The cultural activity of Periclean Greece takes chiefly three forms – art, drama, and philosophy. In the first, religion is the inspiration; in the second it is the battleground; in the third it is the victim. Since the organization of a religious group presumes a common and stable creed, every religion sooner or later comes into opposition with that fluent and changeful current of secular thought that we confidently call the progress of knowledge. In Athens the conflict was not always visible on the surface, and did not directly affect the masses of the people; the scientists and the philosophers carried on their work without explicitly attacking the popular faith, and often mitigated the strife by using the old religious terms as symbols or allegories for their new beliefs; only now and then, as in the indictments of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Diagoras of Melos, Euripides, and Socrates, did the struggle come out into the open, and become a matter of life and death. But it was there. It ran through the Periclean age like a major theme; played in many keys and elaborated in many variations and forms; it was heard most distinctly in the skeptical discourses of the Sophists and in the materialism of Democritus; it sounded obscurely in the piety of Aeschylus, in the heresies of Euripides, even in the irreverent banter of the conservative Aristophanes; and it was violently recapitulated in the trial and death of Socrates. Around this theme the Athens of Pericles lived its mental life.

Pure science, in fifth-century Greece, was still the handmaiden of philosophy, and was studied and developed by men who were philosophers rather than scientists. To the Greeks higher mathematics was an instrument not of practice but of logic, directed less to the conquest of the physical environment than to the intellectual construction of an abstract world.

Popular arithmetic, before the Periclean period, was almost primitively clumsy. One upright stroke indicated 1, two strokes 2, three 3, and four 4; 5, 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 were expressed by the initial letter of the Greek word for the number – pente, deka, hekaton, chilioi, myrioi. Greek mathematics never achieved a symbol for zero. Like our own it betrayed its Oriental origin by taking from the Egyptians the decimal system of counting by tens, and from the Babylonians, in astronomy and geography, the duodecimal or sexagesimal system of counting by twelves or sixties, as still on our clocks, globes, and charts. Probably an abacus helped the people with the simpler calculations. Fractions were painful for them: to work with a complex fraction they reduced it to an accumulation of fractions having t as their common numerator; so I was broken down into ½ + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32.

Of Greek algebra we have no record before the Christian era. Geometry, however, was a favorite study of the philosophers, again less for its practical value than for its theoretical interest, the fascination of its deductive logic, its union of subtlety and clarity, its imposing architecture of thought. Three problems particularly attracted these mathematical metaphysicians: the squaring of the circle, the trisection of the angle, and the doubling of the cube. How popular the first puzzle became appears in Aristophanes' Birds, in which a character representing the astronomer Meton enters upon the stage armed with ruler and compasses, and undertakes to show "how your circle may be made a square" – i.e., how to find a square whose area will equal that of a given circle. Perhaps it was such problems as these that led the later Pvthagoreans to formulate a doctrine of irrational numbers and incommensurable quantities.' It was the Pythagoreans, too, whose studies of the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse prepared for the epochal work of Apollonius of Perga on conic sections. About 440 Hippocrates of Chios (not the physician) published the first known book on geometry, and solved the problem of squaring the lune. About 420 Hippias of Elia accomplished the trisection of an angle through the quadratrix curve. About 410 Democritus of Abdera announced that "in constructing lines according to given conditions no one has ever surpassed me, not even the Egyptians;" he almost made the boast forgivable by writing four books on geometry, and finding formulas for the areas of cones and pyramids. All in all, the Greeks were as excellent in geometry as they were poor in arithmetic. Even into their art geometry entered actively, making many forms of ceramic and architectural ornament, and determining the proportions and curvatures of the Parthenon.

It was part of the struggle between religion and science that the study of astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean age. At Acragas Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from one point to another. At Elea Parmenides announced the sphericity of the earth, divided the planet into five zones, and observed that the moon always has its bright portion turned toward the sun. At Thebes Philolaus the Pythagorean deposed the earth from the center of the universe, and reduced it to the status of one among many planets revolving about a "central fire." Leucippus, pupil of Philolaus, attributed the origin of the stars to the incandescent combustion and concentration of material "drawn onward in the universal movement of the circular vortex." At Abdera Democritus, pupil of Leucippus and student of Babylonian lore, described the Milky Way as a multitude of small stars, and summarized astronomic history as the periodical collision and destruction of an infinite number of worlds. At Chios Oenopides discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic. Nearly everywhere among the Greek colonies the fifth century saw scientific developments remarkable in a period almost devoid of scientific instruments.

But when Anaxagoras tried to do similar work at Athens he found the mood of the people and the Assembly as hostile to free inquiry as the friendship of Pericles was encouraging. He had come from Clazomenae about 480 b.c., at twenty years of age. Anaximenes so interested him in the stars that when someone asked him the object of life he answered, "The investigation of sun, moon, and heaven." He neglected his patrimony to chart the earth and the sky, and fell into poverty while his book On Nature was acclaimed by the intelligentsia of Athens as the greatest scientific work of the century.

It carried on the traditions and speculations of the Ionian school. The universe, said Anaxagoras, was originally a chaos of diverse seeds (spermata), pervaded by a nous, or Mind, tenuously physical, and akin to the source of life and motion in ourselves. And as mind gives order to the chaos of our actions, so the World Mind gave order to the primeval seeds, setting them into a rotatory vortex, [This is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates' substitute for Zeus.] and guiding them toward the development of organic forms. This rotation sorted the seeds into the four elements-fire, air, water, and earth-and separated the world into two revolving layers, an outer one of "ether," and an inner one of air. "In consequence of this violent whirling motion, the surrounding fiery ether tore away stones from the earth, and kindled them into stars." The sun and the stars are glowing masses of rock: "The sun is a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesus." When their revolving motion wanes, the stones of the outer layer fall upon the earth as meteors. The moon is an incandescent solid, having on its surface plains, mountains, and ravines; it receives its light from the sun, and is of all heavenly bodies the nearest to the earth. "The moon is eclipsed through the interposition of the earth . . . the sun through the interposition of the moon." Probably other celestial bodies are inhabited like the earth; upon them "men are formed, and other animals that have life; the men dwell in cities, and cultivate fields as we do." Out of the inner or gaseous layer of our planet successive condensations produced clouds, water, earth; and stones. Minds are due to rarefactions of the atmosphere produced by the heat of the sun; "thunder is caused by the collision of clouds, and lightning by their friction." The quantity of matter never changes, but all forms begin and pass away; in time the mountains will become the sea. The various forms and objects of the world are brought into being by increasingly definite aggregations of homogeneous parts (homoiomeria). All organisms were originally generated out of earth, moisture, and heat, and thereafter from one another." flan has developed beyond other animals because his erect posture freed his hands for grasping things

