Now, in this opinion, I think that there is much of unfounded assumption, as well as a misconception of the real contrast intended in the Platonic Euthydêmus. Comparing Protagoras with Sokrates, I maintain that Sokrates was decidedly the more Eristic of the two, and left behind him a greater number of active disciples. In so far as we can trust the picture given by Plato in the dialogue called Protagoras, we learn that the Sophist of that name chiefly manifested himself in long continuous speeches or rhetoric; and though he also professed, if required, to enter into dialectic colloquy, in this art he was no match for Sokrates.[23] Moreover, we know by the evidence of Sokrates himself, that _he_ was an Eristic not only by taste, but on principle, and by a sense of duty. He tells us, in the Platonic Apology, that he felt himself under a divine mission to go about convicting men of ignorance, and that he had prosecuted this vocation throughout many years of a long life. Every one of these convictions must have been brought about by one or more disputes of his own seeking: every such dispute, with occasional exceptions, made him unpopular, in the outset at least, with the person convicted: the rather, as his ability in the process is known, upon the testimony of Xenophon[24] as well as of Plato, to have been consummate. It is therefore a mistake to decry Protagoras and the Protagoreans (if there were any) as the special Eristics, and to represent Sokrates as a tutelary genius, the opponent of such habits. If the commentators are right (which I do not think they are) in declaring the Athenian mind to have been perverted by Eristic, Sokrates is much more chargeable with the mischief than Protagoras. And the comic poets, when they treated Sokrates as a specimen and teacher of Eristic, proceeded very naturally upon what they actually saw or heard of him.[25] [Footnote 23: See Plat. Protag., especially pp. 329 and 336. About the eristic disposition of Sokrates, see the striking passage in Plato, Theætêt. 169 B-C; also Lachês, 187, 188.] [Footnote 24: Xen. Mem. i. 2.] [Footnote 25: Stallbaum, Proleg. in Platon. Euthydêm. pp. 50-51. "Sed hoc utcunque se habet, illud quidem ex Aristophane pariter atque ex ipso Platone evidenter apparet, Socratem non tantum ab orationum scriptoribus, sed etiam ab aliis, in vanissimorum sophistaram loco habitum fuisse."] [Side-note: Sokrates in the Euthydêmus is drawn suitably to the purpose of that dialogue.]