The Sophists

A Shift in Emphasis.

The scientific philosophers, from Thales to Democritus, had done their best to understand the nature of the world with remarkable achievement. The intuition of Leucippus and Democritus—that the universe was created of atoms and void—was a remarkable one, but the Greeks lacked the scientific equipment to make it anything more than an hypothesis. In the classical period (480–323 b.c.e.), philosophy sought new areas of speculation. In Athens, Socrates was a pivotal figure, so much so that the natural philosophers, from Thales to Democritus, are lumped together under the label, "Presocratics." Yet the way for Socrates was prepared by a group of thinkers and teachers called Sophists. The Greek word sophistes, from which the word "sophist" is derived, means a "master of one's craft," and it has a secondary meaning of "one who is expert in practical wisdom." Experts in classical Greece always suffered from a degree of prejudice—the American slang word "egghead" is a good translation of sophistes. But it was not until the fourth century b.c.e. that the word "sophist" carried distinct overtones of disdain, and Socrates' disciple, the philosopher Plato, must bear much of the responsibility for that development. Plato was at pains to show that Socrates was not a Sophist, though some of his contemporaries clearly thought that he was. Socrates had disciples, but Plato claimed that he never charged tuition fees whereas the Sophists did.

The Demand for Higher Education.

The Sophists appeared at a time when the old aristocratic prejudices of archaic Greece were breaking down all over the Greek world. The age of the Sophists seems to have begun outside Athens, and it gave rise to a cadre of international experts who, like the lyric poets in archaic Greece, roved from city to city in search of students willing to pay the tuition fees they charged. In the aristocratic thought-world of archaic Greece, arete, a word which combines the meanings of "virtue" and "valor," was an innate quality. So far as there was an educational program, it consisted of poetry—particularly the poems of Homer—music, training in arms, and following the examples of one's elders. This sort of education was incomplete in classical Greece, however, where individuals needed to be skilled in presenting cases in court; in the public assemblies, competence in public speaking paid dividends. The Sophists claimed to be able to teach the skills necessary for success. They asserted that they could make their disciples proficient in rhetoric and the verbal skills to make a weak case appear stronger than it really was. From teaching men how to be good at something like rhetoric, the claim to teach men goodness itself required no great leap of the imagination. One of the learned men who approached these broader questions was Protagoras, the first Sophist to charge tuition fees, who came from Abdera in northern Greece not far from the border with modern Turkey. He was an itinerant teacher who spent most of his life traveling; he visited Sicily and he came to Athens at least twice. During one of these times in Athens he was threatened by a conservative Athenian named Pythodorus with a charge of impiety, and he made a timely departure. His books were publicly burned, but Protagoras' reputation outside Athens no doubt resulted in the survival of copies of his books elsewhere in the Greek world.

The Teachings of Protagoras.

Conservative pious Athenians had good reason to be shocked by Protagoras' books, which he presented during public readings. An early work titled On the Gods, which was his first book to be read in public, began with the memorable sentence:

Of the gods, I can know nothing, neither that they are nor that they are not, nor how they are shaped if at all. Many things prevent such knowledge—the uncertainty of the question and the shortness of human life.

With these few words, Protagoras turned his back on the gods to whom the Greeks sacrificed all over the Greek world, though it cannot be said for certain that he was an out-and-out atheist. His outline for the proper education of a politician was laid out in a book titled Truth, or Refutations which began with a sentence that became famous as the summary of his philosophy:

Man [or "a man"] is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.

PROTAGORAS: THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL TEACHER

introduction: Protagoras of Abdera (circa 485–circa 415 b.c.e.) was the first professional sophist to offer instruction for a fee, and he died a wealthy man. He was clearly a man of recognized integrity who was generally respected, for when Athens founded the colony of Thurii on the Gulf of Taranto in Italy in 444 b.c.e., the Athenian statesman Pericles appointed him to draw up a code of laws for the new foundation. He upheld a doctrine of relativism—the sentence that introduced a work of his, "Man is the measure of all things" was famous and was taken to mean that every person has his own criterion for what is good and true. Thus truth existed in the eye of the beholder and everything could be true for in the opinion of someone. The following selections comes from the Lives of the ancient philosophers, a compilation by Diogenes Laertius who probably lived in the first half of the third century c.e.

Protagoras was the first person to declare that in every subject for debate, there were two sides which were the exact opposite of each other, and he used to use this debating procedure in his arguments, being the first person to do so. He started a book of his with this introductory sentence:

Man is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are and the nonexistence of things that are not.

He used to say, too, that the soul was merely sensory perception, as Plato says in the Theaetetus, and that everything was true. Also, he introduces another of his treatises this way:

Concerning the gods, I cannot know for certain if they exist or if they do not. For there are many things that prevent one from knowing, especially the uncertainty of the subject and the shortness of human life.

