nce and noise. They sought
also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual
figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being
clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful. When a man is
young he is often dazzled by brilliance and cleverness, by paradox and
epigram, but as he grows older he learns to discount these things and
to care chiefly for the substance and {112} truth of what is said. And
the Greeks were a young people. They loved clever sayings. And this it
is which accounts for the toleration which they extended even to the
most patent absurdities of the Sophists. The modern question whether a
man has ceased beating his wife is not more childish than many of the
rhetorical devices of the Sophists, and is indeed characteristic of
the methods of the more extravagant among them.

The earliest known Sophist is Protagoras. He was born at Abdera, about
480 B.C. He wandered up and down Greece, and settled for some time at
Athens. At Athens, however, he was charged with impiety and atheism.
This was on account of a book written by him on the subject of the
gods, which began with the words, "As for the gods, I am unable to say
whether they exist or whether they do not exist." The book was
publicly burnt, and Protagoras had to fly from Athens. He fled to
Sicily, but was drowned on the way about the year 410 B.C.

Protagoras was the author of the famous saying, "Man is the measure of
all things; of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not."
Now this saying puts in a nutshell, so to speak, the whole teaching of
Protagoras. And, indeed, it contains in germ the entire thought of the
Sophists. It is well, therefore, that we should fully understand
exactly what it means. The earlier Greek philosophers had made a clear
distinction between sense and thought, between perception and reason,
and had believed that the truth is to be found, not by the senses, but
by reason. The Eleatics had been the first to emphasize this
distinction. The ultimate reality of {113} things, they said, is pure
Being, which is known only through reason; it is the senses which
delude us with a show of becoming. Heracleitus had likewise affirmed
that the truth, which was, for him, the law of becoming, is known by
thought, and that it is the senses which delude us with a show of
permanence. Even Democritus believed that true being, that is,
material atoms, are so small that the senses cannot perceive