These achievements – the foundation of meteorology, the correct explanation of eclipses, a rational hypothesis of planetary formation, the discovery of the borrowed light of the moon, and an evolutionary conception of animal and human life – made Anaxagoras at once the Copernicus and Darwin of his age. The Athenians might have forgiven him these aperçus had he not neglected his nous in explaining the events of nature and history; perhaps they suspected that this nous, like Euripides' deus ex machina, was a device for saving the author's skin. Aristotle notes that Anaxagoras sought natural explanations everywhere. When a ram with a single horn in the center of its forehead was brought to Pericles, and a soothsayer interpreted it as a supernatural omen, Anaxagoras had the animal's skull cleft, and showed that the brain, instead of filling both sides of the cranium, had grown upward towards the center, and so had produced the solitary horn. He aroused the simple by giving a natural explanation of meteors, and reduced many mythical figures to personified abstractions.

The Athenians took him good-humoredly for a time, merely nicknaming him nous. But when no other way could be found of weakening Pericles, Cleon, his demagogic rival, brought a formal indictment of impiety again Anaxagoras on the charge that he had described the sun (still to the people a god) as a mass of stone on fire; and pursued the case so relentlessly that the philosopher, despite Pericles' brave defense of him, was convicted. Having no taste for hemlock, Anaxagoras fled to Lampsacus on the Hellespont, where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy. When new was brought to him that the Athenians had condemned him to death, h said, "Nature has long since condemned both them and me." He died a few years later, aged seventy-three.

The backwardness of the Athenians in astronomy was reflected in their calendar. There was no general Greek calendar: every state had its own; an each of the four possible points for beginning a new year was adopted some where in Greece; even the months changed their names across frontiers. The Attic calendar reckoned months by the moon, and years by the sun. As twelve lunar months made only 360 days, a thirteenth month was added every second year to bring the calendar into harmony with the sun and the seasons. Since this made the year ten days too long, Solon introduced the custom of having alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days, arranged into three week (dekades) of ten (occasionally nine) days each; and as an excess of four days still remained, the Greeks omitted one month every eighth year. In this incredibly devious way they at last arrived at a year of 365¼ days. [Herodotus remarks on the superior calendar of the Egyptians. From Egypt the Greeks took the gnomon, or sundial, and from Asia the clepsydra, or water clock, as their instruments for measuring time.]

Meanwhile a modest degree of progress was made in terrestrial science Anaxagoras correctly explained the annual overflow of the Nile as due to the spring thaws and rains of Ethiopia. Greek geologists attributed the Straits of Gibraltar to a cleaving earthquake, and the Aegean isles to a subsiding sea. Xanthus of Lydia, about 496, surmised that the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were formerly connected at Suez; and Aeschylus noted the belief of his time that Sicily had been torn asunder from Italy by a convulsion of the earth. Scylax of Caria (521-485) explored the whole coast of the Mediterranean an the Black Sea. No Greek seems to have dared so adventurous a voyage of discovers, as that which the Carthaginian Hanno, with a fleet of sixty ships, led through Gibraltar some 2600 miles down the west coast of Africa (ca. 490). Maps of the Mediterranean world were common in Athens at the end of the fifth century. Physics, so far as we know, remained undeveloped, though the curvatures of the Parthenon shows considerable knowledge of optics. The Pythagoreans, towards 450, announced the most lasting of Greek scientific hypotheses – the atomic constitution of matter. Empedocles and others expounded a theory of the evolution of man from lower forms of life, and described the slow advance of man from savagery to civilization.

The epochal event in the history of Greek science during the Periclean age was the rise of rational medicine. Even in the fifth century Greek medicine was in large measure bound up with religion, and the treatment of disease was still practiced by the temple priests of Asclepius. This temple therapy used a combination of empirical medicine with impressive ritual and charms that touched and released the imagination of the patient; possibly hypnosis and some form of anesthesia were also employed.' Secular medicine competed with this ecclesiastical medicine. Though both groups ascribed their origin to Asclepius, the profane Asclepiads rejected religious aids, made no claim to miraculous cures, and gradually placed medicine upon a rational basis.

Secular medicine, in fifth-century Greece, took form in four great schools: at Cos and Cnidus in Asia Minor, at Crotona in Italy, and in Sicily. At Acragas Empedocles, half philosopher and half miracle man, shared medical honors with the rational practitioner Acton." As far back as 520 , we read of the physician Democedes, who, born at Crotona, practiced medicine in Aegina, Athens, Samos, and Susa, cured Darius and Queen Atossa, and returned to spend his last days in the city of his birth. At Crotona, too, the Pythagorean school produced the most famous of Greek physicians before Hippocrates. Alcmaeon has been called the real father of Greek medicine," but he is clearly a late name in a long line of secular medicos whose origin is lost beyond the horizons of history. Early in the fifth century he published a work On Nature (peri physeos) – the usual title, in Greece, for a general discussion of natural science. He, first of the Greeks, so far as we know, located the optic nerve and the Eustachian tubes, dissected animals, explained the physiology of sleep, recognized the brain as the central organ of thought, and defined health Pythagoreanly as a harmony of the parts of the body. At Cnidus the dominating figure was Euryphron, who composed a medical summary known as the Cnidian Sentences, explained pleurisy as a disease of the lungs, ascribed many illnesses to constipation, and became famous for his success as an obstetrician. An unmerry war raged between the schools of Cos and Cnidus; for the Cnidians, disliking Hippocrates' penchant for basing "prognosis" upon general pathology, insisted upon a careful classification of each ailment, and a treatment of it on specific lines. In the end, by a kind of philosophical justice, many of the Cnidian writings found their way into the Hippocratic Collection.

