Lucian Fugitivi 10

[10] After them, the Sophist tribe somehow or other fastened themselves to my skirts. They were neither profoundly interested in my teaching nor altogether at variance, but like the Hippocentaur breed, something composite and mixed, astray in the interspace between quackery and philosophy, neither completely addicted to ignorance nor yet able to keep me envisioned with an intent gaze; being purblind, as it were, through their dim-sightedness they merely glimpsed at times an indistinct, dim presentment or shadow of me, yet thought they had discerned everything with accuracy. So there flared up among them that useless and superfluous “wisdom” of theirs, in their own opinion invincible—those clever, baffling, absurd replies and perplexing, mazy queries.

[10] And then there sprang up—I scarce know how—the tribe of sophists: men who had but little of my spirit, yet were not wholly alien to me; a motley Centaur breed, in whom vanity and wisdom meeting were moulded into one incongruous whole: They clung not entirely to ignorance, but theirs was not the steady eye that could meet the gaze of Philosophy; and if at moments my semblance flashed phantom-like across their dulled vision, they held that in that dim shadow they had seen all that was to be seen. It was this pride that nourished the vain, unprofitable science that they mistook for invincible wisdom; the science of quaint conceits, ingenious paradoxes, and labyrinthine dilemmas.