r The Sophists. 183 speaking in bitter irony.] It continued so to be employed in later writers, but of course more and more rarely as the offensive con- notation gained ground. Add to Mr Grote's list of instances of its favourable sense, Plat. Min. 319, 6 Zcvs o-o^tcmjs tor* ml rj T*xvy avrov irayKakri, and so Minos went to school with him Traidevdrjo-opevou cos viro ao<ptcrTov ovtos tov Atos. The instance m Xen. Memor. iv. 2. 1. ttoitjtcov re km o-o</>io-t<Sj/, " poets and prose writers," (if we accept Mr Grote's translation of the word) is very singular : and all the more so because poets are usually consi- dered the men of skill or artists when they are contrasted with prose writers : whence we have Ijtufais, used in contradistinction to iroiTjTrjs, (for example, Plat. Symp. 178. B. ovre 18u6tov ovtc iroirjTov) in this sense, as it is in like manner opposed to the pro- fessors of other crafts. Possibly Xenophon, who wrote prose himself, was of opinion that good prose was a work of art of a higher order than verse : but the decision of this question must be left to those who have tried and succeeded in both. As far as I know, Aristophanes in the Nubes is the first extant author who employs the term to convey a reproach : and he applies it to the new teachers who were, as he thought, corrupting the youth of Athens. Probably he did not himself fix it upon them, but adopted it from the current language, as sufficiently expressive of the contempt and aversion which he felt for them. This name they ever afterwards retained : and Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodi- cus, Hippias, and the rest, continued to be called ol 2o<purrai, the Sophists par excellence ; and the term seems to have been so far confined to them in popular language, that the mention of 2o0rrat nakedly, without specification of individuals, would have always suggested these particular persons most prominently, if not exclusively, to the hearer's mind : or, when others were desig- nated by the name in an offensive sense, they were compared directly or tacitly to these original and arch Sophists. I should infer also that it was their own personal vanity and ostentation, and the ill effects which resulted from their teaching, and not Plato's satire 20 , that first attached to the word that offensive meaning which it afterwards bore. That it was not Plato at all events that " stole the word out of general circulation to fasten it in a new and special sense upon a particular class whom he disliked," pp. 479, 483, 4, is shown by the application of the 20 Indeed how could it be ? for the Nubes was written when Plato was six years old.
