remarkable for their love of wisdom, that is, paid the sophists handsomely, in the hope of thus enticing knowledge to remain among them. In fact they supposed that wisdom is like a candle and lantern, by which you may have light,—or a saint’s shirt, by wearing which you infallibly become holy,—or the lamp of Epictetus, which a rich man bought at three thousand drachmas, in the hope that it would light him into the very adyta of philosophy. However this may be, it is very certain that the Thessalians became the patrons of the sophists, who disposed in that country of more wisdom and eloquence than in any other part of Greece, and the principal purchasers of it were of the rich family of the Aleuadæ, the earliest Mæcenases, I believe, on record. Footnote 822: Diod. Sicul. xii. 53. Footnote 823: I cannot, therefore, see the reason of Geel’s doubt.—Hist. Sophist. p. 18. Cf. Clint. Fast. Hellen. ii. p. 68. Footnote 824: Plat. Hip. Maj. t. v. p. 416. But the sophists, to their credit be it acknowledged, were no misers. What they easily gained they spent freely; and not merely so, but in many instances converted the effects of their personal vanity into public ornaments of the whole country. Thus Gorgias, enriched by the spoils of Thessaly, erected at Delphi a golden statue[825] of himself, which argued a more generous spirit than he would have shown by setting it afloat in the channels of trade or husbandry or usury, in the hope of rendering himself a great capitalist. Footnote 825: Cressol. Theat. Rhet. i. 8. Gorgias was long absent from Athens, and visited during his travels the most considerable cities of Greece. Among other places he came to Delphi, where from the steps of the altar, probably during the games, he delivered that oration called the Pythian, in celebration of which he erected the above-mentioned statue.[826] From thence perhaps,—for the chronology of his journey is not exactly known,—he proceeded to Olympia, where he also assisted at the games for the purpose of exhibiting his oratorical talents in the presence of all Greece, and reaping as it were in an hour a harvest of glory. This declamation, delivered during the Peloponnesian war, had at least the recommendation of being patriotic. Standing in front of the temple of Zeus, the god of concord and of peace, he earnestly recommended union and harmony.[827] If war they must have, there were the barbarians,—let their arms be turned against them. With what success he spoke, history has informed us; but the satirists of antiquity, ever naturally addicted to scandal, are careful to remark that this great advocate of concord and unanimity kept up a civil war in his own house, where the charms of some beautiful-cheeked θεραπαινίδιον[828] excited the jealousy of Madame. At the same time the old gentleman, to adopt the most moderate computation, must have been hard upon three-score and ten, though some would make him eighty. Footnote 826: Geel, Hist. Sophist. p. 23.