foreigners who from time to time visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic
games. The man of genius, the great original thinker, the disinterested
seeker after truth, the master of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an
argument, was separated, even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an
'interval which no geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences,
the interpreter and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of
words, the teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and manners.

2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows that
the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current. When
Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that the art
which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the young
Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen by the
light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,' would lose
their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is nothing
surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether deserved or
not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they were
foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties, that they
excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to account for the
opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato could not have
stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations which occur in
contemporary writers, such as Xenophon and Isocrates. Changes in the
meaning of words can only be made with great difficulty, and not unless
they are supported by a strong current of popular feeling. There is
nothing improbable in supposing that Plato may have extended and envenomed
the meaning, or that he may have done the Sophists the same kind of
disservice with posterity which Pascal did to the Jesuits. But the bad
sense of the word was not and could not have been invented by him, and is
found in his earlier dialogues, e.g. the Protagoras, as well as in the
later.