As we see Hippocrates in Suidas' thumbnail biography, he appears as the outstanding physician of his time. He was born in Cos in the same year as Democritus; despite their far-separated homes the two became great friends, and perhaps the "laughing philosopher" had some share in the secularization of medicine. Hippocrates was the son of a physician, and grew up and practiced among the thousands of invalids and tourists who came to "take the waters" in the hot springs of Cos. His teacher, Herodicus of Selymbria, formed his art by accustoming him to rely upon diet and exercise rather than upon drugs. Hippocrates won such repute that rulers like Perdiccas of Macedon and Artaxerxes I of Persia were among his patients; and in 430 Athens sent for him to try his hand at staying the great plague. His friend Democritus shamed him by completing a century, while the great physician died at the age of eighty-three.

Nothing in medical literature could be more heterogeneous than the collection of treatises anciently ascribed to Hippocrates. Here are textbooks for physicians, counsels for laymen, lectures for students, reports of researches and observations, clinical records of interesting cases, and essays by Sophists interested in the scientific or philosophical aspects of medicine. The forty-two clinical records are the only examples of their kind for the next seventeen hundred years; and they set a high standard of honesty by confessing that in sixty per cent of the cases the disease, or the treatment, proved fatal. Of all these compositions only four are by general consent from the pen of Hippocrates – the "Aphorisms," the "Prognostic," the "Regimen in Acute Diseases," and the monograph "On Wounds in the Head"; the remainder of the Corpus Hippocraticum is by a variety of authors ranging from the fifth to the second century b.c. There is a fair amount of nonsense in the assortment, but probably not more than the future will find in the treatises and histories of the present day. Much of the material is fragmentary, and takes a loose aphoristic form verging now and then upon Heracleitean obscurity. Among the "Aphorisms" is the famous remark that "Art is long, but time is fleeting."

The historical role of Hippocrates and his successors was the liberation of medicine from both religion and philosophy. Occasionally, as in the treatise on "Regimen," prayer is advised as an aid; but the page-by-page tone of the Collection is a resolute reliance upon rational therapy. The essay on "The Sacred Disease" directly attacks the theory that ailments are caused by the gods; all diseases, says the author, have natural causes. Epilepsy, which the people explained as possession by a demon, is not excepted: "Men continue to believe in its divine origin because they are at a loss to understand it . . . . Charlatans and quacks, having no treatment that would help, concealed and sheltered themselves behind superstition, and called this illness sacred in order that their complete ignorance might not be revealed." The mind of Hippocrates was typical of the Periclean time spirit – imaginative but realistic, averse to mystery and weary of myth, recognizing the value of religion, but struggling to understand the world in rational terms. The influence of the Sophists can be felt in this move for the emancipation of medicine; and indeed, philosophy so powerfully affected Greek therapy that the science had to fight against philosophical as well as theological impediments. Hippocrates insists that philosophical theories have no place in medicine, and that treatment must proceed by careful observation and accurate recording of specific cases and facts. He does not quite realize the value of experiment; but he is resolved to be guided by experience.

The natal infection of Hippocratic medicine with philosophy appears in the once famous doctrine of "humors," The body, says Hippocrates, is compounded of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; that man enjoys the most perfect health in whom these elements are duly proportioned and mingled; pain is the defect or excess of one "humor," or its isolation from the rest. This theory outlived all the other medical hypotheses of antiquity; it was abandoned only in the last century, and perhaps survives by transmigration in the doctrine of hormones or glandular secretions today. Since the behavior of the "humors" was considered subject to climate and diet, and the most prevalent ailments in Greece were colds, pneumonia, and malaria, Hippocrates (?) wrote a brief treatise on "Airs, Waters, Places" in relation to health. "One may expose oneself confidently to cold," we are told, "except after eating or exercise . . . . It is not good for the body not to be exposed to the cold of winter." The scientific physician, wherever he settles, will study the effects, upon the local population, of the winds and the seasons, the water supply and the nature of the soil.

The weakest point in Hippocratic medicine was diagnosis. There was, apparently, no taking of the pulse; fever was judged by simple touch, and auscultation was direct. Infection was understood in the case of scabies, ophthalmia, and phthisis." The Corpus contains excellent clinical pictures of epilepsy, epidemic parotitis, puerperal septicemia, and quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers. There is no mention in the Collection of smallpox, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, or syphilis; and no clear mention of typhoid fever. The treatises on "Regimen" move towards preventive medicine by advocating "prodiagnosis" – an attempt to catch the first symptoms of a disease, and nip it in the bud. Hippocrates was particularly fond of "prognosis": the good physician, he believed, will learn by experience to foresee the effects of various bodily conditions, and be able to predict from the first stages of a disease the course that it will follow. Most diseases reach a crisis in which either the illness or the patient comes to an end; the almost Pythagorean calculation of the day on which the crisis should appear was a characteristic element of Hippocratic theory. If in these crises the natural heat of the body can overcome the morbid matter and discharge it, the patient is cured. In any cure nature – i.e., the powers and constitution of the body – is the principal healer; all that the physician can do is to remove or reduce the impediments to this natural defense and recuperation. Hence Hippocratic treatment makes little use of drugs, but depends chiefly upon fresh air, emetics, suppositories, enemas, cupping, bloodletting, fomentations, ointments, massage, and hydrotherapy. The Greek pharmacopoeia was reassuringly small, and consisted largely of purgatives. Skin troubles were treated with sulphur baths, and by administering the oil of dolphin livers. "Live a healthy life," Hippocrates advises, "and you are not likely to fall ill, except through epidemic or accident. If you do fall ill, proper regimen will give you the best chance of recovery." Fasting was often prescribed, if the strength of the patient allowed; for "the more we nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure them." In general "a man should have only one meal a day, unless he have a very dry belly."

Anatomy and physiology made slow progress in Greece, and owed much of this to the examination of animal entrails in the practice of augury. A little brochure "On the Heart," in the Hippocratic Collection, describes the ventricles, the great vessels, and their valves. Syennesis of Cyprus and Diogenes of Crete wrote descriptions of the vascular system, and Diogenes knew the significance of the pulse. Empedocles recognized that the heart is the center of the vascular system, and described it as the organ by which the pneuma, or vital breath (oxygen?), is carried through the blood vessels to every part of the body. The Corpus, following Alcmaeon, makes the brain the seat of consciousness and thought; "Through it we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good."

