§ 53. This is what the Greek Sophists really were, crammers not for special competitions, but for the general requirements of higher society and of political life. They crammed more or less honestly, more or less efficiently, for a generation or two. Then the want of them passed away, as we may hope the want of the modern crammer will pass away with the superstition that we can find out practical merit by mere examinations. At Athens and throughout Greece the encyclopædic teaching of the Sophists was presently carried into minute specialty by teachers of rhetoric, of dialectic, and of morals, just as the professors of geology of thirty years ago are being supplanted by special teaching in fossil anatomy, botany, and mineralogy. From the middle of the fourth century B.C. the Sophists disappear as a class altogether. It is, nevertheless, certain that they left no bad name behind them in Greece, except among the immediate followers of Plato and Aristotle; for in the second century A.D. the title was revived as one of the highest honor, and attaching to the greatest literary post in Athens. We need not assert that these teachers were as strictly business-like as the modern _coach_, or that they confined themselves as strictly to their definite object. They often boasted of great performances which were beyond the reach of ordinary people, and were merely meant for display. But then their aims were far wider and more varied than those of the coach, and were not to be tested by the clear and definite result of the examination lists. Hence Plato and Socrates found it easy to pick holes in their programmes, and to accuse them of getting money under false pretences. These philosophers went further, and reviled them for taking money at all, bartering their wisdom for gold, and imparting virtue for a fee. All this was mere jealous polemic, and based on an unfair estimate of the attempt made by practical men to supply a public want. Yet even though Plato himself paints the leading Sophists as most respectable men, though we know from independent evidence that they were so, whether Plato confessed it or not, the attacks on the profession made by him and by Aristophanes--the one a radical reformer, and the other a blind conservative--have so imposed upon the learned that they have completely mistaken the real evidence on the question, and set down the arguments for the prosecution as if they were a judicial charge or a mature verdict. So powerful is the influence of literary skill, when it causes the survival of a single work amid the loss of all its fellows. Because Plato is our leading witness on the Sophists, because Aristophanes’ satire has survived, men imagine that this must be the general verdict, and set down the bias and the prejudice of an individual as the reflex of public opinion.