The Sophists: Rhetoric, Relativism, and the First Teachers for Hire

In the second half of the fifth century BCE, a new kind of person began arriving in Athens. He came from somewhere else — Abdera, Leontini, Elis, Ceos — he charged money, and he claimed to teach the one skill that a newly democratic city could not do without: the ability to speak well. The Athenians called him a sophistēs, a "practitioner of wisdom." Within a generation the word had curdled into an insult, and it has never fully recovered. To call an argument "sophistry" today is to call it clever, hollow, and dishonest. That verdict was written largely by one man, Plato, who disliked the sophists so intensely that he built much of Western philosophy in opposition to them. The story of the sophists is therefore a rare thing: a chapter of intellectual history in which we mostly hear the prosecution, and in which the defense has taken twenty-four centuries to be heard.

A city that ran on speech

To understand why the sophists existed at all, one has to understand what Athens had become. After the reforms of Cleisthenes and the victories over Persia, Athens was a direct democracy of a radical kind. Laws were passed by an assembly of thousands of citizens. Courts had juries of five hundred, chosen by lot, with no judges to guide them and no professional lawyers to speak for the parties. If you were sued, you stood up and defended yourself, in person, before a crowd. If you wanted influence, a treaty, a fleet, or a building program, you persuaded the assembly with your own voice or you did not get it.

In such a city, eloquence was not an ornament. It was power, insurance, and self-defense rolled into one. The traditional aristocratic education — Homer, music, gymnastics — produced cultivated gentlemen, but it did not produce winners of arguments. The sophists spotted the gap in the market. They offered, for a fee, systematic training in logos: argument, grammar, rhythm, the marshaling of evidence, the anticipation of objections, the arts of memory and delivery. They were, in the most literal sense, the first professors — and the first people in European history to make teaching itself a paid profession.

Who they were

The sophists were never a school in the way the Academy or the Lyceum would later be. They shared no doctrine, no headquarters, and no master. What they shared was a practice: they traveled from city to city, gave public displays of eloquence to advertise their skill, and took on pupils — mostly ambitious young men of wealthy families — for courses that could cost as much as a hundred minae, the price of a good estate.

Protagoras deserves the first place. He was, so far as we know, the first person to claim explicitly that virtue — aretē, the excellence that made a man effective in private and public life — could be taught. This claim was more subversive than it sounds. If excellence can be taught, then it is not an accident of noble birth; it is a skill, available in principle to anyone who can pay the fee, and eventually to anyone at all. The aristocracy understood the implication perfectly well, which is one reason the sophists were resented as much as they were sought after.

Man is the measure

The sentence for which Protagoras is remembered opened a book, now lost, called Truth:

Of all things the measure is man: of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not. Protagoras, DK 80B1

Whole libraries have been written about what this means. The most natural reading is a form of relativism: the wind that feels cold to me is cold — for me; the same wind that feels mild to you is mild — for you; and there is no further fact of the matter, no wind-in-itself whose real temperature settles the dispute. Extended from perception to values, the doctrine becomes explosive. Justice, piety, and nobility are not fixtures of the cosmos; they are what particular communities take them to be, and they differ from city to city as demonstrably as dress and diet do.

The sophists had empirical material for this view. They were travelers in a way that most Greeks were not, and the fifth century was busily collecting ethnography — Herodotus is full of it. Once you have noticed that the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Scythians each regard their own customs as obviously correct, the distinction between nomos (law, custom, convention) and physis (nature) forces itself upon you. Which of the things we live by are natural, and which are merely agreed? The question is the sophists' deepest legacy, and it has never gone away; it stands behind every later debate about natural law, moral relativism, social contract, and cultural difference.

Different sophists ran in different directions with it. Protagoras himself was a conventionalist of a fairly conservative kind: precisely because there is no cosmic standard, he argued, the shared judgments of a community are all we have, and the wise man's job is to make the better ones prevail. Antiphon flirted with the radical alternative — that law is a shackle on nature, and the sensible man obeys it only when watched. Callicles, in Plato's Gorgias, pushes that thought to its brutal conclusion: nature's own justice is the rule of the stronger, and conventional morality is a trick the weak play on the strong. Whether any historical sophist actually taught this is doubtful; but the fact that the argument could be built from sophistic materials is exactly what frightened their critics.

The power of the word

Gorgias approached the movement from another side. He was less interested in what is true than in what speech does. His Encomium of Helen — a showpiece defending the most blamed woman in Greek myth — argues that if Helen was persuaded to go to Troy, she deserves no more blame than if she had been dragged by force, because persuasion is a kind of force:

Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most divine deeds: it can stop fear and banish grief and instill joy and increase pity. Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

He compared the effect of words on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body — some heal, some poison, and the speaker, like the physician, bears responsibility for the dose. It is hard to read the passage now without thinking of advertising, propaganda, and the engineered feeds of the present day. Gorgias would have recognized our world instantly. He was also, not incidentally, a stylist of genius: the balanced clauses, antitheses, and rhymes he introduced (the "Gorgianic figures") gave Greek prose its first taste of deliberate music, and through Isocrates and Cicero they flowed into the whole rhetorical tradition of Europe.