Surgery was still for the most part an unspecialized activity of advanced general practitioners, though the armies had surgeons on their staffs. The Hippocratic literature describes trephining operations, and its treatment for dislocations of shoulder or jaw are "modern" in everything except anesthesia. A votive tablet from the temple of Asclepius at Athens shows a folding case containing scalpels of various forms. The little museum at Epidaurus has preserved for us ancient forceps, probes, scalpels, catheters, and specula essentially like those that are used today; and certain statues there are apparently models illustrating methods for reducing dislocations of the hip. The Hippocratic treatise "On the Physician" gives detailed directions for the preparation of the operating room, the arrangement of natural and artificial light, the cleanliness of the hands, the care and use of instruments, the position of the patient, the bandaging of wounds, etc.

It is clear from these and other passages that Greek medicine in Hippocrates' days had made great advances, technically and socially. Heretofore Greek physicians had migrated from city to city as need called them, like the Sophists of their time or the preachers of our own. Now they settled down, opened iatreia – "heating places," or offices – and treated patients there or at the patients' homes. Women physicians were numerous, and were usually employed for diseases of their sex; some of them wrote authoritative treatises on the care of the skin and the hair. The state exacted no public examination of prospective practitioners, but required satisfactory evidence of an apprenticeship or tutelage to a recognized physician. City governments reconciled socialized with private medicine by engaging doctors to attend to public health, and to give medical treatment to the poor; the best of such state physicians, like Democedes, received two talents ($12,000) a year. There were, of course, many quacks and, as always, an inexhaustible supply of omniscient amateurs. The profession, as in all generations, suffered from its dishonest or incompetent minority; and like other peoples the Greeks revenged themselves upon the uncertainties of medicine by jokes almost as endless as those that wreak their vengeance upon marriage.

Hippocrates raised the profession to a higher standing by his emphasis on medical ethics. He was a teacher as well as a practitioner, and the famous oath ascribed to him may have been designed to ensure the loyalty of the student to his instructor. [The oath is regarded as deriving from the Hippocratic school rather than from the master himself; but Erotian, writing in the first century a.d., attributes it to Hippocrates.]

The Hippocratic Oath

I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Hvgiaea, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, to the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the physician's oath, but to nobody else. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein. Into whatsoever houses I enter I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets. Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain forever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.

The physician, Hippocrates adds, should maintain a becoming exterior, keeping his person clean and his clothing neat. He must always remain calm, and must make his behavior inspire the patient with confidence." He must

keep a careful watch over himself, and . . . say only what is absolutely necessary . . . . When you enter a sick man's room, bear in mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners . . . self-control, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done . . . . I urge you not to be too unkind, but to consider carefully your patient's superabundance or means. Sometimes give your services for nothing; and if there be an opportunity of serving a stranger who is in financial straits, give him full assistance. For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art.

If, in addition to all this, the physician studies and practices philosophy, he becomes the ideal of his profession; for "a physician who is a lover of wisdom is the equal of a god."

Greek medicine shows no essential advance upon the medical and surgical knowledge of Egypt a thousand years before the various Fathers of Medicine; in the matter of specialization the Greek development seems to have fallen short of the Egyptian. From another point of view we must hold the Greeks in high esteem, for not until the nineteenth century of our era was any substantial improvement made upon their medical practice or theory. In general, Greek science went as far as could be expected without instruments of observation and precision, and without experimental methods. It would have done better had it not been harassed by religion and discouraged by philosophy. At a time when many young men in Athens were taking up with enthusiasm the study of astronomy and comparative anatomy, the progress of science was halted by obscurantist legislation, and the persecutions of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; while the famous "turning around" of Socrates and the Sophists from the external to the internal world, from physics to ethics, drew Greek thought from the problems of nature and evolution to those of metaphysics and morals. Science stood still for a century while Greece succumbed to the charms of philosophy.

The age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the number and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated. Every issue that agitates the world today was bruited about in ancient Athens, and with such freedom and eagerness that all Greece except its youth was alarmed. Many cities – above all, Sparta – forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, "on account of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions" (says Athenaeus) "to which they give rise." But in Periclean Athens the "dear delight" of philosophy captured the imagination of the educated classes; rich men opened their homes and salons in the manner of the French Enlightenment; philosophers were lionized, and clever arguments were applauded like sturdy blows at the Olympic games. When, in 432, a war of swords was added to the war of words, the excitement of the Athenian mind became a fever in which all soberness of thought and judgment was consumed. The fever subsided for a time after the martyrdom of Socrates, or was dissipated from Athens to other centers of Greek life; even Plato, who had known the very height and crisis of it, became exhausted after sixty years of the new game, and envied Egypt the inviolable orthodoxy and quiet stability of its thought. No age until the Renaissance would know such enthusiasm again.

Plato was the culmination of a development that began with Parmenides; he played Hegel to Parmenides' Kant; and though he scattered condemnation lavishly, he never ceased to reverence his metaphysical father. In the little town of Flea, on the western coast of Italy, 450 years before Christ, there began for Europe that philosophy of idealism which was to wage through every subsequent century an obstinate war against materialism. The mysterious problem of knowledge, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, between the unseen real and the unreal seen, was flung into the caldron of European thought, and was to boil or simmer there through Greek and medieval days until, in Kant, it would explode again in a philosophical revolution.

As Kant was "awakened" by Hume, so Parmenides was aroused to philosophy by Xenophanes; perhaps his was one of many minds stirred by Xenophanes' declaration that the gods were myths, and that there was only one reality, which was both world and God. Parmenides studied with the Pythagoreans also, and absorbed something of their passion for astronomy. But he did not lose himself in the stars. Like most Greek philosophers he was interested in living affairs and the state; Elea commissioned him to draw up for it a code of laws, which it liked so well that its magistrates were thenceforth required to decide all cases by that code. Possibly as a recreational aside in a busy life he composed a philosophical poem On Nature, of which some 160 verses survive, enough to make us regret that Parmenides did not write prose. The poet announces, with a twinkle in his eye, that a goddess has delivered to him a revelation: that all things are one; that motion, change, and development are unreal-phantasms of superficial, contradictory, untrustworthy sense; that beneath these mere appearances lies an unchanging, homogeneous, indivisible, indissoluble, motionless unity, which is the only Being, the only Truth, and the only God. Heracleitus said, Panta rei, all all things changre; Parmenides says, Hen ta panta, all things are one, and never change. At times, like Xenophanes, he speaks of this One as the universe, and calls it spheroidal and finite; at times, in an idealistic vision, he identifies Being with Thought, and sins, "One thing are Thinking and Being,"' as if to say that for us things exist only in so far as we are conscious of them. Beginning and end, birth and death, formation and destruction, arc of forms only; the One Real never begins and never ends; there is no Becoming, there is only Being. Motion, too, is unreal, it assumes the passage of something from where it is to where there is nothing, or empty space; but empty space, Not Being, cannot be; there is no void; the One fills every nook and cranny of the world, and is forever at rest.

