Meno). In the later Greek, again, 'sophist' and 'philosopher' became
almost indistinguishable. There was no reproach conveyed by the word; the
additional association, if any, was only that of rhetorician or teacher.
Philosophy had become eclecticism and imitation: in the decline of Greek
thought there was no original voice lifted up 'which reached to a thousand
years because of the god.' Hence the two words, like the characters
represented by them, tended to pass into one another. Yet even here some
differences appeared; for the term 'Sophist' would hardly have been applied
to the greater names, such as Plotinus, and would have been more often used
of a professor of philosophy in general than of a maintainer of particular
tenets.

But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these
senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which the
term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an Athenian,
as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ, have included
Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras, under the specific
class of Sophists? To this question we must answer, No: if ever the term
is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the application is made by an
enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which it is used is neutral.
Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all give a bad import to the word;
and the Sophists are regarded as a separate class in all of them. And in
later Greek literature, the distinction is quite marked between the
succession of philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of
the age of Socrates, who appeared like meteors for a short time in
different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have
been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the
Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so
many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of
Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid