were turned to the purposes of the orator. Gorgias was interested in style for style's sake; his foreign accent and distinguished air delighted the Athenians; and throughout his career he sought to persuade by pleasing. The extravagances and artificialities of his style have often been pointed to as the source of the euphuism of the seventeenth century, and of the stylistic eccentricities of other periods of decadence.

It cannot be said, however, that the oratory of Gorgias was devoid of ideas. In common with other itinerant teachers, he preached PanHellenism in all the cities of Greece. In his Olympian oration he urged the Greeks to cease their internal rivalries, and to turn their spears against the barbarians. In the Athenian funeral oration he warned his hearers that victories over their fellow Greeks called for dirges of lament. As a teacher of oratory, Gorgias was condemned by Aristotle for placing too much emphasis upon memorization and declamation.1 Little is known concerning his pedagogical method, but there is no reason to suppose that it differed markedly from the custom of having the pupils declaim speeches written by themselves and by the master, drill in topics of amplification and depreciation, and practise upon commonplaces and disputations. Although an epideictic speaker would be constantly praising virtue and censuring vice, and in so doing could hardly avoid entertaining certain ethical theories, Gorgias never announced himself as a teacher of virtue. He agreed with Isocrates that one who tried to become persuasive in discoursing about justice and virtue and expediency would probably become as virtuous as mere knowledge could make him.

As a philosopher, Gorgias engaged in controversy with the Eleatic school. All we know of his book On Nature or Not-Being, is its threefold thesis that "Being does not exist, if it did exist it would not be cognizable, and if it were cognizable, the cognition would not be communicable."2 We cannot here enter upon metaphysical questions; but the conventional construction put upon this thesis is that it goes beyond Protagoras, and is the ultimate of sophistical scepticism, that it is a nihilism which makes all knowledge impossible, that it makes immediate plausibility the sole standard of the critical judgment, and that rhetoric was the chief of all subjects for Gorgias because the one certainty of life was that the man who could persuade *Aristotle, Sophistici Elenchi, tr. Edward Poste, London, 1866, ch. 34. As translated in Gomperz, op. cit., I, 482.

2

others to do his will was, temporarily at least, the possessor of great power. This interpretation is not justified either by an examination. of the philosophical disputes of the time, or by a study of the life of Gorgias himself. The Eleatic school, following Parmenides and Melissus, was quite willing to doubt all evidence of the senses, and yet to trust implicitly in a priori reasoning about Absolute Being. The protest of Gorgias against this was quite in harmony with the growing modesty of the scientific endeavor of the times, which was beginning to see the necessity of increasing knowledge bit by bit, and to question the claim of the philosophers to a higher knowledge. Had Gorgias, in denying the tenets of the Eleatics, meant that he believed scientific truth to be unattainable, it is not likely that he would have written upon physics, nor that a statue would have appeared upon the tomb of Isocrates representing Gorgias as directing the attention of his pupil to a globe. The attack of Gorgias upon the contradictions of his predecessors in philosophy does not show that he abandoned all search for truth. Socrates attacked his philosophical predecessors in a similar manner, he abandoned all inquiry in natural science, and he had as little confidence in the attributes of being as Gorgias; yet he is not accused of denying the validity of established scientific truth, or of abandoning all belief in the possibility of knowledge. The account of Gorgias offered by many historians of philosophy is a reductio ad absurdum rather than an interpretation.

Although we think of Gorgias chiefly as an orator and a teacher of oratory, and as a creator of a style which is now looked upon unfavorably, he was too active a participant in the philosophical controversies of his time for us to dismiss him as intellectually insignificant. Since we have lost his philosophical works, we cannot prove that he made a constructive contribution to the thought of his time, but his attack upon an absolutistic philosophy was something, and the evidence certainly does not warrant the supposition that he was guilty of meaningless absurdities, or that his teaching was necessarily immoral in its implications.

Numerous other rhetoricians might be mentioned-Polus and Thrasymachus especially-but our information concerning them is scanty, and the four we have dealt with are the most significant when we consider their prominence as rhetoricians, their contribution to the thought of the time, and the attention they received from Plato.

III

One is inevitably led to ask why such men as these have suffered so greatly in the estimation of posterity. Why has Plato's opinion been accepted uncritically and its perversions further distorted by later commentators? In addition to what has already been suggested -that we need the terminology of the attack upon the Athenian sophists to describe an ever present sophistry-there is the fact that Athenian hostility to the sophists has often been taken as a confirmation of Plato's account. This is to forget that Athenian public opinion distrusted the sophists for reasons similar to those which led it to execute Socrates, and that the disagreement between Plato and the Athenian public was profound. The activities which gave these teachers their influence with the Athenians were just the ones which led Plato to condemn them; while many aspects of their thought which led to popular disfavor were the ones which Plato would have regarded with approval. We may learn much about the sophists by contrasting the typical Athenian criticism of them with that of Plato.

