These are the words not of Plato, who is supposed often enough to allow his
imagination to carry him beyond his facts about the Sophists as about
others, nor are they the words of a satiric poet such as
Aristophanes. They are the
words of the most sober and philosophic of Greek historians, and they
illustrate very strikingly the tendency, nay, the absolute necessity,
whereby the theories of philosophers in the closet extend themselves into
the market-place and the home, and find an ultimate realisation of
themselves for good or for evil in the ‘business and bosoms’ of the common
crowd.
It is not to be said that the individualistic and iconoclastic movement
which the Sophists represented was wholly bad, or wholly unnecessary, any
more (to again quote a modern instance) than that the French Revolution was.
There was much, no doubt, in the traditional religion and morality of Greece
at that time which represented obsolete and antiquated conditions, when
every city lived apart from its neighbours with its own narrow interests and
local cults and ceremonials. Greece was ceasing to be an unconnected crowd
of little separate communities; unconsciously it was preparing itself for a
larger destiny, that of conqueror and civiliser of East and West.
This scepticism, utterly untenable and unworkable on the lines extravagantly
laid down by its leading teachers, represented the birth of new conditions
of thought and action adapted to the new conditions of things. On the
surface, and accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of
knowledge; it threatened to destroy humanity and civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it was
laying the foundations of a broader humanity.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE SOPHISTS /
GORGIAS
