In the article entitled "Philosophy" within the Encyclopedia, Diderot returns to the Ancients and links systematic thought to the displacement of wisdom into sophistry. In tracing the growth of philosophy and its achievements, he remarks that if the Ancients could not carry out their ideal of wisdom, at least they had the glory of having conceived of it and attempted its realization. The trouble was that "as soon as they had given it a systematic form, they began to teach it, and schools and sects sprang up; so that their ideas might be better received, they embellished them with eloquence; this became imperceptibly confused with wisdom, especially for the Greeks who placed great emphasis on the art of speaking well because of its influence on the affairs of state in their republics. The name of wiseman was misrepresented (fut travesti) in that of the sophist or master of eloquence; and this caused extreme degeneration in the revolution of a science which, in its origin, had set goals a great deal more noble.' In the article entitled "Socratique," Diderot presents Socrates as the student of a sophist, Prodicus, signaling that, in his view, the sophists had no scourge or affliction more formidable. By extension, the discourse of the new Socrates (Diderot), like that of his predecessor, will also be woven with schema and concepts which come out of the sophistic tradition. The difference therefore between the sophist and the sage resides less in the fact that "the sophists pretended to know everything; Socrates that he knew only