believe not only, with Mr Grote, that the Sophists "bear the penalty of their name in its modern sense," but also that in their own day they bore the penalty of superior ability and intelligence in becoming the objects of dislike, and therefore of misrepresentation, and yet to understand how they may have afforded very fair material for the professional satirist. The art of public speaking, which these professors taught, is a powerful engine, which in unscrupulous hands may do as much to mislead as to instruct. That the love of disputation and the consciousness of power will tempt a clever man to maintain a paradox, and discomfit an opponent by what he knows to be a fallacy—that a keen intellect will delight in questioning an established belief—and that the shallow self-sufficiency of younger disciples will push any doctrine to its wildest extremes,—are moral facts for whose confirmation we have no need to go to ancient history. And we are not to suppose that either the poet or his audience intended the fun of the piece to be taken as serious evidence either of the opinions or the practice of any school whatever.
But the question which has, with much more reason, exercised the ingenuity of able critics, is the choice which Aristophanes has made of Socrates as the representative of this sophistical philosophy, and his motive in holding him up to ridicule, as he here does, by name. For Socrates, it is generally allowed, was the opponent of these Sophists, or at least of those objectionable doctrines which they were said to teach. But there were some very important points—and those
