A great many more Sophists are known by name, some of them depicted or maligned in Plato’s dialogues, such as Thrasymachus, Polus, Euenus; but they do not present to us any special features. All are said to have insisted on the dictates of society as superior to any supposed law of nature, and this Hobbism has brought upon them the anathemas of moralists. Within the century 470-370 B.C. their part was played out; and even Plato, in his later works, no longer thinks them worthy of refutation. CHAPTER IX. THE RHETORS--ISOCRATES. § 57. It is argued by many scholars, who believe all that Plato says literally, and who think that the dark pictures of Thucydides apply only to his own day, and not to previous generations, that the Greeks were so degraded and debauched by this sophistic tampering with religion and morals, by this scepticism in philosophy, and by the rise of radicalism in politics, as to present from this time onward (430 B.C.) the symptoms of a decaying race. The Athenian State, in particular, is supposed to have lost its splendor and its seriousness, and to be now a mere mob-rule, far removed from the democracy, tempered with despotism, which made it so great under Pericles. This view, which is strongly urged, for example, in Curtius’s “History of Greece,” is based altogether on the complaints of Plato and Aristophanes, and the impression produced by the history of the aristocratic Thucydides, by Xenophon, and by the plays of Euripides. This is not the place to refute the theory generally, as has been done by Grote, who shows that never was the Athenian democracy so enlightened and moderate in policy as in the period after the close of the great war (403 B.C.). But in the particular department before us, that of education, we have already seen that this period after the Peloponnesian war is exactly the period when the sophistic higher education began to be discarded as superficial and even morally questionable, and the task of training the keener and more ambitious youth passed into the hands of greater specialists--either philosophers like Plato and his followers, or rhetoricians like Isocrates and Antiphon. Socrates forms the connecting link between the Sophists and the philosophic schools. Isocrates is hardly such a link, though he professes to be the philosopher in the guise of a rhetorician. Though he inveighed against his rivals the Sophists, he is hardly to be distinguished from them save in his being fixed at Athens, in his avoidance of displays (from natural inability rather than from choice), and in his declared conservatism in religion and politics, as contrasted with their scepticism. It is not just that the eminent respectability of Isocrates personally should be urged as another difference, when we adopt the fair view of the high characters of the leading Sophists. Isocrates, whose views are fortunately preserved in his own very diffuse advocacy of them, was strictly a