voice he moved his audiences by descriptions of the different ages of man from birth to second childhood and death. He would depict death as "a stonyhearted creditor, wringing pledges one by one from his tardy debtor, first his hearing, then his sight, and next the free movement of his limbs." His pessimism had none of the usual consequencespassive resignation, retreat from the world, or a great desire to seek pleasures while they might be found. To face death courageously was a virtue, and he taught his disciples that while we are, death is not; when death is, we are not. Life, while it lasted, was to be lived vigorously. His most famous lecture, The Choice of Hercules, has been preserved by Xenophon,3 who tells us that Socrates quoted it with approval; through many centuries it has had a great effect in exalting the ideals of labor, hardihood, and simplicity. It was not in popular religion that Prodicus found his sustaining faith, for his speculations upon the origin of religion have the point of view of the modern critical historian. He accounted for the divinities of the various nations by pointing out that they deified the objects most useful to them-sun, moon, rivers, fruits of the field, and heroic men.

The more technical instruction of Prodicus was devoted to a study of language. He sought to collect and compare words of similar meaning. He desired to reduce the ambiguities in the arguments of the Greeks, and to aid in the development of literary style. He attempted to clarify ideas by insisting upon accuracy in the use of words, believing, with Hobbes, that "the light of human minds is perspicuous words."

The lectures of Prodicus were well known in all the cities of Greece, and commanded large sums in all places except Sparta, where foreign teachers were discouraged by a law against the payment of

'For Prodicus, see the following: Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, tr. W. C. Wright, New York, 1922, pp. 37-9; F. Welcker, "Prodikos von Keos, Vorgänger des Sokrates," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, III (1833), 1-39; Gomperz, op. cit., I, 425-30; Benn, op. cit., I, 77-81; Bromley Smith, "Prodicus of Ceos," Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, VI, ii (1920), 51.

Pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, 360, D. Cited by Gomperz, op. cit., I, 428. 'Xenophon's Memorabilia, tr. E. C. Marchant, New York, 1923, II,

ch. I.

fees. Nevertheless he was welcomed there. He served his native island frequently as ambassador, and in the discharge of his civic duties displayed the qualities which in his lectures he urged upon youth.

Prodicus, then, was the rhetor rather than the teacher of rhetoric; and his chief contributions to the thought of his time were made as philosopher and grammarian.

Hippias of Elis, whom Plato especially disliked, is chiefly remembered for his versatility. As an orator he was known throughout Greece. He recited certain well-known compositions of his in which figures of the Iliad are compared upon the basis of their virtues, or old men give advice to aspiring youths. He was rewarded by being made a freeman of many cities, and it is especially significant that his lectures on history and ethics were also acceptable to the conservative Spartans. He never gave himself to the routine of perfecting his students in rhetoric, but was occupied with innumerable pursuits. He was a mathematician of considerable note; he wrote on theories of sculpture and painting, on phonetics, rhythm, and music; he developed a system that enabled him to perform surprising feats of memory in his old age; he was an ambassador for his native city, Elis; he attempted most of the prevailing forms of literature; and he prided himself upon his facility in mastering all the arts and crafts.

The antithesis between nature and convention seems to have originated with Hippias. He observed the variety and changeability of the laws of the Greek democracies, and felt that only laws possessing the universality and permanence of the laws of nature should be really sacred and binding. To give validity to the laws of men, the laws of all states should be compared, and the universal elements in them selected as the "natural" laws for the governing of nations. In believing that all men were by nature equal, Hippias was perhaps the originator of the doctrine of natural rights. When the distinction between nature and convention has been clearly made, one may, of course, espouse either. Hippias was one of the first preachers of a return to nature. This suggests a reason for his efforts to achieve so wide a versatility. The return to nature is only possible when each person is relatively self-sufficient, and self-sufficiency was a favorite doctrine with Hippias. He doubtless believed, as have men of other

'For Hippias, see Philostratus, op. cit., p. 35; Gomperz, op. cit., I, 431-4: Benn, op. cit., I, 81-5.

ages, that the development of personality gained by the consciousness of being equal to any situation more than offsets the dissipation of energy and efficiency incurred by the performance of all sorts of tasks; but one motive was clearly that of independence, and the development of the sort of ingenuity that enables a Robinson Crusoe to exist. Such a man would live by his work as well as by his wits. Rhetoric would not be the chief means of obtaining what he desired, and it is not surprising that rhetoric should be relatively less important to those who would be governed by nature than to those who saw in convention the power that offers the best government.

Hippias was more than a popular orator preaching to the cities of Greece. In his thought we have the beginnings of the cosmopolitanism of the later Cynics, the self-sufficiency of the Stoics, the belief in natural rights, and the ideal of versatility as a means of developing the whole man.

