ut he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man
of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like
mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the
Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty
drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all
mankind is reflected.

A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of
the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than
the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that
any individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in
comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is
no real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist
which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the
Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power
to be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are
no worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be
justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be
above them. There is another point of view in which this passage should
also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly
in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different--the world as
the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of
gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the
few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has
many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the
Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other
deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented
as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter
of him and of itself.

Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have
been applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias
and Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the
genius of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters
of youth (for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable
persons, who supplied