It was not to be expected that men would listen patiently to all this; and apparently the Parmenidean Rest became the target of a thousand metaphysical assaults. The significance of Parmenides' subtle follower, Zeno of Elea, lay in an attempt to show that the ideas of plurality and motion were, at least theoretically, as impossible as Parmemdes' motionless One. As an exercise in perversity, and to amuse his youth, Zeno published a book of paradoxes, of which nine have come down to us, and of which three will suffice. First, said Zeno, any body, in order to move to point A, must reach B, the middle of its course toward A; to arrive at B it must reach C, the middle of its course toward B; and so on to infinity. Since an infinity of time would be required for this infinite series of motions, the motion of any body to any point is impossible in a finite time. Second, as a variant of the first, swift-footed Achilles can never overtake the leisurely tortoise; for as often as Achilles reaches the point which the tortoise occupied, in that same moment the tortoise has moved beyond that point. Third, a flying arrow is really at rest; for at any moment of its flight it is at only one point in space, that is, is motionless; its motion, however actual to the senses, is logically, metaphysically unreal.

Zeno came to Athens about 450, perhaps with Parmemdes, and set the impressionable city astir by his skill in reducing any kind of philosophical theory to absurd consequences. Timon of Phlius described

The two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,
Say what one would, would argue it untrue.

This pre-Socratic gadfly was (in the relative sense which our ignorance of the past compels us to. give to such phrases) the father of logic, as Parmenides was for Europe the father of metaphysics. Socrates, who denounced Zeno's dialectical method, imitated it so zealously that men had to kill him in order to have peace of mind. Zeno's influence upon the skeptical Sophists was decisive, and in the end it was his skepticism that triumphed in Pyrrho and Carneades. In his old age, having become a man "of great wisdom and learning," he complained that the philosophers had taken too seriously the intellectual pranks of his youth. His final escapade was more fatal to him: he joined in an attempt to depose the tyrant Nearches at Elea, ,vas foiled and arrested, tortured and killed." He bore his sufferings bravely, as if to associate his name so soon with the Stoic philosophy.

The discussion of these paradoxes has gone on from Plato to Bertrand Russell, and may continue as long as words are mistaken for things. The assumptions that invalidate the puzzles are that "infinite" is a thing instead of merely a word indicating the inability of the mind to conceive an absolute end; and that time, space, and motion are discontinuous, i.e., are composed of separate points or parts.

As Parmenides' denial of motion and change was a reaction against the fluid and unstable metaphysics of Hercleitus, so his monism was a counterblast to the atomism of the later Pythagoreans. For these had developed the number theory of their founder into the doctrine that all things are composed of numbers in the sense of indivisible units. When Philolaus of Thebes added that "all things take place by necessity and by harmony," everything was ready for the Atomic school in Greek philosophy.

About 435 Leucippus of Miletus came to Elea, and studied under Zeno; there, perhaps, he heard of the number atomism of the Pythagoreans, for Zeno had aimed some of his subtlest paradoxes at this doctrine of plurality. Leucippus finally settled in Abdera, a flourishing Ionian colony in Thrace. Of his direct teaching only one fragment remains: "Nothing happens without a reason, but all things occur for a reason, and of necessity." Presumably it was in answer to Zeno and Parmenides that Leucippus developed the notion of the void, or empty space; in this way he hoped to make motion theoretically possible as well as sensibly actual. The universe, said Leucippus, contains atoms and space and nothing else. Atoms tumbling about in a vortex fall by necessity into the first forms of all things, like attaching itself to like; in this way arose the planets and the stars." All things, even the human soul, are composed of atoms.

Democritus was the pupil or associate of Leucippus in developing the atomistic philosophy into a rounded system of materialism. His father was a man of wealth and position in Abdera; from him, we are told, Democritus inherited a hundred talents ($600,000), most of which he spent in travel: Unconfirmed stories send him as far as Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylonia, Persia, and India. "Among my contemporaries," he says, "I have traveled over the largest portion of the earth in search of things the most remote, and have seen the most climates and countries, and heard the largest number of thinkers." At Boeotian Thebes he stopped long enough to imbibe the number atomism of Philolaus. Having spent his money he became a philosopher, lived simply, devoted himself to study and contemplation, and said, "I would rather discover a single demonstration" (in geometry) "than win the throne of Persia." There was some modesty in him, for he shunned dialectic and discussion, founded no school, and sojourned in Athens without making himself known to any of the philosophers there. Diogenes Laertius gives a long list of his publications in mathematics, physics, astronomy, navigation, geography, anatomy, physiology, psychology, psychotherapy, medicine, philosophy, music, and art. Thrasyllus called him pentathlos in philosophy, and some contemporaries gave him the very name of Wisdom (sophia). His range was as wide as Aristotle's, his style as highly praised as Plato's. Francis Bacon, in no perverse moment, called him the greatest of ancient philosophers.

He begins, like Parmenides, with a critique of the senses. For practical purposes we may trust them; but the moment we begin to analyze their evidence we find ourselves taking away from the external world layer after layer of the color, temperature, flavor, savor, sweetness, bitterness, and sound that the senses lay upon it; these "secondary qualities" are in ourselves or in the total process of perception, not in the objective thing; in an earless world a falling forest would make no noise, and the ocean, however angry, would never roar. "By convention (nomos) sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void." Hence the senses give us only obscure knowledge, or opinion; genuine knowledge comes only by investigation and thought. "Verily, we know nothing. Truth is buried deep . . . . We know nothing for certain, but only the changes produced in our body by the forces that impinge upon it." All sensations are due to atoms discharged by the object and falling upon our sense organs" All senses are forms of touch.

