ἐπέων. It is very difficult to be certain whether this means here “word,” “song,” or “epic.” Footnote 16: ὀρθοεπείης καὶ γλωσσέων. Footnote 17: ῥημάτων That the other great Abderite, Protagoras, the disciple of Democritus himself, wrote on subjects of the kind, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is practically impossible that he should not have done so, though we have not the exact title of any. He is said to have been the first to distinguish the parts of an oration by name, to have made some important advances in technical grammar, and to have lectured on the poets. But here again we have no texts to appeal to, nor any certain fact. Yet perhaps it is not mere critical whim to doubt whether, if we had these texts also, we should be much further advanced. The titles of those attributed to Democritus, if we could accept [Sidenote: _The Sophists—earlier._] the attribution with any confidence, would make such scepticism futile. But we have no titles of critical works attributed to Protagoras; we only know vaguely that he lectured on the poets.[18] And from all the stories about him as well as from the famous dialogue which puts the hostile view of his sophistry, we can conclude with tolerable certainty that his interests were mainly ethical, with perhaps a dash of grammar—the two notes, as we have seen and shall see, of all this early Greek criticism. Certainly this was the case with the Sicilian school which traditionally founded Rhetoric—Empedocles himself perhaps, Corax, Tisias, Gorgias, and the pupil of Gorgias, Polus, with more certainty. Here again most of our best evidence is hostile, and therefore to be used with caution; but the hostility does not affect the present point. Socrates or Plato could have put unfavourable views of Sophistic quite as well—indeed, considering Plato’s curious notions of inventive art, perhaps better—in regard to Æsthetics. If ethics and philology, not criticism proper, are the subjects in which their adversaries try to make Protagoras and Gorgias cut a bad figure, we may be perfectly certain that these were the subjects in which they themselves tried to cut a good one. If they are not misrepresented—are not indeed represented at all—in the strict character of the critic, it can only be because they did not, for good or for ill, assume that character. The philosophy of language, the theory of persuasion, the moral character of poetry and oratory, these were the subjects which interested them and their hearers; not the sources of literary beauty, the division of literary kinds, the nature and varieties of style. Wherever ethic and metaphysic are left, the merest philology seems to have been the only alternative—the few phrases attributed to any writers of this period that bear a different complexion being _very_ few, uncertainly authentic, and in almost every case extremely vague. Footnote 18: