confirmed the philosophic
scepticism, so also the collapse of contending philosophies in Greece
promoted the collapse of contending systems of political authority, and
the collapse of political authority facilitated the growth of that
individualism in thought with which the name of the Sophists is
associated.

[178]

Cicero (_Brut_. 12) definitely connects the rise of these teachers with
the expulsion of the tyrants and the establishment of democratic
republics in Sicily. From 466 to 406 B.C. Syracuse was democratically
governed, and a 'free career to talents,' as in revolutionary France,
so also in revolutionary Greece, began to be promoted by the
elaboration of a system of persuasive argument. Devices of method
called 'commonplaces' were constructed, whereby, irrespective of the
truth or falsehood of the subject-matter, a favourable vote in the
public assemblies, a successful verdict in the public courts, might
more readily be procured. Thus by skill of verbal rhetoric, the worse
might be made to appear the better reason; and philosophy, so far as it
continued its functions, {85} became a search, not for the real amidst
the confusions of the seeming and unreal, but a search for the seeming
and the plausible, to the detriment, or at least to the ignoring, of
any reality at all.

The end of philosophy then was no longer universal truth, but
individual success; and consistently enough, the philosopher himself
professed the individualism of his own point of view, by teaching only
those who were prepared to pay him for his teaching. All over Greece,
with the growth of democracy, this philosophy of persuasion became
popular; but it was to Athens, under Pericles at this time the centre
of all that was most vivid and splendid in Greek life and thought, that
the chief teachers of the new philosophy flocked from every part of the
Greek world.

[177]

The first great leader of the Sophists was _Protagoras_. He, it is
said, was the first to teach for pay; he also was the first to adopt
the name of Sophist. In the word Sophist there was indeed latent the
idea which subsequently attached to it, but as first used it seems to
have implied this only, that _skill_ was the object of the teaching
rather than _truth_; the new teachers professed themselves 'practical
men,' not mere theorists.

The Greek word, in short, meant an able cultivated man in any branch of
the arts; and the development of practical capacity was doub