In accounting for the disfavor with which the Athenians looked upon the sophists it must not be forgotten that a complementary picture of their power and influence could quite as easily be drawn, and that both are necessary to a true estimate of their position in Athenian life. The sophists exerted a much greater influence upon their times than Plato, and the element of jealousy should not be entirely overlooked in considering his attitude toward them.1 But the conservative

'G. H. Lewes has shown why the relationship between the solitary thinker and the public speaker tends to remain constant. "The Sophists were wealthy; the Sophists were powerful; the Sophists were dazzling, rhetorical, and not profound. Interrogate human nature-above all, the nature of philosophersand ask what will be the sentiment entertained respecting the Sophists by their rivals. Ask the solitary thinker what is his opinion of the showy, powerful, but shallow rhetorician who usurps the attention of the world. The man of convictions has at all times a superb contempt for the man of mere oratorical or dialectical display. The thinker knows that the world is ruled by Thought; yet he finds Expression gaining the world's attention. He knows that he has within him thoughts pregnant with human welfare; yet he sees the giddy multitude intoxicated with the enthusiasm excited by some plausible fallacy, clothed in enchanting language. He sees through the fallacy, but cannot make others as clear-sighted. His warning is unheeded; his wisdom is spurned; his ambition is frustrated; the popular Idol is carried onward in triumph. The neglected thinker would not be human if he bore this with equanimity. He does not. He is loud and angry in lamenting the fate of a world that can be so led; loud and angry in his contempt of

elements of the city, of whom Aristophanes was a prominent representative, charged the sophists with corrupting the youth. Plato dissented from this charge in the case of Socrates, and defended the sophists generally from it, asserting that the real corrupter of youth in Athens was public opinion, which the sophists only reflected.1 John Stuart Mill, who had reasons for analyzing the motives of those who are overzealous in protecting the young, has stated the case most clearly:

When the charge of corrupting youth comes to be particularized, it always resolves itself into making them think themselves wiser than the laws, and fail in proper respect to their fathers and seniors. And this is a true charge; only it ought to fall, not on the Sophists, but on intellectual culture generally. Whatever encourages young men to think for themselves, does lead them to criticize the laws of their country-does shake their faith in the infallibility of their fathers and elders, and make them think their own speculations preferable. It is beyond doubt that the teaching of Socrates, and of Plato after him, produced these effects in an extraordinary degree. Accordingly, we learn from Xenophon that the youths of rich families who frequented Socrates, did so, for the most part, against the severe disapprobation of their relatives. In every age and state of society, fathers and elder citizens have been suspicious and jealous of all freedom of thought and all intellectual cultivation (not strictly professional) in their sons and juniors, unless they can get it controlled by some civil or ecclesiastical authority in which they have confidence. But it had not occurred to Athenian legislators to have an established Sophistical Church, or State Universities. The teaching of the Sophists was all on the voluntary principle; and the dislike of it was of the same nature with the outcry against "godless colleges," or the objection of most of our higher and middle classes to any schools but denominational ones. They disapproved of any teaching unless they could be certain that all their own opinions would be taught. It mattered not that the instructors taught no heresy; the mere fact that they accustomed the mind to ask questions, and require other reasons than use and wont, sufficed at Athens, as it does in other places, to make the teaching dangerous in the eyes of selfsatisfied respectability. Accordingly, respectability, as Plato himself tells us, looked with at least as evil an eye on Philosophers as on Sophists.'

This explanation of Mill's is more applicable to the ethical and philosophical, than to the rhetorical, aspects of the sophists' teaching. To be sure, the rhetoricians professed to be able to speak upon either

one who could so lead it. Should he become a critic or historian of his age, what exactness ought we to expect in his account of the popular idol?" Op. cit., p. 88.

2

Republic, VI, 492.

Op. cit., IV, 262.

side of any case, and to impart this ability to their pupils; this was the cause of a certain distrust analogous to that with which lawyers are sometimes viewed today. But when lawyers turn public orators, they are the most vigorous and platitudinous upholders of the status quo. So the sophists, as public orators, illustrated and reënforced the received dogmas of Athenian society. Their speeches were acceptable to the most conservative. Even their teaching of the art of speaking upon either side of any case did not rest so much upon a willingness to attack prevalent morality and customs as it did upon the cultivation of an ability to make either side of the case appear to be consistent with common standards of right and justice. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion must always appeal to the people upon the basis of whatever beliefs they may happen to have. It is not likely, then, that it was the rhetoric of the sophists which led to the charge that they broke down religion and corrupted youth. It was rather that they concerned themselves enough with philosophy to incur something of the distrust with which speculative thought has always been viewed. In all the disputes between the earlier schools of philosophy there was one point upon which they were agreed; namely, that the popular beliefs and explanations of phenomena were entirely wrong. For them, as for modern philosophers, the incarnation of ignorance was "the man in the street." Their arrogance and their contempt for the public naturally roused resentment. Their lofty pretensions were contrasted with their apparent practical helplessness, and the story of Thales falling into a well while gazing at the stars is typical of the popular attitude toward philosophers. The popular distrust of the sophists was not so much that, as rhetoricians, they were different from Socrates and Plato, but that, as philosophers, they were so much like them.

There was a certain aspect of the rhetorical teaching which caused a portion of the public to dislike the popular teachers. After the downfall of the Thirty in Athens, it was evident that democracy was the order of the day. Members of the aristocracy could retain their power in the state only by developing their ability to persuade an audience. Teachers of rhetoric, in such a situation, were indispensable. But the fees charged by the sophists placed their instruction beyond the reach of many, who naturally resented what seemed an unfair advantage possessed by those more adequately trained for public life.