than of a maintainer of particular tenets.

But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these
senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which
the term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an
Athenian, as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ,
have included Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras,
under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must answer,
No: if ever the term is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the
application is made by an enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which
it is used is neutral. Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all give
a bad import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a separate
class in all of them. And in later Greek literature, the distinction
is quite marked between the succession of philosophers from Thales to
Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who appeared like
meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For the purposes
of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the Sophists, and
he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is no reason to
suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really
have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any
intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time
visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the
great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master
of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated,
even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no
geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter
and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of words, the
teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and manners.

2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows
that the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current.
When Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that
the art which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the
young Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen
by the light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,'
would lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is
nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether
deserved or not, was a natural consequence o