Protagoras of Abdera accepted the distinction of Hippias between nature and convention; but he had no sympathy for the return to nature.1 In the variety and changeability of the laws of men lay the great hope of progress. He therefore turned away from the natural sciences and devoted himself to the "humanities." He, too, was a man of great versatility; he invented a porter's pad; as a friend of Pericles, he was given the task of framing the laws for the colony at Thurium. As a teacher, his instruction was chiefly intended to offer a training for public life. He included within his curriculum oratory and its auxiliary arts, educational theory, jurisprudence, politics, and ethics. In his teaching of public speaking he insisted upon the value of practical exercises. He declared that there were two sides to every proposition, and that a speaker should be able to set forth the arguments on either side. His practice of having his students argue upon both sides of certain general themes may have been responsible for the charge against him, recorded by Aristotle, that he made the worse appear the better reason. But as this was a standing reproach against philosophers as well as rhetoricians, and as we have no evidence which impeaches his moral character, we may believe

'For Protagoras, see the following: Philostratus, op. cit., pp. 33-5; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, tr. C. D. Yonge, London, 1853, bk. ix, ch. 8; Hegel, op. cit., I, 372-8; Gomperz, op. cit., I, 438-75; Benn, op. cit., I, 85-95; E. Barker, Greek Political Theory, London, 1918, pp. 60-4; Bromley Smith, "Protagoras of Abdera," Quarterly Journal of Speech Educa tion, IV (1918), 196.

that this charge applied no more to his teaching than to all instruction in the art of reasoning.

In addition to the training in debate, Protagoras practised his pupils in the development of what were called commonplaces. Speeches were made which praised or blamed certain human qualities, such as patriotism, friendship, courage, cupidity. These speeches had no reference to a concrete situation, but they equipped the pupils with a stock of thoughts and phrases for use when a real occasion demanded ready utterance. The debates developed keenness and dexterity; the commonplaces gave the speakers a certain copiousness and elegance.

Grammar was also given attention, and Protagoras is recognized as the first to introduce the subject into his curriculum. It has been remarked that the level attained by Greek literature before Protagoras wrote his book On Correct Speech seems to indicate that a mastery of language may be acquired quite independently of conscious rules. But the desire of Protagoras to introduce order and consistency in the tenses of the verb, moods of predication, and genders of substantives, was in harmony with the intellectual tendencies of the times, and shows him to have been by no means totally absorbed in the practical business of advising youth how to get on in the world.

The ethical theory of Protagoras was set forth in the lost work, On the Incorrect Actions of Mankind. In his seventieth year he read publicly, at the house of Euripides, his work, On the Gods. Only the first sentence has been preserved.

In respect to the gods, I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, above all the obscurity of the matter, and the life of man, in that it is so short.1

Whether Protagoras meant to assail the belief in the gods, or whether he meant merely to point out that in the nature of the case we could not have knowledge of them, we do not know. At any rate, his scepticism so alarmed certain of his contemporaries that his book was publicly burned, and he was exiled.

The philosophical doctrine for which Protagoras is chiefly known, and for which he was vigorously assailed by Plato, is summarized in the dictum that man is the measure of all things. Since we have only

Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51.

the first sentence of the work in which this doctrine was developed, it is not strange that scholars are far apart in their interpretation of the meaning of Protagoras; but they are generally agreed that the Platonic interpretation of it in the Theatetus is quite unfair. Few interpreters now consider it to involve the degree of relativity and subjectivism with which Protagoras and the sophists generally have been burdened. Gomperz points out that a man who preached that anything was true which any one believed to be so, would not be the man to suffer for a denial of the possibility of knowledge of the gods. Professor F. C. S. Schiller, in his Studies in Humanism, devotes two dialogues to Protagoras; one explaining his humanism, and the other defending his scepticism. In his introduction to the volume Professor Schiller says:

Our only hope of understanding knowledge, our only chance of keeping philosophy alive by nourishing it with the realities of life, lies in going back from Plato to Protagoras, and ceasing to misunderstand the great teacher who discovered the measure of man's universe.1

But this is not the place to discuss the philosophical aspects of the teachings of Protagoras; it is only desired to make it clear that there are grounds for regarding him as did Hegel.

[He was] not merely a teacher of culture, but likewise a deep and solid thinker, a philosopher who reflected on fundamental questions of an altogether universal kind."

Gorgias of Leontini,3 who first appeared in Athens as the head of an embassy petitioning for aid against the aggressions of Syracuse upon Sicilian cities, is known as the founder of the art of prose. Chiefly interested in oratory of the epideictic type, he employed what is termed the "grand" style. The resources of the poets, whose works were so successful in holding the attention of Greek audiences,

1 Schiller, Studies in Humanism, London, 1907, p. xiv. Hegel, op. cit., I, 373.

2

3

For Gorgias, see the following: Philostratus, op. cit., pp. 29-33; Diodorus Siculus, bk. xii, ch. 7; The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, tr. George Booth, London, 1814, I, 465-6; F. Blass, Attische Beredsamkeit, Leipzig, 1864, I, ch. 2; Navarre, op. cit., ch. 3; W. H. Thompson's introduction to his edition of Plato's Gorgias, London, 1871; Hegel, op. cit., I, 378-84; Gomperz, op. cit., I, 476-94; Benn, op. cit., I, 95-100; Bromley Smith, "Gorgias: A Study of Oratorical Style," Quarterly Journal of Speech Education, VII (1921), 335.