prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not through professional lawyers. Naturally,
success or failure depended largely on oratorical skill in appealing to popular prejudices.
Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he could hire an expert to write the speech for
him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for instruction in the arts required for success in the
law courts. These arts the Sophists were supposed to teach.
The age of Pericles is analogous, in Athenian history, to the Victorian age in the history of
England. Athens was rich and powerful, not much troubled by wars, and possessed of a
democratic constitution administered by aristocrats. As we have seen in connection with
Anaxagoras, a democratic opposition to Pericles gradually gathered strength, and attacked his
friends one by one. The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 B.C.; * 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 by a court composed of 1501 judges. His two 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,
* It ended in 404 B.C. with the complete overthrow of Athens.