In his absorbing study The Greeks and the New (Cambridge, 2011), Armand DAngour argues that innovation was built into the cut and thrust of spoken and written debate in ancient Greece. He places the culmination of this process in fifth-century Athens (chapter 9 of his book). Certainly Athens buzzed with cultural energy. The city was wealthy and receptive and it had attracted intellectuals from across the Greek world. These, as well as those who shared their approach to ideas in Athens, are known as the sophists, a word which in its original meaning suggested a combination of intellectual curiosity with practical skills in the art of living. The philosopher Socrates recorded that sophists teach ‘the kind of wisdom and virtue which fits men to manage an estate or govern a city, to look after their parents and to entertain and send off guests in proper style, but they ranged much more widely than this. Many of those reaching Athens came from other democratic cities and so they were used to revelling in free debate. Their prime skill lay in teaching rhetoric but they contributed more than this. While the sophists were never a school they were naturally unconventional, ready to challenge received opinion and to explore how far they could persuade through argument. As Aristophanes claims in his play The Clouds, a satire on the new thinking (see further below, p. 279): ‘I don’t try to fool you by repeating the same material again and again, but I always act the sophist and introduce new ideas, all totally different from each other and all brilliant [!].’ (See John Dillon and Tania Gergel (eds. and trans.), The Greek Sophists, Penguin Classics, London and New York, 2003.)
The image of the sophists was tarnished in the century that followed by the assault that the philosopher Plato made on their endeavours. Plato had a lofty ideal of philosophy as an enterprise carried out for its own sake and when he saw the sophists charging for teaching rhetoric he felt they were degrading themselves. He had a more profound philosophical objection. Too often, he claimed, the sophists revelled in the process of debate itself, ready to develop arguments on whichever side of the case they chose. They had not found underlying truths that were independent of emotion and rhetoric. Plato, however, excluded his hero Socrates from his charge and when he wrote his philosophical dialogues, he used Socrates as the Platonic figure who would challenge named sophists from the century before.
One of Plato’s victims is to be found in his dialogue Protagoras. Protagoras, from Abdera in Thrace, is often seen as the father figure of the Athenian sophists. He may have been born as early as 490 and travelled widely in Greece before visiting Athens in the 440s. Here he is reported as teaching rhetoric for which he charged high fees. Speaking was a much sought after skill for anyone making their way in public life and he found a ready market among the young social elite.
There was more to Protagoras than this. In 444 he was used by Pericles to draw up a constitution for an Athenian colony in Thurii in southern Italy. He was also deeply interested in the problems of knowledge, even if the few surviving fragments of his writings are hard to interpret. The most famous is ‘Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.’ It is difficult to place this within a wider context but Protagoras noted how individuals would explain or experience the world through their own eyes so that what might be hot for one person might be cold for another. He accepted that a person might feel hot because, demonstrably, he had a fever but he still left open the question of whether there was an objective way of determining heat and cold. To place man at the centre of things also implied a diminution of the power of the gods and Protagoras proved himself a sceptic here. The subject was too challenging and life too short to resolve the issue.
Other sophists went further by suggesting that the gods might merely be imagined, perhaps originating in man’s experience of nature as Prodicus of Ceos (C.465-C.395 Bc) argued. They were no more than personifications of natural phenomena such as the sun and the moon, rivers, water, and fire. The Athenian poet Critias, in a fragment preserved from his play Sisyphus, developed the theme. ‘I believe’, he argued, ‘that a man of shrewd and subtle mind invented for men the fear of the gods, so that there might be something to frighten the wicked even if they acted, spoke or thought in secret.’ In other words, the gods were purely a human creation, invented as a means of social control.
Another of Plato’s targets is confronted in his Gorgias. The real Gorgias had arrived in Athens in 427 from the Sicilian city of Leontini to ask the Athenians for an alliance. Gorgias’ speech was reported as being ‘in a new style’ and it gripped his younger listeners. Gorgias was soon showing off his oratorical skills. In his On Nature, which only survives in later quotations, he tackled the question as to whether the world was an illusion and how far knowledge of it could be communicated between individuals. Not enough survives to tell how he developed this argument but it shows that he was able to play about with philosophical issues and challenge convention. In his more famous speech, The Encomium [Defence] of Helen, he argued, more provocatively, that Helen was morally blameless for leaving her husband Menelaus and making off to Troy with Paris. He suggested possible reasons for her actions: she was impelled to do so by fate, she was abducted by force, Paris’s words were enough to sway her, or she may genuinely have been in love. Each of these possibilities relieved her of moral responsibility. At the end of the speech, Gorgias seemed ready to acknowledge that he might not have been persuasive and so left open the question of how far rhetoric was simply a device to persuade. It was this approach that Plato challenged in his dialogue.
Plato’s condemnation of the sophists now seems much too harsh. Their presence in Athens was invigorating in itself and by challenging convention they forced people to think for themselves. Fundamental to sophistic thought was the distinction between the natural order of things, the underlying, unchanging parameters of existence (phusis), and convention (nomos). The sophists confronted the quandary of whether one constrained the other or whether conventions were the public expression of the natural order. The sophists were also interested in language, how the meanings of words shifted according to context. So they are often seen as the founders of linguistics. Prodicus was respected for his careful analysis of language and the importance he applied to the correct use of words.
The sophists were adamant that philosophical life must not cut the intellectual off from the real world. One visiting sophist, Hippias of Elis, from southern Italy, boasted of how he had visited Olympia having made everything he was wearing or had brought with him including his oil can. Hippias was an example of a true polymath. The surviving fragments show that his contributions ranged over astronomy, mathematics, language, history, poetry, music, and even archaeology. The truth is that the sophists overflowed with confidence and just enjoyed debating anything that came up.
In traditional accounts of Greek thought, the sophists are grouped together as if they were segregated from other spheres of intellectual life. However, one only has to read Herodotus’ enquiries on why the Nile floods or how the Egyptian way of life contrasted with that of the Greeks to see they were typical of the milieu of ideas that pervaded Athens. (See Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion, Cambridge and New York, 2000.) The rigorous approach Thucydides takes to his History of the Peloponnesian War, one in which he sees the unfolding of events as the result of human action, and not of divine intervention, is in the same tradition. Perhaps most interesting of all is the extent to which sophistic thought pervaded the work of the great Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
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