Sophists: Who They Were and What They Taught in Fifth-Century Athens

Who the sophists were

In the second half of the fifth century BC, in Athens and in other Greek cities, a figure appeared who had not existed before: the teacher who asked to be paid. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the sophists as itinerant professionals who, in exchange for a fee, gave wealthy young Greeks an education in aretē, virtue understood as excellence. The trade brought many of them money and fame, and the money brought a good deal of social resentment with it.

The name comes from sophia, wisdom. Early on, a “sophist” was simply someone who practised a body of knowledge or a doctrine. Over the course of the fifth century BC the label shifted onto a new kind of intellectual: professional educators who moved between Greek cities teaching a wide range of subjects, with particular attention to skill in public speaking.

They did not form a school. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents them as independent practitioners with no organisation and no common body of doctrine, one reason why the views we read under a single label sometimes contradict each other.

The names both encyclopedias return to are Protagoras of Abdera (about 490-420 BC), Gorgias of Leontini (about 485-380 BC, who came over from Sicily), Hippias of Elis, Prodicus of Ceos, a contemporary of Socrates, Antiphon and Thrasymachus. For Hippias and Thrasymachus the sources record activity in the last third of the century.

Why Athens wanted speakers

Participatory democracy grew faster in Athens than elsewhere, and it raised the demand for rhetorical skill: anyone who wanted to get on in politics, or to defend himself before a popular jury, had to be able to address a large crowd. The paid teachers moved into that gap, and each of them pitched the service in his own way. Protagoras described his teaching as a complete training in managing one’s private affairs and the city’s business well, in word and in action. Gorgias, in Plato’s account of him, claimed to teach a technique of persuasion that was neutral about values and belonged to no ethical system; in the same dialogue he ends up conceding that a speaker active in politics does have to know what is just and what is not. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy flags that concession as a tension inside his own position.

What they taught

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a definition it admits is rough: the sophists were paid teachers of aretē, where aretē means the capacity to reach political power and to exercise it through persuasive speech. Rhetoric sat at the centre of the curriculum, even though most of them said they taught other subjects as well.

Practical example: according to Aristotle, one of the most criticised claims attributed to Protagoras was that he could make the weaker argument the stronger one in a speech. The natural ground for this was the courtroom, where cases are argued over what seems likely: a speaker could lean on how improbable it was that a weak man had attacked a strong one.

The fees show how much the service was wanted. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that Hippias boasted of earning more than 150 minas on a single visit to Sicily, that is 15,000 drachmas, a sum estimated at around thirty years of a skilled craftsman’s wages; in Plato’s Meno (91d) Socrates says Protagoras took in more than ten sculptors put together, Phidias included. Prodicus charged by course: one drachma for the lesson on names, which matched a skilled craftsman’s daily pay, and fifty drachmas for the full programme.

Physis and nomos, the argument about justice

In the later fifth century BC Greek thought was working on the distinction between physis, nature, and nomos, a word that covers custom, law and convention at once. What hung on it was the basis of the rules: are moral and social norms rooted in the nature of things, or are they only the product of habit and agreement between people? The same distinction comes up in working out what a legal norm is and where it gets its force.

Antiphon took the distinction into the problem of justice and argued that much of what convention counts as just runs against nature, and therefore is not just by nature. A papyrus attributed to him holds a similar line: nature would drive each person to do only what serves him, while conventional morality usually limits that advantage. In Plato’s Gorgias the character Callicles pushes the claim further and describes current morality as an invention of the weaker sort to keep the stronger in check, where nature would grant the strong the right to exploit their inferiors.

Protagoras, in the Great Speech that Plato puts in his mouth, goes the other way: justice and self-control would be natural to human beings, because the survival of the species depends on their being drilled into everyone. The sources trace his relativism back to his famous claim that the human being is the measure of all things; on Plato’s account it follows that whatever a city regards as just and admirable really is so for that city, for as long as the convention stays in force.

Why Socrates and Plato criticised them

Most of what we know about the sophists comes through Plato, and Plato wrote with a definite aim: to mark off philosophers, Socrates first among them, from teachers who worked for a fee, because Athenians were inclined to put Socrates in that group too. In his writings the sophists almost always arrive with a dismissive aside about the mercenary side of the job.

Their financial success had already provoked a reaction in conservative circles in Athens, where they were seen as a danger to inherited religion and moral standards, and as the wrong company for the city’s sons. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the charge was partly unfair, and adds a heavy consequence: according to Plato’s Apology, that climate of opinion, staged most memorably in Aristophanes’ Clouds, led to the conviction of Socrates for impiety and corrupting the young.

The democracy that created the market for rhetoric lessons is the same one that condemned Socrates soon afterwards. To make sense of that assembly and those courts, start from how the Greek polis worked.

From “sophist” to “sophism”

It is mainly through the influence of Plato and Aristotle that “sophistry” means, in modern usage, reasoning built to be fallacious on purpose, intellectual charlatanism, a loose grip on moral scruple: the word lost its link with the wisdom it grew out of. Anyone who wants practice at taking apart an argument built to persuade can start with how to spot fake news.

This is why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns that the current image of the sophist as an argumentative cheat significantly distorts the history that can be reconstructed. A school test usually turns on two distinctions: the one between physis and nomos, and the one between Plato’s sophist and the sophist of modern historical scholarship.