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his friends one by one. The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 B.C.;1 Athens (in common with many other places) was ravaged by the plague; the population, which had been about 230,000, was greatly reduced, and never rose again to its former level (Bury, History of Greece, I, p. 444). Pericles himself, in 430 B.C., was deposed from the office of general and fined for misappropriation of public money, but soon reinstated. His two legitimate sons died of the plague, and he himself died in the following year (429). Pheidias and Anaxagoras were condemned; Aspasia was prosecuted for impiety and for keeping a disorderly house, but acquitted.

In such a community, it was natural that men who were likely to incur the hostility of democratic politicians should wish to acquire forensic skill. For Athens, though much addicted to persecution, was in one respect less illiberal than modern America, since those accused of impiety and corrupting the young were allowed to plead in their own defence.

This explains the popularity of the Sophists with one class and their unpopularity with another. But in their own minds they served more impersonal purposes, and it is clear that many of them were genuinely

concerned with philosophy. Plato devoted himself to caricaturing and vilifying them, but they must not be judged by his polemics. In his lighter vein, take the following passage from the Euthydemus, in which two Sophists, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, set to work to puzzle a simple-minded person named Clesippus. Dionysodorus begins:

You say that you have a dog?

Yes, a villain of a one, said Clesippus.

And he has puppies?

Yes, and they are very like himself.

And the dog is the father of them?

Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the

puppies come together.

And is he not yours?

To be sure he is.

Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo, he is your father,

and the puppies are your brothers.

In a more serious vein, take the dialogue called The Sophist. This is a logical discussion of definition, which uses the sophist as an illustration. With its logic we are not at present concerned; the only thing I wish to mention at the moment as regards this dialogue is the final conclusion:

'The art of contradiction-making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of the semblance-making breed, derived from image-making, distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow-play of words—such is the blood and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be assigned to the authentic Sophist.' (Cornford's translation.)

There is a story about Protagoras, no doubt apocryphal, which illustrates the connection of the Sophists with the law-courts in the popular mind. It is said that he taught a young man on the terms that he should be paid his fee if the young man won his first law-suit, but not otherwise, and that the young man's first law-suit was one brought by Protagoras for recovery of his fee.

However, it is time to leave these preliminaries and see what is really known about Protagoras.

Protagoras was born about 500 B.C., at Abdera, the city from which Democritus came. He twice visited Athens, his second visit being not later than 432 B.C. He made a code of laws for the city of Thurii in 444–3 B.C. There is a tradition that he was prosecuted for impiety, but this seems to be untrue, in spite of the fact that he wrote a book On the Gods, which began: 'With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.'

His second visit to Athens is described somewhat satirically in Plato's Protagoras, and his doctrines are discussed seriously in the Theaetetus. He is chiefly noted for his doctrine that 'Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.' This is interpreted as meaning that each man is the measure of all things, and that, when men differ,