They naturally sometimes gave themselves great airs. There are many stories about them. Philostratus tells one of the Emperor Antoninus Pius on arriving at Smyrna going, in accordance with imperial custom, to spend the night at the house which was at once the best house in the city and the house of the most distinguished man. It was that of the sophist Polemo, who happened on the Emperor’s arrival to be away from home; but he returned from his journey at night, and with loud exclamations against being kept out of his own, turned the Emperor out of doors.[185] The common epithet for them is ἀλαζών—a word with no precise English equivalent, denoting a cross between a braggart and a mountebank. But the real grounds on which the more earnest men objected to them were those upon which Plato had objected to their predecessors: their making a trade of knowledge, and their unreality. 1. The making of discourses, whether literary or moral, was a thriving trade.[186] The fees given to a leading sophist were on the scale of those given to a _prima donna_ in our own day.[187] But the objection to it was not so much the fact of its thriving, as the fact of its being a trade at all. “If they do what they do,” says Dio Chrysostom,[188] “as poets and rhetoricians, there is no harm perhaps; but if they do it as philosophers, for the sake of their own personal gain and glory, and not for the sake of benefiting you, there is harm.” The defence which Themistius[189] makes for himself is more candid than effective: “I do make money,” he says; “people give me sometimes one _mina_, sometimes two, sometimes as much as a talent: but, since I must speak about myself, let me ask you this—Did any one ever come away the worse for having heard me? Mark, I charge nothing: it is a voluntary contribution.”