university teacher; and so well recognized was this that _a pupil of Isocrates_ meant something like our A.B. Oxon. For he had a regular course, and charged a considerable fee for his lessons. His pupils came from all parts of Greece, and stayed with him a considerable time. Moreover, he could boast that the most famous public men had been educated by him, and owned his influence in after-days. This higher education he called _philosophy_, and he only differed from other professed Sophists (he says) in the modesty of his promises, and his distinct admission that he undertook merely to improve natural talent, not to change a stupid and ignorant youth into a man of acuteness and power. § 58. There is an interesting passage in the speech in vindication of his life,[52] which gives so clear a view of the prevailing opinions about higher education at Athens that I will transcribe it freely: “The ordinary attacks made upon us are of two kinds. Some say that going to the Sophists for education is mere arrant imposture; never has there been any system of training discovered by which a man can become abler in speech or wiser in deed, since all who excel in these respects differ by nature from the rest of mankind. The other objectors concede that those who submit to this training become indeed abler, but in a bad sense, and coupled with moral loss; for when they gain power, they use it to injure their neighbors. I will now refute both these objections. “First, let us consider the absurdity of those who decry all higher education. They revile it, indeed, as worth nothing, and mere deceit and imposture, but yet demand from us that our pupils, as soon as they come, should show a complete change, that after a few days’ intercourse with us they should appear better in discourse and abler than their elders in age and experience; but if they stay one whole year, they should all be perfect orators--the idle as well as the diligent, the commonplace as well as the gifted. This they expect from us, though we never have made such promises, and though it contradicts the analogy of all other kinds of training, in which results are acquired with difficulty, and each with a various measure of success, so that some two or three only out of all the schools of all kinds turn out thoroughly proficient, while the rest remain mere average amateurs. Accordingly, the objectors are silly enough to demand from a training, which they call unreal, an influence unknown in the recognized instruction of all arts and sciences! Our teaching, then, is discredited for accomplishing exactly what the other arts do. For which of you does not know that many of those put under the Sophists were not imposed upon, as is alleged, but have become, some of them, real experts in public life, others able instructors of youth, and even those who chose to remain in private life more polished in manners than they had been, and more accurate critics of arguments as well as of most ordinary things?