Note 593 — Chapter LXVII · THE DRAMA. — RHETORIC AND DIALECTICS. — THE SOPHISTS.

Thucydidês (iii, 82) specifies very distinctly the cause to which he ascribes the bad consequences which he depicts. He makes no allusion to sophists or sophistical teaching; though Brandis (Gesch. der Gr. Röm. Philos. i, p. 518, not. f.) drags in “the sophistical spirit of the statesmen of that time,” as if it were the cause of the mischief, and as if it were to be found in the speeches of Thucydidês, i, 76, v, 105.

There cannot be a more unwarranted assertion; nor can a learned man like Brandis be ignorant, that such words as “the sophistical spirit,” (Der sophistische Geist,) are understood by a modern reader in a sense totally different from its true Athenian sense.