Gorgias appears to have maintained the same ideas with more moderation and
also with less profundity. He claimed, above all, to be able to make a good
orator. According to Plato, it was he whom Socrates most persistently made
the butt of his sarcasms.

Prodicus, whom Plato himself esteemed, appears to have been principally
preoccupied with the moral problem. He was the author of the famous
apologue which represented Hercules having to choose between two paths, the
one being that of virtue, the other of pleasure. Like Socrates later on, he
too was subject to the terrible accusation of impiety, and underwent
capital punishment. The Sophists furnish the most important epoch in the
history of ancient philosophy; until their advent the philosophic systems
were great poems on the total of all things, known and unknown. The
Sophists opposed these ambitious and precipitate generalizations, in which
imagination had the larger share, and their discovery was to bring
philosophy back to its true starting point by affirming that the first
thing to do, and that before all else, was to know our own mind and its
mechanism. Their error possibly was, while saying that it was the first
thing to do, too often to affirm that it was the only thing to do; still
the fact remains that they were perfectly accurate in their assurance that
it was primary.



CHAPTER III

SOCRATES


Philosophy Entirely Reduced to Morality, and Morality