In tracing this class of men to their origin, we must look back a great way, and endeavour to detect them, under a variety of forms, different from that in which they ultimately settled. They arose with the first philosophers, or the first poet who made self the centre of his researches, and sought to render the investigation of science a means of personal aggrandisement. Protagoras describes in Plato the rise of his own art; where, though a side blow be wrongfully aimed at poetry itself, the truth of the accusation against a number of poets cannot be denied. He makes good at the very outset what I have asserted above. They travelled, he says, over all Greece, alluring the noblest youths to abandon the company of their friends and fellow-citizens, to become their pupils, and be guided wholly by their maxims, the nature of which I shall presently unfold. The feelings they thus excited, he denominates envy and malevolence, though in truth it was nothing more than that patriotic and parental jealousy and hatred experienced by the good when they behold those they love led astray. The better to escape this hostility, the ancient sophists adopted various disguises, sometimes enveloping their art in the folds of poetry as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, on other occasions affecting to be the interpreters of foreign rites and oracles, as Orpheus and Musæus; while a third class concealed the features of their art under the less suspected mask of gymnastics, such as Iccos of Tarentum, and that Herodicos of Silymbria a man of Megarean origin who in the art of sophistry was second to none of his age. Occasionally they made their entrance into cities as professors of music. In this capacity Damon conversed with Pericles, and Agathocles, an Athenian by birth, diffused through the state the seeds of sophistry; Pythocleides, too, the Coan, pursued the same course; and thus a youth, while ostensibly engaged in gaining a proficiency on the lyre or cithara, was initiated in the mysteries of tyranny, irreligion and injustice.[813] Footnote 813: Plat. Protag. t. i. p. 163. seq. Bekk. By degrees, however, it was discovered that all disguise might be very safely laid aside.[814] In fact the object at first aimed at,—to escape the notice of men in power,—was found impracticable; and as to the people, against whom all these shafts were directed, it was easy to delude them, since what their leaders recommended they praised. Protagoras, accordingly, boldly professed himself a sophist, trusting for safety to his eloquence, and that growing laxity of manners which was rapidly undermining the old republican constitution and preparing the way for a new order of things. His candour was praiseworthy, but lamentable were the circumstances which rendered it safe. Footnote 814: At a late period, by a decree of Sophocles, the sophists were driven out of Attica.—Athen. xiii. 92. Cf. Cressol. Theat. Rhet. i. 12. p. 87.