Making the weaker argument stronger

The charge sheet against the sophists was drawn up early. Aristophanes' comedy Clouds (423 BCE) put a "Thinkery" on stage where, for a fee, a young man could learn the Unjust Argument that beats the Just one and lets him cheat his creditors. The play's chief resident of the Thinkery was not, in fact, a paid sophist at all — it was Socrates, which tells you how blurred the categories were to the ordinary Athenian eye. Twenty-four years later, when Socrates stood trial, he complained that the old slander of "making the weaker argument the stronger" had stuck to him; it almost certainly helped kill him.

The phrase itself seems to descend from Protagoras, who taught that on every question there are two opposing arguments (dissoi logoi) and trained pupils to argue both sides. To his enemies this was cynicism made into a curriculum. To Protagoras it was something closer to what a modern debate coach, litigator, or scientist would recognize: you do not understand your own position until you can state the opposing one at full strength. The technique is morally neutral — which is precisely the problem. Rhetoric is a power, and the sophists sold power without vetting the buyer. Their honest answer to the charge, reported by Gorgias in Plato's dialogue, was that a boxing master is not to blame when a pupil punches his father. Athens was never quite convinced.

Plato's long shadow

Plato wrote at least six dialogues wholly or largely about sophists, and the portrait is a masterpiece of hostile art. His Protagoras is vain but formidable; his Gorgias is genial and shallow; his Thrasymachus snarls; his Euthydemus is a clown juggling verbal fallacies. Above all, Plato worked tirelessly to separate two figures the public confused: the sophist, who takes money to produce conviction, and the philosopher — Socrates — who takes nothing and seeks truth. In the Sophist, written years later, the sophist is finally defined, with icy formality, as a dealer in images and appearances, a "wizard and imitator of real being."

The caricature endured because the caricaturist was the greatest prose writer of antiquity and because the sophists' own books perished. We possess perhaps a few dozen pages of genuine sophistic writing against the thousands in which Plato and his heirs describe them. History's verdict on the sophists was, for most of two millennia, a verdict delivered by their opponent's estate. It was not until the nineteenth century — Hegel and, decisively, George Grote in his History of Greece — that the file was reopened. Grote pointed out the obvious: the sophists were the professional educators of the most brilliant generation Greece ever produced, the generation of Thucydides, Euripides, and Pericles; a class of men who were simply frauds could not have done that work. Twentieth-century scholarship largely followed him, and the "Older Sophists" are now studied as serious thinkers: pioneers of grammar, semantics, anthropology, political theory, and the philosophy of language.

What they got right

Strip away the polemic, and a sober list of sophistic achievements is long. They created the idea of higher education for a fee — the ancestor of every university that charges tuition. They invented the systematic study of language: Protagoras classified the genders of nouns and the moods of sentences; Prodicus founded synonymy; Gorgias founded prose style. They opened the empirical study of human societies by taking the nomos–physis question seriously. They articulated, in Protagoras' great myth of Prometheus, the first surviving theory of civilization as a human achievement — justice and shame distributed to all men, because a city cannot stand if political skill is the monopoly of a few. That myth contains, in embryo, the democratic idea itself.

They were also, it must be said, right about their own core claim. Excellence in public life can be taught — every law school, business school, writing program, and debate team on earth operates on the sophists' premise, and charges the sophists' fees. The modern knowledge economy, in which persuasion is packaged, priced, and sold at scale, is Protagoras' marketplace with better logistics.

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The unresolved argument

And yet Plato's question does not go away, which is why the quarrel still feels alive. If persuasion is a teachable power detached from truth, what protects a democracy from its most skillful speakers? Athens itself supplied the cautionary tales: the assembly talked into the Sicilian catastrophe by beautiful arguments; the demagogues of the war years; the juries swayed to kill. Every age of new media has replayed the problem — print, radio, television, and now feeds tuned by machine to each listener's private weather, a personalization of persuasion beyond anything Gorgias dreamed of. The sophists answered that the remedy for dangerous speech is training in speech — that a citizenry schooled in argument is harder to fool, and that judgment itself is the skill their courses ultimately sold. Plato answered that no amount of training substitutes for a standard of truth outside the contest. Both answers are still on the table. The debate between them is not a relic of the fifth century BCE; it is the operating condition of every open society, conducted daily in courtrooms, parliaments, comment threads, and classrooms.

Perhaps that is the fairest way to leave it. The sophists lost their name and kept their world: we live in the one they described — plural, contested, ruled by argument — and we still half-wish, with Plato, that we did not. Of all things, man remains the measure; the question the Greeks left us is whether he can also be measured, and by what.