The Historians' History of the World 03

The first establishment of the dicasteries is nearly coincident with the great improvement of Attic tragedy in passing from Æschylus to Sophocles. The same development of the national genius, now preparing splendid manifestations both in tragic and comic poetry, was called with redoubled force into the path of oratory, by the new judicial system. A certain power of speech now became necessary, not merely for those who intended to take a prominent part in politics, but also for private citizens to vindicate their rights or repel accusations, in a court of justice. It was an accomplishment of the greatest practical utility, even apart from ambitious purposes; hardly less so than the use of arms or the practice of the gymnasium. Accordingly, the teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and the composers of written speeches to be delivered by others, now began to multiply and to acquire an unprecedented importance—as well at Athens as under the contemporary democracy of Syracuse, in which also some form of popular judicature was established. Style and speech began to be reduced to a system, and so communicated; not always happily, for several of the early rhetors adopted an artificial, ornate, and conceited manner, from which Attic good taste afterwards liberated itself. But the very character of a teacher of rhetoric as an art—a man giving precepts and putting himself forward in show-lectures as a model for others, is a feature first belonging to the Periclean age, and indicates a new demand in the minds of the citizens.

We begin to hear, in the generation now growing up, of the rhetor and the sophist, as persons of influence and celebrity. These two names denoted persons of similar moral and intellectual endowments, or often indeed the same person, considered in different points of view; either as professing to improve the moral character, or as communicating power and facility of expression, or as suggesting premises for persuasion, illustrations on the commonplaces of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of ordinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, etc. Antiphon of the deme Rhamnus in Attica, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Tisias of Syracuse, Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, Theodorus of Byzantium, Hippias of Elis, Zeno of Elea, were among the first who distinguished themselves in these departments of teaching. Antiphon was the author of the earliest composed speech really spoken in a dicastery and preserved down to the later critics. These men were mostly not citizens of Athens, though many of them belonged to towns comprehended in the Athenian empire, at a time when important judicial causes belonging to these towns were often carried up to be tried at Athens—while all of them looked to that city as a central point of action and distinction. The term “sophist,” which Herodotus applies with sincere respect to men of distinguished wisdom such as Solon, Anacharsis, Pythagoras, etc., now came to be applied to these teachers of virtue, rhetoric, conversation, and disputation; many of whom professed acquaintance with the whole circle of human science, physical as well as moral (then narrow enough), so far as was necessary to talk about any portion of it plausibly, and to answer any question proposed to them.

Though they passed from one town to another, partly in the capacity of envoys from their fellow-citizens, partly as exhibiting their talents to numerous hearers, with much renown and large gain—they appear to have been viewed with jealousy and dislike by a large portion of the public. For at a time when every citizen pleaded his own cause before the dicastery, they imparted, to those who were rich enough to purchase it, a peculiar skill in the common weapons, which made them like fencing-masters or professional swordsmen amidst a society of untrained duellists. Moreover Socrates—himself a product of the same age, a disputant on the same subjects, and bearing the same name of a sophist—but despising political and judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers—Socrates or rather Plato, speaking through the person of Socrates—carried on throughout his life a constant polemical warfare against the sophists and rhetors in that negative vein in which he was unrivalled. And as the works of these latter have not remained, it is chiefly from the observations of their opponents that we know them; so that they are in a situation such as that in which Socrates himself would have been if we had been compelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanes, or from those unfavourable impressions respecting his character which we know, even from the Apologia of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens.