Note 556 — Chapter LXVII · THE DRAMA. — RHETORIC AND DIALECTICS. — THE SOPHISTS.

Isokratês calls both Anaxagoras and Damon, sophists (Or. xv, De Perm. sect. 251), Plutarch, Periklês, c. 4. Ὁ δὲ Δάμων ἐοικεν, ἄκρος ὢν σοφιστὴς, καταδύεσθαι μὲν εἰς τὸ τῆς μουσικῆς ὄνομα, ἐπικρυπτόμενος πρὸς τοὺς πολλοὺς τὴν δεινότητα.

So Protagoras too (in the speech put into his mouth by Plato, Protag. c. 8, p. 316) says, very truly, that there had been sophists from the earliest times of Greece. But he says also, what Plutarch says in the citation just above, that these earlier men refused, intentionally and deliberately, to call themselves sophists, for fear of the odium attached to the name; and that he, Protagoras, was the first person to call himself openly a sophist.

The denomination by which a man is known, however, seldom depends upon himself, but upon the general public, and upon his critics, friendly or hostile. The unfriendly spirit of Plato did much more to attach the title of sophists specially to these teachers, than any assumption of their own.