[492b]
who are the chief sophists and
educate most effectively and mould to their own heart's desire young and
old, men and women?” “When?” said he.
“Why, when,” I said, “the multitude are seated
together1 in assemblies
or in court-rooms or theaters or camps or any other public gathering of a
crowd, and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and
done and approve others, both in excess, with full-throated clamor
1 Cf. Gorg. 490 B, Emerson, Self-Reliance: “It is easy . . . to brook the rage of the cultivated classes . . . . But . . . when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment,” Carlyle, French Revolution: “Great is the combined voice of men . . . . He who can resist that has his footing somewhere beyond time.” For the public as the great sophist cf. Brimley, Essays, p. 224 (The Angel in the House): “The miserable view of life and its purposes which society instils into its youth of both sexes, being still, as in Plato's time, the sophist par excellence of which all individual talking and writing sophists are but feeble copies.” Cf. Zeller, Ph. d. Gr. 4 II. 1. 601 “Die sophistische Ethik ist seiner Ansicht nach die einfache Konsequenz der Gewöhnlichen.” This is denied by some recent critics. The question is a logomachy. Of course there is more than one sophistic ethics. Cf. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, iv. pp. 247 ff., 263 ff., 275. For Plato's attitude toward the sophists see also Polit. 303 C, Phaedr, 260 C, What Plato Said, pp. 14-15, 158.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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