The Sophists

The word 'sophist' (sophistēs) originally meant simply 'one who is wise' or 'one who makes wise' — it could be applied to poets, seers, musicians, and sages without negative connotation. Herodotus calls Solon a sophist; Pindar uses the term for poets. The pejorative meaning — charlatan, intellectual fraud, purveyor of specious arguments for hire — is largely a creation of Plato, whose dialogues systematically contrasted the philosopher (lover of wisdom) with the sophist (seller of wisdom). Aristotle consolidated the polemic: 'the sophist is one who makes money from apparent but not real wisdom' (Sophistical Refutations 165a22). This hostile characterization dominated the tradition for over two millennia, and the rehabilitation of the Sophists as serious thinkers is largely a modern achievement — beginning with Hegel's History of Philosophy (1833–36) and George Grote's History of Greece (1846–56), and consolidated in the twentieth century by Mario Untersteiner's The Sophists (1949), G.B. Kerferd's The Sophistic Movement (1981), and more recently by Susan Jarratt's Rereading the Sophists (1991) and Edward Schiappa's Protagoras and Logos (1991).

The historical Sophists were itinerant professional educators who flourished in the Greek world — above all in Athens — during the second half of the fifth century BCE. They charged fees for instruction, sometimes large ones: Protagoras reportedly asked 10,000 drachmas for a complete course (Plato elsewhere says Protagoras earned more in total from his wisdom than Phidias and ten other sculptors combined), and Gorgias was wealthy enough to dedicate a gold statue of himself at Delphi. What they taught varied: Protagoras offered training in civic virtue (politikē technē) and the art of speaking persuasively on both sides of a question; Gorgias specialized in rhetoric, the power of logos to move souls; Hippias taught mathematics, astronomy, grammar, and music alongside rhetoric, and prided himself on self-sufficiency — arriving at Olympia wearing nothing he had not made himself; Prodicus offered subtle distinctions among near-synonyms, charging different fees for different levels of linguistic precision; Thrasymachus pioneered the theory and practice of emotional appeal in prose. The diversity of their interests resists any single doctrinal summary — the Sophists were not a school in any institutional sense.

Their emergence was inseparable from Athenian democratic culture. In the radical democracy established after Cleisthenes' reforms (508/507 BCE) and expanded under Ephialtes and Pericles, political success depended on the ability to speak persuasively before the Assembly (ekklēsia), in the law courts (dikastēria), and at public festivals. There was no professional legal class — citizens prosecuted and defended themselves. The demand for rhetorical training was therefore enormous and practical: the ability to construct arguments, anticipate objections, and move an audience was not an intellectual luxury but a political necessity. The Sophists met this demand. Their teaching was, at bottom, democratic education — training citizens for participation in self-governance. The aristocratic hostility they attracted (visible in Aristophanes' Clouds, Plato's dialogues, and the anti-sophistic tradition generally) reflects in part the resentment of a traditional elite whose inherited advantages were being eroded by teachable skills.

Intellectually, the Sophists' most enduring contribution was the nomos–physis debate: the distinction between what exists by nature (physis) and what exists by human convention or law (nomos). If the Presocratics had asked 'what is nature?' the Sophists asked the more dangerous question: 'is what we call justice, law, religion, and morality part of nature, or merely a human invention?' The answers they gave ranged from moderate (Protagoras: conventions are genuinely valuable, even if man-made, because social life is impossible without them) to radical (Antiphon: the dictates of nature and convention are mostly opposed, and nature should be preferred; Thrasymachus: justice is merely the advantage of the stronger; Critias: the gods were invented by a clever legislator to enforce obedience in private). This was not idle speculation — it threatened the foundations of the polis at precisely the moment when Athens was under maximum political stress (the Peloponnesian War, the plague, the oligarchic coups of 411 and 404 BCE).

The sources for sophistic thought are almost entirely hostile or indirect. We have no complete work by any Sophist except Gorgias's Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes (epideictic speeches, not treatises) and the anonymous Dissoi Logoi (a sophistic exercise in opposing arguments). Protagoras's works — Truth (or Refutations), On the Gods, Antilogiae, Great Speech — survive only in fragments and paraphrases, many preserved by opponents. Antiphon's On Truth is known primarily from two papyrus finds (the Oxyrhynchus papyri, published 1915 and 1922). For the rest, we depend heavily on Plato's dramatizations — brilliant as literary creations but hardly neutral reports — and on brief citations in Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius, and the doxographic tradition. The standard modern collection is Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (the Sophists are included despite the title), supplemented by Mario Untersteiner's edition with commentary. The interpretive challenge is acute: we are largely reading the Sophists through the eyes of their most gifted and most hostile critic.