One of the beauties of old Hellenic education had been that it did not make the rich a class apart from the poor by giving a widely different form of culture. The rise of the Sophists changed all this: their fees excluded the poor. The odium of resultant class-separation fell upon the teachers. Their pupils, rich, aristocratic, and cultured, inclined towards oligarchy. Hellenic sentiment held the teacher responsible for the whole career of his pupils. So for this reason again the democracies regarded the Sophists with suspicion, as the trainers of oligarchs and tyrants. It was chiefly because he had been the teacher of Kritias and Alkibiades that Sokrates was put to death by the restored democracy. The persuasive powers which the rhetoricians gave to their pupils might be, and often were, misused; the pupils might mislead the Ekklesia into bad policy or the law-courts into injustice by their eloquence. However much the Sophists might protest that they taught only rhetoric, not ethics, they were held responsible for the dishonesty as well as for the eloquence of such pupils. Besides, rhetoric gave the rich man, who alone could buy it, a most undemocratic influence in the State. The odium against the Sophists was increased by their religious and political views. They were free thinkers in all things. Protagoras was a frank agnostic; Gorgias believed that nothing whatever existed. Their political theories were equally revolutionary, full of the idea of Social Contracts and the right of the one strong man. All this was extremely distasteful to the majority, who were democratic and orthodox. But it must be remembered that no such views appeared in lectures: they were confined to an occasional book or to private conversation. Outwardly the Sophists were law-abiding and respectable servants of the constitution, and their lectures were, if anything, rather commonplace. Thus the prejudice against them was excited partly by their freethinking and partly by their fees. The first of these two reasons applied still more to Sokrates and the philosophic schools. But Sokrates neither asked nor received fees: Plato and Aristotle only accepted presents. Consequently when the philosophic party tried to dissociate themselves in the popular mind from the Sophists with whom they were confounded, they attempted to revive the old Hellenic prejudice against taking fees for “wisdom,” which had given trouble to the lyric poets, and to emphasise the money-making aspects of the Sophists’ profession. This rather absurd appeal to the gallery has influenced posterity; but it did not win universal acceptation in Hellas. Aischines still calls Sokrates a Sophist. Under the Roman Empire “Sophist” became a title of distinction applied to artistic stylists and teachers like Libanius. [495] Plato’s own schoolmaster, Diog. Laert. iii. 5. [496] [Plato] _Lovers_, 132. [497] Reputed inventor of Euclid i. 12 and 23, and a great astronomer.