This spirit, as manifested in the sophists and their teaching, directed itself against the old political spirit in all the departments of life--in religion, in politics, in education. It discredited the old popular gods, upon loyalty to whom the existence of the State had been supposed to depend, substituting for them some crude fancy like Vortex, or some bald abstraction like Intellect. It encouraged the individual to seek his end in his own pleasure, and to regard the State as but a means to that end. It championed an education in which these ideas occupied a prominent place. What the sophists actually taught the ambitious young men who sought their instruction, was self-assertion, unscrupulousness, and a showy rhetoric, in whose triumphal procession facts, fancies, and falsehoods marched together in brilliant array. It is but fair to them to say that, in their endeavor to instruct young men in the art of specious oratory, they laid the foundations of the art of rhetoric and the science of grammar. So much, at least, the world owes to them. Since it was to the young men, who, freed from the discipline of home, pedagogue, school, and palæstra, could be met with anywhere, in the street, the agora, the gymnasium, that the sophists directed their chief attention, it was of course these who first showed the effects of their teaching. But their influence, falling in, as it did, with the pronounced radical tendencies of the time, soon made itself felt in all grades of education, from the family to the university, in the form of an irreverent, flippant, conceited rationalism, before whose self-erected and self-corrupted tribunal every institution in heaven and earth was to be tried. In the schools this influence showed itself in various ways: (1) in an increased attention to literature, and especially to the formal side of it, (2) in the tendency to substitute for the works of the old epic and lyric poets the works of more recent writers tinged with the new spirit, (3) in the introduction of new and complicated instruments and kinds of music, (4) in an increasing departure from the severe physical and moral discipline of the old days. We now, for the first time, hear of a teacher of literature, distinct from the music master, of teachers who possessed no copy of Homer (Alcibiades is said to have chastised such a one), of flutes, citharas, and the like in use in schools, of wildness and lewdness among boys of tender age. In the palæstra the new spirit showed itself in a tendency to substitute showy and unsystematic exercises for the vigorous and graded exercises of the older time, to sacrifice education to execution.