Sophists

A group of clever Greek teachers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. who laid claim to wisdom and to their ability to impart it. For the most part they were traveling foreigners who in Athens and elsewhere communicated needed information and met the demand for a developing individuality, receiving pay for their services. They are hardly to be described as a school and they were not primarily intellectual philosophers; rather were they versatile and capable teachers who by no means generally deserved the opprobrious epithet "sophist" which their critics, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Aristophanes fastened upon them. (The reader interested in this phase of the matter should consult Grote's sixty-seventh chapter.)

The four best known sophists were Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. Others were Polus of Agrigentum, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of Chios, Antiphon of Athens, and Euenus of Paros. These men taught all that was known at the time. They picked up information by travel and observation, and they were also originators. Their special subjects were rhetoric, politics, and grammar, in order of emphasis, but they also touched on athletics and music, tactics, and strategy, drawing and painting, mathematics, etymology, synonyms and mnemonics, geography, history, and natural history, logic, ethics, and religious criticism. The methods they used were mainly conversations and informal discourses, sometimes peripatetic, given in short and unsystematic "courses," while stopping in a city, to its curious and ambitious young men seeking both release from custom and tradition and the means of political promotion. Their philosophy, if we may judge correctly from their critics, upon whom alone we have to rely for our information in the absence of other sources, was an assertion of individualism and a denial of universal and objective standards of conduct and thought. Protagoras taught "man is the measure of all things," and Gorgias that "nothing exists; if it did, you could not know it; if you could, you could not communicate it."

The sophists both modified the old Greek education and contributed to the new. The former home training became milder, intellectual instruction supplanted the process of forming moral habits, a knowledge content was added to gymnastic and music, the gymnastic training tended to substitute beauty for strength, and ease for vigor, and the musical training came to include the wind instruments in addition to the strings. The sophists also helped to grade studies into elementary, secondary, and higher; to popularize learning; and to substitute the study of man for the study of nature. Their destructive criticisms aroused Socrates, as Hume awoke Kant, and so the movement of Plato and Aristotle was made possible.

The greatness of their influence is to be appreciated in the light of the social transition through which Greece was just then going, which may be sketched as follows: in politics, from oligarchy to democracy; in art, from convention to originality; in history, from tradition to science; in oratory, from simplicity to adornment of style; in literature, from epic and lyric to tragedy and comedy; in religion, from traditional faith to reason; in economic conditions, from moderate means to wealth; and in philosophy, from mythology to independent thinking. These forces all mean greater individuality, freedom, initiative, and opportunity. They put a new demand on education. The sons of Greek gentlemen could not always be about their gymnastic and music, — they demanded a higher education for social utility. Hence arose the sophists to meet this demand. Mahaffy compares them to our professional university "coaches" or to our newspapers. Naturally they were met with enthusiasm by the young personality and speech, because of the desire of the youth to win personal distinction in the state, and because also of the natural intellectual curiosity of the Greeks. The results were first great liberty of thought, speech, and action, and then great license, which not even the moral force of the Socratic movement was able fully to offset in a practical way, though it suggested the larger life of conceptual thinking and acting, in which alone sophistic teaching may be sublimated.

H.H.H.

See Greece, education in ancient; also Ethics; Socrates.

Sources:

• Aristophanes. Clouds.
• Plato. Protagoras, Gorgias, Theætetus, Cratylus, Euthydemus, Sophist, and Republic, Book I.
• Xenophon. Memorabilia, II, I, 21 (for Hippias),

Authorities:

• Benn, A. W. The Greek Philosophers, I, 53-107. (London, 1882.)
• Cope, E. M. On the Sophists, and On the Sophistical Rhetoric, Jour. Clas. and Sacr. Phil., Vols. II and III. (Cambridge, 1855, 1857.)
• Freeman, K. J. Schools of Hellas, Ch. V. (London, 1907.)
• Gomperz, T. Greek Thinkers. (London, 1905.)
• Grote, G. History of Greece, Ch. 67 and 68. (New York,1883.)
• Jackson, H. Sophists, in Ency. Brit.
• Mahaffy, J. Old Greek Education, Ch. IX. (London, 1887.)
• Monroe, P. Source Book of the History of Education, Ch. III. (New York and London, 1902.)
• Schanz, M. Die Sophisten, (Gottingen, 1867.)
• Sidgwick, H. The Sophists, Jour. of Phil., Vols. IV and V. (Cambridge, 1872 and 1874.)
• Ueberweg, F. History of Philosophy. (London, 1880.)
• Windelband. W. History of Ancient Philosophy. pp. 100-151. (New York, 1898.)
• Zeller, E. G. Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 394-516. (London, 1881.)