Critical History of Philosophy

For since those who imparted the precepts of wisdom were eager to use a clear and lucid manner of discourse, the name of the wise man and of wisdom was also applied to the study of eloquence; and this meaning so pleased the Greeks—who, by the study of eloquence, recommended the great benefits that flowed from it to the republic—that masters of eloquence were called, as if by their own proper title, Sophists, that is to say, wise men. i Even though this honor was also held by poets, who were called wise, since the most ancient wise men, and especially those who taught divine matters, used bound speech [verse], and the very art of fabrication was employed for handing down the precepts of wisdom in a peculiar genre of eloquence. k But when wisdom acquired the greatest dignity and authority for its cultivators and teachers, and those who had attained the name of wise men were recommended by many titles of honor and by reverence, l the best institution began to degenerate into arrogance, and those who wished to appear to have cultivated it more than others began to exalt themselves more than the name of wisdom allowed. m Whence Pythagoras, restricting the name of wise man to God alone, the inexhaustible sea of all wisdom, was the first to refuse this appellation as seeming The name of philosophy invented. more arrogant than was becoming to one studious of truth and wisdom, and he invented the name of philosopher. When he had come to Phlius, and had discoursed learnedly and copiously with Leon, the prince of the Phliasians, Leon so admired his talent and eloquence that he asked him in what art he was most confident; but he replied that he knew no art, but was a philosopher, as Cicero relates and elegantly explains the origin of the name. n And although Pythagoras changed the name of wise man to that of a student of wisdom for the sake of modesty, and, moved by the end of his system, determined that wisdom was to be attained only when one had reached the goal of philosophy, o yet soon all that prudently established distinction vanished, and the name of philosophy was said to mean the same as wisdom, and the appellation of philosopher became no less ambitious than that of wise man, so much so that there were not wanting those who said that the ambition of the philosophers—who claimed the study of wisdom for themselves alone and, as if by a silent argument, denied it to the cultivators of other disciplines—was intolerable. p Nor did this long prevail,

i) Hecataeus of Miletus, in DIOG. LAERT. Bk. I, f. 12, who reports that Solon was the first to receive the name of Sophist. But especially PHILOSTRATUS, pref. to the Lives of the Sophists, Works, p. 479, ed. Olear.

j) In such a way, however, that the ancient Sophists treated philosophical arguments, [while] the more recent ones exercised themselves in the mere art of speaking, as PHILOSTRATUS warns, loc. cit., p. 481; whence they became hateful early on; cf. CLERICUS, Art. Crit., Pt. II, Sect. I, ch. 17, p. 337, sqq.

k) ANACREON, ode to the Rose; PINDARUS, Isthmian ode 5; cf. MENAGIUS on LAERT., Bk. I, f. 12.

l) This is demonstrated at length in a

dissertation on the honors shown to the authors and teachers of wisdom among the Barbarians and Greeks, extant in Otio Vindelico, p. 203, sqq.

m) See ARISTOPHANES in the Clouds; ARISTOT., On Sophistical Refutations, Bk. I, ch. 2; concerning which matter, below under Socrates.

n) See JOHANN SCHEFFERUS, On the Nature and Constitution of Italian Philosophy, ch. VII, p. 43, sqq.

o) DIOG. LAERTIUS, Bk. I, f. 12.

p) Thence some, having spurned the labor of fine speaking, returned to forming minds and establishing laws of life; they retained, indeed, the better part (of philosophy), if it could be divided,