Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Great is the crowd of such people: some of them, enslaved to pleasures and wishing to disbelieve, laugh at truth, worthy of all reverence, counting the barbarian teaching a mere game; others, puffing themselves up, strain to invent slanders against our arguments, procuring contentious quibbles, hunters after petty phrases, zealots of paltry arts, wranglers and word-twisters, as that man of Abdera says: "pliant is the tongue of mortals," he says, "and many are the words in it; wide is the range of words of every kind, this way and that." And: "whatever sort of word you speak, such a one you will hear in return." Puffed up, then, by this art, the ill-starred sophists, babbling in their own trumpery, spending their whole life laboring over the discrimination of terms and the particular composition and interweaving of phrases, show themselves more talkative than turtledoves — scratching and tickling, not in a manly way, it seems to me, the ears of those who itch to be scratched, a very river of words but a mere trickle of sense. Indeed, just as with old sandals, the rest of them wears thin and falls apart, while only the tongue is left over.
Most excellently does the Athenian Solon inveigh and write: "mark well the speech and utterance of a flattering man; each one of you treads the fox's path, yet in the lot of you a mind stands empty." This, I think, is what that saving utterance hints at: "foxes possess dens, yet the Son of Man has no place to rest his head"; for only, I suppose, to the believer, set apart completely from the other beasts spoken of by scripture, does the sum of all things find rest — the good and gentle Word, who snares the crafty in their own cunning; for the Lord alone perceives what the clever devise, that it is empty — scripture naming those "clever," I suppose, who are the sophists busy with words and superfluous arts.
Hence the Greeks themselves have called, by a related name, those who are officious meddlers about anything at all both "wise" and "sophists." Cratinus, at any rate, in his Archilochi, having listed the poets, said: "what a swarm of sophists you have dug up." And likewise Iophon, as the comic poet says in the Satyrs Who Sing to the Flute, speaking of rhapsodes and certain others: "for there has come in a whole crowd of sophists, fully equipped." Concerning these and others like them, all who have practiced empty arguments, the divine scripture speaks most excellently: "the cleverness of the clever I will bring to ruin, and the discernment of the discerning I will render void."
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