Helen

There are some who are much pleased with themselves if, after setting up an absurd and self-contradictory subject, they succeed in discussing it in tolerable fashion; and men have grown old, some asserting that it is impossible to say, or to gainsay, what is false[*](So Antisthenes and the Cynics; cf. Plat. Soph. 240c.), or to speak on both sides of the same questions, others maintaining that courage and wisdom and justice are identical[*](A reference to the views of Plato and the Academy.), and that we possess none of these as natural qualities, but that there is one sort of knowledge concerned with them all.; and still others waste their time in captious disputations that are not only entirely useless, but are sure to make trouble for their disciples.

For my part, if I observed that this futile affectation had arisen only recently in rhetoric and that these men were priding themselves upon the novelty of their inventions, I should not be surprised at them to such degree; but as it is, who is so backward in learning as not to know that Protagoras and the sophists of his time have left to us compositions of similar character and even far more overwrought than these?

For how could one surpass Gorgias[*](Cf. Isoc. 15.268. Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily, pupil of Teisias, came to Athens on an embassy in 427 B.C.), who dared to assert that nothing exists of the things that are, or Zeno[*](This is Zeno of Elea, in Italy, and not the founder of the Stoic School of philosophy. Zeno and Melissus were disciples of Parmenides.), who ventured to prove the same things as possible and again as impossible, or Melissus who, although things in nature are infinite in number, made it his task to find proofs that the whole is one!

Nevertheless, although these men so clearly have shown that it is easy to contrive false statements on any subject that may be proposed, they still waste time on this commonplace. They ought to give up the use of this claptrap, which pretends to prove things by verbal quibbles, which in fact have long since been refuted, and to pursue the truth,

to instruct their pupils in the practical affairs of our government and train to expertness therein, bearing in mind that likely conjecture about useful things is far preferable to exact knowledge of the useless, and that to be a little superior in important things is of greater worth than to be pre-eminent in petty things that are without value for living.

But the truth is that these men care for naught save enriching themselves at the expense of the youth. It is their “philosophy” applied to eristic disputations[*](eristics, “wordy wrangling” “mere disputation for its own sake”; cf. General Introd., Vol. I, p. xxi and Isoc. 13.1.) that effectively produces this result; for these rhetoricians, who care nothing at all for either private or public affairs, take most pleasure in those discourses which are of no practical service in any particular.