falsehood of all mankind is reflected.

A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of
the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than the
leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that any
individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in comparison
with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is no real
inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist which
occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the Sophists
in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power to be
contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are no worse
than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be justly
condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be above them.
There is another point of view in which this passage should also be
considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly in the
theological sense, yet in one not wholly different--the world as the hater
of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of gain and
pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the few good and
wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has many heads:
rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the Sophist is the
Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other deceivers have a
piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented as the corrupter of
the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter of him and of itself.

Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have been
applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias and
Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the genius
of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters of youth