Sophists any of a number of ancient Greeks, roughly contemporaneous with Socrates, who professed to teach, for a fee, rhetoric, philosophy, and how to succeed in life. They typically were itinerants, visiting much of the Greek world, and gave public exhibitions at Olympia and Delphi. They were part of the general expansion of Greek learning and of the changing culture in which the previous informal educational methods were inadequate. For example, the growing litigiousness of Athenian society demanded instruction in the art of speaking well, which the Sophists helped fulfill. The Sophists have been portrayed as intellectual charlatans (hence the pejorative use of ‘sophism’), teaching their sophistical reasoning for money, and (at the other extreme) as Victorian moralists and educators. The truth is more complex. They were not a school, and shared no body of opinions. They were typically concerned with ethics (unlike many earlier philosophers, who emphasized physical inquiries) and about the relationship between laws and customs (nomos) and nature (phusis).
Protagoras of Abdera (c.490–c.420 B.C.) was the most famous and perhaps the first Sophist. He visited Athens frequently, and became a friend of its leader, Pericles; he therefore was invited to draw up a legal code for the colony of Thurii (444). According to some late reports, he died in a shipwreck as he was leaving Athens, having been tried for and found guilty of impiety. (He claimed that he knew nothing about the gods, because of human limitations and the difficulty of the question.) We have only a few short quotations from his works. His ‘Truth’ (also known as the ‘Throws,’ i.e., how to overthrow an opponent’s arguments) begins with his most famous claim: ‘Humans are the measure of all things – of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.’ That is, there is no objective truth; the world is for each person as it appears to that person. Of what use, then, are skills? Skilled people can change others’ perceptions in useful ways. For example, a doctor can change a sick person’s perceptions so that she is healthy. Protagoras taught his students to ‘make the weaker argument the stronger,’ i.e., to alter people’s perceptions about the value of arguments. (Aristophanes satirizes Protagoras as one who would make unjust arguments defeat just arguments.) This is true for ethical judgments, too: laws and customs are simply products of human agreement. But because laws and customs result from experiences of what is most useful, they should be followed rather than nature. No perception or judgment is more true than another, but some are more useful, and those that are more useful should be followed.
Gorgias (c.483–376) was a student of Empedocles. His town, Leontini in Sicily, sent him as an ambassador to Athens in 427; his visit was a great success, and the Athenians were amazed at his rhetorical ability. Like other Sophists, he charged for instruction and gave speeches at religious festivals. Gorgias denied that he taught virtue; instead, he produced clever speakers. He insisted that different people have different virtues: for example, women’s virtue differs from men’s. Since there is no truth (and if there were we couldn’t know it), we must rely on opinion, and so speakers who can change people’s opinions have great power – greater than the power produced by any other skill. (In his ‘Encomium on Helen’ he argues that if she left Menelaus and went with Paris because she was convinced by speech, she wasn’t responsible for her actions.) Two paraphrases of Gorgias’s ‘About What Doesn’t Exist’ survive; in this he argues that nothing exists, that even if something did, we couldn’t know it, and that even if we could know anything we couldn’t explain it to anyone. We can’t know anything, because some things we think of do not exist, and so we have no way of judging whether the things we think of exist. And we can’t express any knowledge we may have, because no two people can think of the same thing, since the same thing can’t be in two places, and because we use words in speech, not colors or shapes or objects. (This may be merely a parody of Parmenides’ argument that only one thing exists.) Antiphon the Sophist (fifth century) is probably (although not certainly) to be distinguished from Antiphon the orator (d. 411), some of whose speeches we possess. We know nothing about his life (if he is distinct from the orator). In addition to brief quotations in later authors, we have two papyrus fragments of his ‘On Truth.’ In these he argues that we should follow laws and customs only if there are witnesses and so our action will affect our reputation; otherwise, we should follow nature, which is often inconsistent with following custom. Custom is established by human agreement, and so disobeying it is detrimental only if others know it is disobeyed, whereas nature’s demands (unlike those of custom) can’t be ignored with impunity. Antiphon assumes that rational actions are selfinterested, and that justice demands actions contrary to self-interest – a position Plato attacks in the Republic. Antiphon was also a materialist: the nature of a bed is wood, since if a buried bed could grow it would grow wood, not a bed. His view is one of Aristotle’s main concerns in the Physics, since Aristotle admits in the Categories that persistence through change is the best test for substance, but won’t admit that matter is substance. Hippias (fifth century) was from Elis, in the Peloponnesus, which used him as an ambassador. He competed at the festival of Olympus with both prepared and extemporaneous speeches. He had a phenomenal memory. Since Plato repeatedly makes fun of him in the two dialogues that bear his name, he probably was selfimportant and serious. He was a polymath who claimed he could do anything, including making speeches and clothes; he wrote a work collecting what he regarded as the best things said by others. According to one report, he made a mathematical discovery (the quadratrix, the first curve other than the circle known to the Greeks). In the Protagoras, Plato has Hippias contrast nature and custom, which often does violence to nature.
Prodicus (fifth century) was from Ceos, in the Cyclades, which frequently employed him on diplomatic missions. He apparently demanded high fees, but had two versions of his lecture – one cost fifty drachmas, the other one drachma. (Socrates jokes that if he could have afforded the fifty-drachma lecture, he would have learned the truth about the correctness of words, and Aristotle says that when Prodicus added something exciting to keep his audience’s attention he called it ‘slipping in the fifty-drachma lecture for them.’) We have at least the content of one lecture of his, the ‘Choice of Heracles,’ which consists of banal moralizing. Prodicus was praised by Socrates for his emphasis on the right use of words and on distinguishing between synonyms. He also had a naturalistic view of the origin of theology: useful things were regarded as gods. H.A.I.