Because of this sentence that began his treatise, he was banished by the Athenians, who burned his books in the market-place.

source: Diogenes Laertius, "The Life of Protagoras," in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry Bohn, 1853): 397–398. Text modified by James Allan Evans.

In the context of its time, this passage may have been a protest against the Eleatic school of philosophy, particularly Parmenides, who argued that existence as men perceive it is not at all what it actually is. Protagoras' rejoinder to the Eleatics was that as things exist for me, that is what they are for me, and as they exist for you, that is what they are for you. In other words, each person has a right to trust his own senses. Yet there is little doubt that Protagoras carried over this relativist view into judgments of value as well. The inference was that there was no such thing as absolute justice or absolute goodness; rather they were matters of personal judgment. Thus Protagoras held that one could argue equally well for or against any proposition; whether or not the proposition had some merit was of no consequence since all opinions were equally true. Some opinions, however, could be better than others even if they were not more true; that, at least, is what Plato suggested in his dialogue, the Theaetetus, as Protagoras' meaning, and it is very close to that of a modern pragmatist.

Gorgias of Leontini.

Like Protagoras, Gorgias of Leontini found the conclusions of the Eleatic philosophers impossible to accept. But unlike Protagoras, whose reaction was to affirm that it was right for every person to decide for himself what was true, Gorgias maintained that there was no truth at all. Gorgias was from the Sicilian city of Leontini and he came to Athens in 427 b.c.e. as an envoy for his native city. His skill at public speaking made a great impression on the Athenian public. He introduced Athens to methods of persuasion that had been developed in Sicily, and his influence on Athenian literature and prose style was enormous. During his time in Athens he studied and presented his own brand of philosophy. One of his works On Nature, or What Does Not Exist, attempted to show that there is nothing; even if there is something, we cannot know it, and even if we could know it, we cannot communicate our knowledge to anyone else. This sort of nihilism would seem to lead to the conclusion that there is no right or wrong, but Gorgias did not go so far. Others did, however; in the first book of Plato's Republic, an Athenian named Thrasymachus maintains that there is no "Right" at all, and what we call "Right" is only what is advantageous for the more powerful person who can force weaker persons to accept it as lawful and binding simply because he is more powerful. Thrasymachus was a teacher of rhetoric in Athens when Gorgias visited Athens, and though the Republic of Plato was written more than a generation later, Plato probably reported accurately the conclusions that some of Gorgias' disciples drew from his teachings.

Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis.

Prodicus was a contemporary with Democritus and Gorgias, and was a disciple of Protagoras. Originally from Iulis on the island of Ceos, he was a popular public servant who eventually was sent to Athens as an ambassador. After a time, he also took up the study of philosophy and soon had opened his own school of Rhetoric. By the late fifth century b.c.e., he was giving expensive lecture-courses which seem to have emphasized linguistics. His particular specialization was the exact meaning of synonyms. His studies in religion focused on the personalization of natural objects as the creation for the need for organized religion, that man needed to understand how nature related to him personally and not how he worked in conjunction with nature. This defied many of the ideas that man was the center of the universe and that all things were created by the gods to serve man. Many of these ideas were noted in his most famous work The Choice of Heracles, a work that is no longer available but is often cited by later philosophers. Prodicus was put to death for his ideas on religion and was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. Another contemporary Sophist was Hippias, who belonged to a school of teachers that believed that the educated man was master of everything. Once he visited the Olympic Games wearing a purple cloak, and boasted that he made everything he wore, including the ring on his finger. He dabbled in all the recognized branches of learning—grammar, rhetoric, geometry, mathematics, and music—and he also tried his hand at literature: epic poetry, tragedy, chronicles, and so on. He made profitable lecture tours, traveling from city to city; in one of the Platonic dialogues he boasts to Socrates that he had just given a very successful series of lectures in Sparta, where his subject was genealogies, which was one of the few categories of learning that were to Spartan taste. One of his works was a list of the victors at the Olympic Games, starting in 776 b.c.e. Hippias' work is lost but it served as one source for a later list drawn up in the early third century c.e., and it is the basis for the chronology of archaic Greece.

sources

The Greek Sophists. Trans. John Dillon and Tania Gergel (London, England: Penguin, 2003).

Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963).

G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Michael Nill, Morality and Self-Interest in Protagoras, Antiphon and Democritus (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1985).

The Sophists and Their Legacy. Ed. G. B. Kerferd (Wisebaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1981).

Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists. Trans. Kathleen Freeman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954).

Paul Woodruff, "Rhetoric and Relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias," in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 290–310.