Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/384

362 HISTORY OF GREECE Platonic dialogue termed Protagoras, that sophist is irlroduced as describing the manner in which he proceeded respecting remuneration from his pupils. " I make no stipulation before- hand : when a pupil parts from me, I ask from him such a sum as I think the time and the circumstances warrant ; and I add, that if he deems the demand too great, he has only to make up his own mind what is the amount of improvement which my com- pany has procured to him, and what sum he considers an equivalent for it. I am content to accept the sum so named by himself, only requiring him to go into a temple and make oath that it is his sincere belief." 1 It is not easy to imagine a more dignified way of dealing than this, nor one which more thoroughly attests an honorable reliance on the internal consciousness of the scholar, on the grateful sense of improvement realized, which to every teacher constitutes a reward hardly inferior to the payment that proceeds from it, and which, in the opinion of Sokrates, formed the only legitimate reward. Such is not the way in which the corrupt ors of mankind go to work. That which stood most prominent in the teaching of Gorgiaa and the other sophists, was, that they cultivated and improved the powers of public speaking in their pupils ; one of the most essential accomplishments to every Athenian of consideration. For this, too, they have been denounced by Ritter, Brandis, and other learned writers on the history of philosophy, as corrupt and immoral. " Teaching their pupils rhetoric (it has been said), they only enabled them to second unjust designs, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to delude their hearers, by trick and artifice, into false persuasion and show of knowledge without 1 Plato, Protagoras, c. 16, p. 328, B. Diogenes Laertius (ix, 58) says that Protagoras demanded one hundred minae as pay : little stress is to be laid upon sach a statement, nor is it possible that he could have had one fixed rate of pay. The story told by Aulus Gellius (v, 10) about the suit at law between Protagoras and his disciple Euathlus, is at least amusing and inge- nious. Compare the story of the rhetor Skopelianus, in Philostratns, Vit Sophist, i, 21, 4. Isokrates (Or. XT, de Perm. sect. 166) affirms that the gains made by Gor- gias, or by any of the eminent sophists, had never been very high ; that they had been greatly and maliciously exaggerated ; that they were very inferior to those of the great dramatic actors (sect. 168).