The atoms that constitute the world differ in figure, size, and weight; all have a tendency downward; in the resultant rotatory motion like atoms combine with like and produce the planets and the stars. No noun, or intelligence, guides the atoms, no Empedoclean "love" or "hate" assorts them, but necessity – the natural operation of inherent causes – rules over all. There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our ignorance." The quantity of matter remains always the same; none is ever created, none ever destroyed;" only the atom combinations change. Forms, however, are innumerable; even of worlds there is probably an "infinite" number, coming into being and passing away in an interminable pageantry." Organic beings arose originally from the moist earth." Everything in man is made of atoms; the soul is composed of tiny, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. Mind, soul, vital heat, vital principle, are all one and the same thing; they are not confined to men or animals, but are diffused throughout the world; and in man and other animals the mental atoms whereby we think are distributed throughout the body.

Nevertheless these fine atoms that constitute the soul are the noblest and most wonderful part of the body. The wise man will cultivate thought, will free himself from passion, superstition, and fear, and will seek in contemplation and understanding the modest happiness available to human life. Happiness does not come from external goods; a man "must become accustomed to finding within himself the sources of his enjoyment." "Culture is better than riches . . . . No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge." Happiness is fitful, and "sensual pleasure affords only a brief satisfaction"; one comes to a more lasting content by acquiring peace and serenity of soul (ataraxia), good cheer (euthumia), moderation (metriotes), and a certain order and symmetry of life (biou symmietria): We may learn much from the animals – "spinning from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the nightingale and the swan"; but "strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man." So, like the heretics of Victorian England, Democritus raises upon his scandalous metaphysics a most presentable ethic. "Good actions should be done not out of compulsion but from conviction; not from hope of reward, but for their own sake . . . . A man should feel more shame in doing evil before himself than before all the world,"

He illustrated his own precepts, and perhaps justified his counsels, by living to the age of a hundred and nine, or, as some say, to merely ninety, years. Diogenes Laertius relates that when Democritus read in public his most important work, the megas diakosmos, or Great World, the city of Abdera presented him with a hundred talents ($600,000); but perhaps Abdera had depreciated its currency. When someone asked the secret of his longevity, he answered that he ate honey daily, and bathed his body with oil. Finally, having lived long enough, he reduced his food each day, determined to starve himself by easy degrees. "He was exceedingly old," says Diogenes,

and appeared to be at the point of death. His sister lamented that he would die during the festival of the Thesmophoria, which would prevent her from discharging her duties to the goddess. So he bade her be of good cheer, and to bring him hot loaves (or a little honey) every day. And by applying these to his nostrils he kept himself alive over the festival. But when the three days of the feast were passed he expired without any pain, as Hipparchus assures us, having lived one hundred and nine years.

His city gave him a public funeral, and Timon of Athens praised him." He founded no school; but he formulated for science its most famous hypothesis, and gave to philosophy a system which, denounced by every other, has survived them all, and reappears in every generation.

Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains everything but the world, the other everything but life. To merge these half-truths it was necessary to find some dynamic principle that could mediate between stricture and growth, between things and thought. Anaxagoras sought such a principle in a cosmic Mind; Empedocles sought it in the inherent forces that made for evolution.

This Leonardo of Acragas was born in the year of Marathon, of a wealthy family whose passion for horse racing gave no promise of philosophy. He studied for a while with the Pythagoreans, but in his exuberance he divulged some of their esoteric doctrine, and was expelled." He took very much to heart the notion of transmigration, and announced with poetic sympathy that he had been "in bygone times a youth, a maiden, and a flowering shrub; a bird, yes, and a fish that swims in silence through the deep sea." He condemned the eating of animal food as a form of cannibalism; for were not these animals the reincarnation of human beings? All men, he believed, had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly place by some impurity or violence; and he was certain that he felt in his own soul intimations of a prenatal divinity. "From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth!" Convinced of his divine origin, he put golden sandals upon his feet, clothed his body with purple robes, and crowned his head with laurel; he was, as he modestly explained to his countrymen, a favorite of Apollo; only to his friends did he confess that he was a god. He claimed supernatural powers, performed magic rites, and sought by incantations to wrest from the other world the secrets of human destiny. He offered to cure diseases by the enchantment of his words, and cured so many that the populace half believed his claims. Actually he was a learned physician fertile in suggestions to medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical art. He was a brilliant orator; he "invented," says Aristotle," the principles of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who peddled them in Athens. He was an engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by draining marshes and changing the courses of streams. He was a courageous statesman who, though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow aristocracy, refused the dictatorship, and established a moderate democracy. He was a poet, and wrote On Nature and On Purifications in such excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the poets, and Lucretius complimented him with imitation. "When he went to the Olympic games," says Diogenes Laertius, "he was the object of general attention, so that there was no mention made of anybody else in comparison with him." Perhaps, after all, he was a god.

The 470 lines that survive give us only hazardous intimations of his philosophy. He was an eclectic, and saw some wisdom in every system. He deprecated Parmenides' wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed each sense as an "avenue to understanding." Sensation is due to effluxes of particles proceeding from the object and falling upon the "pores" (poroi) of the senses; therefore light needs time to come from the sun to us. Night is caused by the earth intercepting the rays of the sun. All things are composed of four elements – air, fire, water, and earth. Operating upon these are two basic forces, attraction and repulsion, Love and Hate. The endless combinations and separations of the elements by these forces produce the world of things and history. When Love or the tendency to combine is dominant, matter develops into plants, and organisms take higher and higher forms. Just as transmigration weaves all souls into one biography, so in nature there is no sharp distinction between one species or genus and another; e.g., "Hair and leaves and the thick feathers of birds, and the scales that form on tough limbs, are the same thing." Nature produces every kind of organ and form; Love unites them, sometimes into monstrosities that perish through maladaptation, sometimes into organisms capable of propagating themselves and meeting the conditions of survival. All higher forms develop from lower forms. At first both sexes are in the same body; then they become separated, and each longs to be reunited with the other. To this process of evolution corresponds a process of dissolution, in which Hate, or the force of division, tears down the complex structure that Love has built. Slowly organisms and planets revert to more and more primitive forms, until all things are merged again in a primeval and amorphous mass. These alternating processes of development and decay go on endlessly, in each part and in the whole; the two forces of combination and separation, Love and Hate, Good and Evil, fight and balance each other in a vast universal rhythm of Life and Death. So old is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.

