Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/187

f . The Sophists. 177 suggests to him a great number of very fine moral maxims. This speech I say I ' exhibited' at Sparta, and I mean to exhibit it here the day after to-morrow." Philostratus in his life of Hippias patches up a brief title for the speech out of this passage of Plato, and this I believe is all that remains to us of Prodicus' *-&. Having examined in detail the opinions, general and particu- lar, which we find ascribed to these four, by far the most im- portant and influential of their class, I will only touch very slightly on the remainder. Polus is admitted by Mr Grote, p. 527, to exhibit " insolence" (in the Gorgias), but it is asserted that he maintained no immoral doctrine. I may observe here once for all that Mr Grote seems sometimes to argue as if nothing short of a republication of the second table of the Deca- logue with the negatives omitted can sustain a charge of immoral teaching. Neither Polus nor any of the Sophists were, as far as we know, immoral teachers in this sense. They low- ered the tone of morality in a less direct way by encouraging a sceptical habit of mind in those who frequented their society, they taught them to call in question the religious faith and principles which had regulated the conduct of their fathers, those universal laws and natural convictions, the aypafya vofiLfia, vague and indefinite enough no doubt, to which men had been accustomed tacitly to appeal. They educated young men for public life, and sent them out into the world qualified to speak and to act, dexterous in the use of their tongues and mental faculties, deivoi in every sense of the word, not only clever but formidable, or rather all the more formidable on account of their cleverness, men of whom Pheidippides in the Nubes is an overcharged portrait ; but promoted no scientific study and no serious purpose ; inculcated no sound principles of morality and no distinctions between right and wrong. The sum of Greek and of heathen virtue in general was to be vofiifios and dUaios (similarly Horace, Vir bonus est quis? Qui consulta patrum qui leges juraque servat). The Sophists pronounced that justice and the laws are conventions, that the aim and end of the Rhetoric which they professed and taught was to make the unrighteous cause triumph over the just. Surely this was bad and immoral teaching, even though it enabled a man to make a successful defence in a court of justice or a brilliant harangue Vol. I. June, 1854. 12