370 HISTORY OF GREECE. for the duties of an active citizen. 1 Nor must we forget that Sokrates himself discouraged physical speculations even more decidedly than either of them. If the censures cast upon the alleged skepticism of Gorgiaa and Protagoras are partly without sufficient warrant, partly without any warrant at all, much more may the same remark be made respecting the graver reproaches heaped upon their teach- ing on the score of immorality or corruption. It has been com- mon with recent German historians of philosophy to translate from Plato and dress up a fiend called "Die Sophistik," (Sophistic,) whom they assert to have poisoned and demoralized, by corrupt teaching, the Athenian moral character, so that it became degenerate at the end of the Peloponnesian war, com- pared with what it had been in the time of Miltiades and Aristeides. Now, in the first place, if the abstraction " Die Sophistik" is to have any definite meaning, we ought to have proof that the per- sons styled sophists had some doctrines, principles, or method, both common to them all and distinguishing them from others. But such a supposition is untrue : there were no such common doctrines, or principles, or method, belonging to them ; even the name by which they are known did not belong to them, any more than to Sokrates and others ; they had nothing in common except their profession, as paid teachers, qualifying young men " to think, speak, and act," these are the words of Isokrates, and better words it would not be easy to find, with credit to themselves as citizens. Moreover, such community of profession did not at that time imply near so much analogy of character as it does now, when the path of teaching has been beaten into a broad and visi- ble high road, with measured distances and stated intervals : Pro- tagoras and Gorgias found predecessors, indeed, but no binding precedents to copy ; so that each struck out more or less a road of his own. And accordingly, we find Plato, in his dialogue called " Protagoras," wherein Protagoras, Prodikus, and Hippias, are all introduced, imparting a distinct type of character and dis- tinct method to each, not without a strong admixture of reciprocal jealousy between them ; while Thrasymachus, in the Republic, 1 Isokrates De Pcrmutatione, Or. xv, s. 287; Xcnoph. Memorab. i, 1, 14.