The place of God in this process is not clear, for in Empedocles it is difficult to separate fact from metaphor, philosophy from poetry. Sometimes he identifies deity with the cosmic sphere itself, sometimes with the life of all life, or the mind of all mind; but he knows that we shall never be able to form a just idea of the basic and original creative power. "We cannot bring God near so as to reach him with our eyes and lay hold of him with our hands . . . . For he has no human head attached to bodily members, nor do two branching arms dangle from his shoulders; he has neither feet nor knees nor any hairy parts. No; he is only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts." And Empedocles concludes with the wise and weary counsel of old age:

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools? For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of mam°

In his last years he became more distinctly a preacher and prophet, absorbed in the theory of reincarnation, and imploring his fellow men to purge away the guilt that had exiled them from heaven. With the assorted wisdom of Buddha, Pythagoras, and Schopenhauer he warned the human race to abstain from marriage, procreation, and beans. When, in 415, the Athenians besieged Syracuse, Empedocles did what he could to help its resistance, and thereby offended Acragas, which hated Syracuse with all the animosity of kinship. Banished from his native city, he went to the mainland of Greece and died, some say, in Megara. But Hippobotus, says Diogenes Laertius, tells how Empedocles, after bringing back to full life a woman who had been given up for dead, rose from the feast that celebrated her recovery, disappeared, and was never seen again. Legend said that he had leaped into Etna's fiery mouth so that he might die without leaving a trace behind him, and thereby confirm his divinity. But the elemental fire betrayed him; it flung up his brazen slippers and left them, like heavy symbols of mortality, upon the crater's edge.

It is a reproof to those who think of Greece as synonymous with Athens, that none of the great Hellenic thinkers before Socrates belonged to that city, and only Plato after him. The fate of Anaxagoras and Socrates indicates that religious conservatism was stranger in Athens than in the colonies, where geographical separation had broken some of the bonds of tradition. Perhaps Athens would have remained obscurantist and intolerant to the point of stupidity had it not been for the growth of a cosmopolitan trading class, and the coming of the Sophists to Athens.

The debates in the Assembly, the trials before the heliaea, and the rising need for the ability to think with the appearance of logic and to speak with clarity and persuasion, conspired with the wealth and curiosity of an imperial society to create a demand for something unknown in Athens before Pericles – formal higher education in letters, oratory, science, philosophy, and statesmanship. The demand was met at first not by the organization of universities but by wandering scholars who engaged lecture halls, gave there their courses of instruction, and then passed on to other cities to repeat them. Some of these men, like Protagoras, called themselves Sophistai – i.e., teachers of wisdom." The word was accepted as equivalent to our "university professor," and bore no derogatory connotation until the conflict between religion and philosophy led to conservative attacks upon the Sophists, and the commercialism of certain of them provoked Plato to darken their name with the imputations of venal sophistry that now cling to it. Perhaps the general public entertained a vague dislike for these teachers from their first appearance, since their costly instruction in logic and rhetoric could be bought only by the well to do, and gave these an advantage in trying their cases before the courts. It is true that the more famous Sophists, like most skilled practitioners in any field, charged all that their patrons could be persuaded to pay; this is the final law of prices everywhere. Protagoras and Gorgias, we are told, demanded ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the education of a single pupil. But lesser Sophists were content with reasonably moderate fees; Prodicus, famous throughout Greece, asked from one to fifty drachmas for admission to his courses.

Protagoras, the most renowned of the Sophists, was born in Abdera a generation before Democritus. In his lifetime he was the better known of the two, and the more influential; we surmise his repute from the furore created by his visits to Athens." Even Plato, who was not often intentionally fair to the Sophists, respected him, and described him as a man of high character. In the Platonic dialogue that is named after him Protagoras makes a much better showing than the argumentative young Socrates; here it is Socrates who talks like a Sophist, and Protagoras who behaves like a gentleman and a philosopher, never losing his temper, never jealous of another's brilliance, never taking tile argument too seriously, and never anxious to speak. He admits that he undertakes to teach his pupils prudence in private and public matters, the orderly management of home and family, the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking, and the ability, to understand and direct affairs of state. He defends his high fees by saying that it is his custom, when a pupil objects to the sum asked, to agree to receive as adequate whatever amount the pupil may name as just in a solemn statement before some sacred shrine – a rash procedure fur a teacher who doubted the existence of the gods. Diogenes Laertius accuses him of being the first to "arm disputants with the weapon of sophism," a charge that would have pleased Socrates; but Diogenes adds that Protagoras "was also the first to invent that sort of argument which is called Socratic" – which might not have pleased Socrates.

It was but one of his many distinctions that he founded European grammar and philology. He treated of the right use of words, says Plato, and was the first to distinguish tile three genders of nouns, and certain tenses and moods of verbs. But his chief significance lay in this, that with him, rather than with Socrates, began the subjective standpoint in philosophy. Unlike the Ionians he was less interested in things than in thought – i.e., in the whole process of sensation, perception, understanding, and expression. Whereas Parmenides rejected sensation as a guide to truth, Proragoras, like Locke, accepted it as the only means of knowledge, and refused to admit any transcendental – suprasensual – reality. No absolute truth can be found, said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold far given men under given conditions; contradictory assertions can be equally true fur different persons ox at different times: All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative and subjective; "man is the measure of all things – of those that are, chat they are, and of those that are not, that they are not." To the historical eye a whole world begins to tremble when Protagoras announces this simple principle of humanism and relativity; all established truths and sacred principles crack; individualism has found a voice and a philosophy; and the supernatural bases of social order threaten to melt away.

The far-reaching skepticism implicit in this famous pronouncement might have remained theoretical and safe had not Protagoras applied it for a moment to theology. Among a group of distinguished men in the home of the unpopular freethinker, Euripides, Protagoras read a treatise whose first sentence made a stir in Athens. "With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing: the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of our mortal life." The Athenian Assembly, frightened by that ominous prelude, banished Protagoras, ordered all Athenians to surrender any copies they might have of his writings, and burned the books in the market place. Protagoras fled to Sicily, and, story tells us, was drowned on the way.

