The fees of the sophists seem to have been a cause of universal reproach, but the feeling was too complex to be explained simply. There was, of course, the aristocratic bias of Athenian life. Physicians were the only wage-earners who suffered no loss of social standing. Sculptors were artisans rather than artists because their work was a method of gaining a livelihood. Plato, the man of wealth and family, was for once in agreement with the popular prejudice, and he attacked the sophists both for the insignificance of their petty fees, and for the large fortunes that they made.1 The acceptance of fees marked a certain institutionalizing and mechanizing of higher education, which was disliked. The philosopher whose chief occupation was the pursuit of truth might impart his wisdom to such persons and at such times as suited him, without seriously interrupting his own thinking. He probably found a certain number of disciples a stimulus. But the introduction of fees and the acceptance of responsibility for practical training in public speaking made the teacher seem to be a servant of the pupil. He became a professional educator, and as such insisted disagreeably upon the importance of education. As philosophers, the sophists could probably have retained the measure of freedom and leisure that Plato demanded, even while accepting pay for their work. But as teachers of rhetoric they tended to become submerged in the routine of schoolmastering. As philosophers, the sophists incurred a different sort of penalty for their fee-taking. Then, as now, certain activities of what may perhaps be termed men's higher natures were especially removed from thoughts of gain. We do not like to think that popular preachers are making money; we deplore the commercialized theatre, and the novel written only to sell. These activities, we believe, should be ends in themselves. It is not difficult to understand why the spectacle of foreign teachers coming to Athens to teach virtue for a price should have roused a resentment somewhat distinct from that of those who disliked the teaching of rhetoric. IV Turning to Plato, we have already noted that he shared the general dislike of fee-taking; but we should consider also those aspects of his thought which led him to dislike any persons who accepted 'Apology, 20; Cratylus, 384 and 391. Athenian life and institutions and participated actively in public affairs. Mill has pointed out: Plato, if he returned to life, would be to the full as contemptuous of our statesmen, lawyers, clergy, authors, and all others who lay claim to mental superiority as he ever was of the corresponding classes at Athens.1 This would be true because Plato would find that our life bears a much closer resemblance to the Athens he knew, than to his Republic. We may cite the Republic and the Laws as sufficient evidence of Plato's discontent with the sorry scheme of things entire. He was not a reformer who could be contented with a gradual evolution in the direction of his ideals; nor did it disturb him that his Republic was not an earthly city; he was satisfied to believe that its pattern was laid up in the heavens. Scholars are becoming increasingly conscious, however, that his gaze was not exclusively heavenward as he wrote the Republic. He knew what he disliked in Athens, and his utopia owes at least as much to his dislikes as to his desires. Had the sophists and rhetoricians been the only objects of his scorn he might not have been driven to writing the Republic. But the politics, poetry, art, education, and religion of Athens were all wrongso wrong that it was easier to paint a utopia than seriously to attempt the reformation of Athens. We may say in the beginning, then, that Plato's condemnation of rhetoric and rhetoricians is merely a small part of his condemnation of all contemporary civilization. We may note in passing, that rhetoric has its uses even for those who attack it; and that Plato's contrast between the rhetorician's world of appearance and the philosopher's world of reality was drawn with consummate rhetorical skill. The supreme remedy for the ills of civilization, Plato believed, lay in the government of philosopher-kings. But until philosophers were kings, and could govern autocratically by their wisdom, without the necessity for persuading the multitude, they were to remain aloof from public affairs. The lords of philosophy have never, from their youth upwards, known their way to the Agora, or the dicastery, or the council, or any other political assembly; they neither see nor hear the laws or votes of the State written or spoken; the eagerness of political societies in the attainment of offices, 1Op. cit., IV, 245. clubs, banquets, and revels, and singing maidens, do not even enter into their dreams.1 In Plato's ideal realm, there was no place for rhetoric as a political agency. Large questions of policy were to be settled by the philosophers. Administration of routine affairs was to be in the hands of experts. There would be no litigation, for there would be no laws. Laws were as absurd and useless for philosopher-kings as decrees of the public assembly would be for pilots and physicians, whose actions were governed by their own arts. Later in life Plato despaired of finding philosophers, even in utopia, who could be trusted to govern without laws, or of inducing people to have confidence in them, even if they could be found, and his Laws is a concession to that feeling. But even in his later utopia there was no freedom of utterance, without which, of course, the development of rhetoric would be an impossibility. With the dogmatism of age upon him, he laid down laws which were to be permanent. The games of children, the restrictions upon foreign travel,3 the denial of freedom of speech, and the enforcement