No doubt there were black sheep among the lesser Sophists, to whom Plato’s bitter definitions in the _Sophist_ were quite applicable, who were “hunters after young men of wealth and position, with sham education as their bait, and a fee for their object, making money by a scientific use of quibbles in private conversation, while quite aware that what they were teaching was wrong.” But they do not appear in extant literature, which has only recorded a very few, and those the very pick, of the hundreds of Sophists that there must have been in the Socratic age.[526]
The Sophists who have been mentioned so far have been but little concerned with Rhetoric: they form rather a school of Logic, opposed to the rhetorical school of _Gorgias_ and his followers.
IN THE PALAISTRA: FLUTE-PLAYERS (WITH φορβεία [phorbeia]), JAVELIN-THROWER, DISK-THROWER, AND BOXER
Gerhard’s _Auserlesene Vasenbilder_, cclxxii. Fig. 1. From a Kulix, now at Berlin, signed by Epiktetos (No. 2262).]
Of the rise of Rhetoric in Hellas I need say little: the whole subject has been admirably treated elsewhere.[527] For educational purposes, Hellenic rhetoric started with several fatal drawbacks and some counterbalancing advantages. The southern nature of the Hellenes preferred sensuous charm of sound to logical accuracy of fact; their rhetoric, arising as it did out of poetry, and modelling itself upon its literary parent, pandered only too readily to their taste. With truth it had no more to do than Homer had; its object was to please the ear by curious rhythms, balanced clauses, parisosis, and all other possible devices. As long as the form was excellent, no matter how trivial the subject:[528] mice or salt were good enough for a theme. The oration must, of course, be full of passion, but that could be simulated: rhetoric had inherited the legacy of acting from its parent, Lyric Poetry. So rhetoric became simply a question of style, not of argument; and since arguments were not required, the strength or weakness of a case did not matter: rhetoric could make any cause attractive to a sensuous Hellenic ear by its tricks of style, and thus make “the weaker cause the stronger.” The method by which its professors taught their pupils brought out this attitude clearly. They were accustomed to take an imaginary case, and then to teach their pupils how to write a speech on either side of it: the extant “Tetralogies” of Antiphon are examples of the method, which was excellent educationally; for it is good to see the arguments on both sides of a case. It was the carelessness about fact and indifference to truth, and the element of acting, that were so dangerous to the pupils. These elements certainly wrecked the justice of the Athenian courts; their effect on Hellenic character was probably equally unsatisfactory.