Gorgias of Leontim carried on this skeptical revolution, but had the good sense to spend most of his life outside of Athens. His career was typical of the union between philosophy and statesmanship in Greece. Born about 483, he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Empedocles, and became so famous in Sicily as an orator and a teacher of oratory that in 427 he was sent by Leontini as an ambassador to Athens. At the Olympic games of 408 he captivated a great crowd by an address in which he appealed to the warring Greeks to make peace among themselves in order to face with unity and confidence the resurrected power of Persia. Traveling from city to city, he expounded his views in a style of oratory so euphuistically ornate, so symmetrically antithetical in idea and phrase, so delicately poised between poetry and prose, that he had no difficulty in attracting students who offered him a hundred minas for a course of instruction. His book On Nature sought to prove three startling propositions: (1) Nothing exists; (2 ) if anything existed it would be unknowable; and (3) if anything were knowable the knowledge of it could not be communicated from one person to another. [These propositions, aiming to discredit the transcendentalism of Parmenides, meant: (1) Nothing exists beyond the senses; (2) if anything existed beyond the senses it would be unknowable, for all knowledge comes through the senses; (3) if anything suprasensual were knowable, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable, since all communication is through the senses.] Nothing else remains of Gorgias' writings. After enjoying the hospitality and fees of many states he settled down in Thessalv, and had the wisdom to consume most of his great fortune before his death. He lived, as all authorities assure us, to at least one hundred and five; and an ancient writer tells us that "though Gorgias attained to the age of one hundred and eight, his body seas not weakened by old age, but to the end of his life be was in sound condition, and his senses were those of a youth."

If the Sophists together constituted a scattered university, Hippias of Elis was a university in himself, and typified the polymath in a world whey knowledge was not yet so vast as to be clearly beyond the grasp of on mind. He taught astronomy and mathematics, and made original contributions to geometry; he was a poet, a musician, and an orator; he lectured o literature, morals, and politics; he was an historian, and laid the foundation of Greek chronology by compiling a list of victors at the Olympic games he was employed by Elis as an envoy to other states; and he knew so many arts and trades that he made with his own hands all his clothing and ornaments:' His work in philosophy was slight but important: he protested against the degenerative artificiality of city life, contrasted nature with law, and called law a tyrant over mankind. Prodicus of Ceos carried on the grammatical work of Protagoras, fixed the parts of speech, and pleased the elders with a fable in which he represented Heracles choosing laborious Virtue instead of easy Vice. Other Sophists were not so pious: Antiphon of Athens followed Democritus into materialism and atheism, and defined justice in terms of expediency; Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (if we may take Plato's word for it) identified right with might, and remarked that the success of villains cast doubt upon the existence of the gods.

All in all, the Sophists must be ranked among the most vital factors in the history of Greece. They invented grammar and logic for Europe; they developed dialectic, analyzed the forms of argument, and taught men how to detect and practice fallacies. Through their stimulus and example reasoning became a ruling passion with the Greeks. By applying logic to language they promoted clarity and precision of thought, and facilitated the accurate transmission of knowledge. Through them prose became a form of literature, and poetry became a vehicle of philosophy. They applied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down, among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellos. "The common opinion" of his time, says Plato, derived "the world and all animals and plants . . . and inanimate substances from . . . some spontaneous and unintelligent cause." Lysias tells of an atheistic society that called itself the kakodaimoniotai, or Devils' Club, and deliberately met and dined on holydays set apart for fasting: Pindar, at the opening of the fifth century, accepted the oracle of Delphi piously; Aeschylus defended it politically; Herodotus, about 450, criticized it timidly; Thucydides, at the end of the century, openly rejected it. Euthyphro complained that when in the Assembly he spoke of oracles, the people laughed at him as an antiquated fool.

The Sophists must not be blamed or credited for all of this; much of it was in the air, and was a natural result of growing wealth, leisure, travel, research, and speculation. Their role in the deterioration of morals was likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism and stoicism. But within these modest limits the Sophists unwittingly quickened disintegration. Most of them, barring a thoroughly human love of money, were men of high character and decent life; but they did not transmit to their pupils the traditions or the wisdom that had made or kept them reasonably virtuous despite their discovery of the secular origin and geographical mutability of morals. Their colonial derivation may have led them to underestimate the value of custom as a peaceful substitute for force or law in maintaining morality and order. To define morality or human worth in terms of knowledge, as Protagoras did a generation before Socrates, was a heady stimulus to thought, but an unsteadying blow to character; the emphasis on knowledge raised the educational level of the Greeks, but it did not develop intelligence as rapidly as it liberated intellect. The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul. The distinction between "Nature" and convention, and the willingness of minor Sophists to argue that what "Nature" permitted was good regardless of custom or law, sapped the ancient supports of Greek morality, and encouraged many experiments in living. Old men mourned the passing of domestic simplicity and fidelity, and the pursuit of pleasure or wealth unchecked by religious restraints.' Plato and Thucydides speak of thinkers and public men who rejected morals as superstitions, and acknowledged no right but strength. This unscrupulous individualism turned the logic and rhetoric of the Sophists into an instrument of legal chicanery and political demagogy, and degraded their broad cosmopolitanism into a cautious reluctance to defend their country, or an unprejudiced readiness to sell it to the highest bidder. The religious peasantry and the conservative aristocrats began to agree with the common citizen of the urban democracy that philosophy had become a danger to the state.

Some of the philosophers themselves joined in the attack upon the Sophists. Socrates condemned them (as Aristophanes was to condemn Socrates) for making error specious with logic and persuasive with rhetoric, and scorned them for taking fees.' He excused his ignorance of grammar on the ground that he could not afford the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus, but only the one-drachma course, which gave merely the rudiments.'s In an ungenial moment he used a merciless and revealing comparison:

It is believed among us, Antiphon, that it is possible to dispose of beauty or of wisdom alike honorably or dishonorably; for if a person sells his beauty for money to anyone that wishes to purchase it, men call him a male prostitute; but if anyone makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be an honorable and worthy admirer, we regard him as prudent. In like manner those who sell their wisdom for money to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it were, prostitutes of wisdom; but whoever makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be deserving, and teaches him all the good that he knows, we consider him to act the part which becomes a good and honorable citizen

Plato could afford to agree with this view, being a rich man. Isocrates began his career with a speech Against the Sophists, became a successful professor of rhetoric, and charged a thousand drachmas ($1000) for a course. Aristotle continued the attack; he defined a Sophist as one who "is only eager to get rich off his apparent wisdom,"°' and accused Protagoras of promising to make the worse appear the better reason."