of ethical and theological dogmas, were all designed to protect the city against changes of any sort. The use of rhetoric in administering and interpreting the laws was also carefully guarded against." Although rhetoric had no place in the courts or political assemblies of Plato's ideal realms, its scope in another field was to be greatly increased. All the literature and art of the Greeks was to be examined with a single eye to its effect upon the morals of the citizens. Truth and beauty were subordinated to goodness-to goodness as Plato conceived it. Whenever the attempt is made to govern the ideals of a people by censoring art in the interests of a dogmatic morality, all art tends to become rhetorical. To say that rhetoric was banished from the Republic, then, is not quite true. It was driven out the door only to fly in at the window. The unsympathetic interpreter of Plato would say that literature became part of the educator's rhetoric, with Plato as chief educator and chief rhetorician; a better Platonist, however, would hold that literature and education became philosophy, with Plato as chief philosopher. One source of rhetoric and rhetoricians in any democracy is the continual and restless striving of the people to better their individual conditions. They perpetually seek to become what they are not, and in doing this they strive to bend the wills of others to their own ends. This state of affairs Plato avoided, in his Republic, by having a fixed and settled order of society, an order of experts, in which every man did his own work, and no man attempted the work of another. In this way ambitious, self-seeking demagoguery was to be eliminated. There is no indication in the Republic, that even under philosopher-kings, with a scheme of education devised by Plato himself, and with art and literature revised in the interest of morals, the mass of the people were expected to rise to greater heights than a certain efficiency in minding their own routines. It is not particularly strange, then, that Plato had a great contempt for the people of Athens, who lived under a government so little influenced by Platonism. Plato adhered to the philosophic tradition in regarding public opinion as always wrong both because it was public and because it was merely opinion. Plato despised mere opinion almost as much as he did the public. He was never tired of contrasting the knowledge of the philosopher, who had attained real knowledge by dialectical investigation, and by contemplation of Ideas, with that shadow knowledge called opinion.1 Sometimes, of course, opinion would turn out to be right. And right opinion had a certain value as a guide to action in practical affairs; but even right opinion fell far short of philosophic knowledge. /Plato never believed that probability was the guide of life. Education, for him, was a process of keeping the mass of people at their tasks with as few opinions as might be, and of enabling the few whose intelligence would permit, to attain philosophic knowledge. Those who knew, were to abandon the pleasures of knowing, at stated intervals, and govern those who did not know. Thus opinion was largely to be eliminated from the State./ The education given by the sophists and rhetoricians, on the other hand, was for the purpose of enabling a man to get on in a world of conjecture. Isocrates (whom we have not discussed, because, though he receives passing mention, he is hardly a figure in the Platonic pictures of contemporary rhetoricians) stated as his philosophy of education: 1 See especially Republic, VI, 509 ff. ? It is impossible to attain absolute knowledge of what we ought or ought not to do; but the wise man is he who can make a successful guess as a general rule, and philosophers are those who study to attain this practical wisdom.1 Akin to this is the educational aim of Protagoras-given us by Plato, but probably quite acceptable to Protagoras : If a young man comes to me he will learn prudence in affairs private as well as public, he will learn to order his own house in the best manner, and he will be best able to speak and act in affairs of state." The education given by the sophists varied with individual teach✓ers, but in general it aimed to enable the pupils to become leaders of men in a democracy. It was practical in the sense in which all training for public affairs is practical; and it sought to enable the individual to use existing institutions rather than to overthrow them. The perversions of such education-half-knowledge, propaganda, demagoguery, philistinism, worship of the appearance of success— are probably even more prevalent now than then. Whether they are worse than the perversions of Platonism is too large a question to be argued here. But whether for good or ill, the conception of the aims and purposes of the American liberal college as set forth by the most distinguished modern educators, is much closer to Isocrates and Protagoras than to Plato. It is evident, from Plato's literary activities as an idealistic reformer and creator of utopias, from his conception of the philosopher as the true governor of mankind, and from his social, political, and educational philosophy, that he would have differed profoundly from the sophists and rhetoricians, even had all of them possessed the highest character and wisdom. V It will be convenient to discuss Plato's treatment of rhetoric and rhetoricians under four heads: the pictures he has given us of the individual rhetoricians, his general indictment of rhetoric in Athens, his suggestions for the creation of a nobler and better rhetoric, and his later attack upon the eristical rhetoricians who imitated the argumentative methods of Socrates. 1 The Platonic pictures of the sophists are scattered throughout p. 142 rotagoras, 318. |