sophists, and they boldly undertook to supply all deficiencies, and qualify their pupils for any station whatever which they might be called on to fill, or for any pursuit by which they hoped to rise to eminence. They professed to have acquired, and to be able to teach, all knowledge; and one of them, by way of advertising his own merits, appeared at the Olympic games with a stock of literary samples of various sorts, tragedy, epics, &c.; and further, with the announcement that every article of use or ornament about his person was the work of his own hands. This folly, if it were all, might excite a smile; but these men laid claim to a more mischievous power, that of being able to confound truth and falsehood, and to show how either of two contradictory propositions might be proved with equal certitude and success, according to the interest or inclination of the disputant. Under a democracy, eloquence was the readiest path to power; and eloquence, they taught, was of all acquisitions the most important; that eloquence, and skill in word–splitting, by which, as Plato has farcically described it in the Euthydemus, it could be shown that a man could speak and be silent at the same time; that it was equally easy to a professor of this art to prove that a man knew or did not know the same thing, or that he both knew it and did not know it at the same time; and by which the sophists, in the above–named dialogue, prove to the satisfaction of their fellow–disputant, “that he had a father—that he had no father—that a dog was his father—that his father was everybody’s father—that his mother had a family equally numerous, in which horses, pigs, and crab–fish were all common brethren, with the same rights and ties of consanguinity and affection.”[83] This was the eloquence by which, according to the grave professions of Protagoras, the founder of the school, the worse might be made to appear the better cause, and right and wrong confounded; so that alike in the agora, in the courts of justice, or in social converse, no standard of right or wrong could be set up, except that which the convenience of the speaker should dictate. “As the first step towards this important acquisition, the pupil was carefully initiated in all the niceties of that language, whose mazes and subtleties sometimes led from premises apparently simple to conclusions which looked more like legerdemain than the effects of sober reasoning. He was then told that there were two sorts of persuasion; that by the one an auditor’s mind was imbued with actual knowledge, by the other with a knowledge consisting only in belief and opinion; and when he was asked which of these two persuasions rhetoric was meant to create in the courts of law and the public assemblies, he was answered, belief of knowledge without actuality; for rhetoric was defined to be the art of enabling an ignorant man to speak among the ignorant, with more appearance of knowledge than the man who was