Ancient Philosophy · Part 10 · Athens · B2
The Sophists: Protagoras, Gorgias and the Art of Persuasion
Part 10 of Ancient Philosophy: in 5th-century Athens, travelling teachers called Sophists charged high fees to teach young men how to speak, argue and win. Plato made “sophist” an insult, but they asked some of the boldest questions in Greek thought: who decides what is true, what is just, and what is natural? Question tags and rhetorical questions (it’s true, isn’t it? who could deny it?), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the most hated teachers in Greek history: the Sophists.
They took money for teaching, they argued that the weaker case could be made stronger, and Plato wrote most of what we know about them.
Not at all. So we must listen carefully to their own words, where we have them.
In democratic Athens, a citizen who could speak well in the Assembly or the law courts could win power, wealth and safety. A new kind of teacher appeared to meet the demand: the Sophists, “experts in wisdom”, who travelled from city to city and charged fees for teaching rhetoric, politics, grammar and many other subjects.
The most famous were Protagoras of Abdera and Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily; others included Prodicus, Hippias, Antiphon and Thrasymachus. Their books are almost all lost, but a few speeches survive complete, and papyri from Egypt have returned some lost fragments.
Much of what we know about them comes from Plato, who portrayed them as clever, vain and dangerous, and from the comic poet Aristophanes, who mocked them. Modern scholars try to read the Sophists through their own surviving words, as well as through their enemies’ portraits.
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