of religious orthodoxy. Of course their conclusions drifted away from ordinary mythology. When the Attic public heard that Anaxagoras, the friend of Pericles, reduced Helios, the blessed Sun, to a mass of red-hot metal, and set up as the prime mover of matter a vague Intelligence, instead of the national Zeus, they were inexpressibly shocked. Yet Anaxagoras had never placed himself in declared opposition to orthodoxy. He probably thought out his system, and taught bis pupils without alluding to it.
8. The work of popularising the theories of the philosophers, and of working out the formal side of knowledge, was taken up by a class of men who, though claiming to be philosophers, were very different from the solitary thinkers just named—I mean the much-decried much-vindicated sophists. The leaders of these—Gorgias, Protagoras, and Prodicus—are represented, even by the bitter enemies of their class, as both able and respectable, undertaking the task of general higher education, and fulfilling through the Greek cities exactly the office of the universities in England. They taught general culture, and, above all, the art of expressing oneself fluently on the topics of the day, as well as the stricter art of disputation, or of maintaining one's ground against an adversary. They of course professed to know all the deeper philosophy of their age, and were ready to talk hard metaphysics with those who challenged them; but their main occupation was with the formal side of knowledge, with our faculty of knowing rather than with the things known by it. Hence they studied accuracy of expression and subtlety of reasoning. They sowed the seeds of that chaste and strict prose style which has modelled all the literature of Europe. They studied rhetoric, and with it the practical sides of politics and of ethics which came into ordinary life. Of course the really eminent sophists excited a herd of imitators, who did not maintain the reserve and respect towards traditional beliefs which characterised Gorgias and Prodicus. These inferior men led the way
