The Sophists
In the second half of the fifth century B.C., a new kind of teacher became available
to young men who sought to polish their skills for politics. They were called
sophists1 (“wise men”),
a label that acquired a pejorative sense preserved in the English word
“sophistry,” because they were so clever at public speaking and
philosophic debates and were feared by traditionally-minded men whose political
opinions they threatened. The earliest sophists arose in parts of the Greek world
other than Athens, but from about 450 B.C. on they began to travel to Athens, which
was then at the height of its material prosperity, in search of pupils who could pay
the hefty
prices the sophists charged2 for their instruction. Wealthy
young men flocked to the dazzling demonstrations of these
itinerant
teachers3' ability to speak persuasively, an
ability that they claimed to be able to impart to students. The sophists were offering
just what every ambitious young man wanted to learn because the greatest single skill
that a man in democratic Athens could possess was to be able to persuade his fellow
male citizens in the debates of the assembly and the council or in lawsuits before
large juries. For those unwilling or unable to master the new rhetorical skills of
sophistry, the sophists for hefty fees would compose speeches to be delivered by the
purchaser as his own composition. The overwhelming importance of persuasive speech in
an oral culture like that of ancient Greece made the sophists frightening figures to
many, for the new teachers offered an escalation of the power of speech that seemed
potentially destabilizing to political and social traditions.
Protagoras
The most famous sophist was
Protagoras4, a
contemporary of
Pericles5 from
Abdera in northern Greece.6 Protagoras emigrated to Athens about 450 B.C. when he was about forty and
spent most of his career there. His oratorical ability and his upright character so
impressed the men of Athens that they soon chose him to devise a code of laws for a
new colony to be founded in Thurii in southern Italy in 444 B.C. Some of Protagoras'
ideas eventually aroused considerable controversy, such as his agnostic position
concerning the gods: “Whether the gods exist I cannot discover, nor what
their form is like, for there are many impediments to knowledge, [such as] the
obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”
The Subjectivism of Protagoras
Equally controversial was Protagoras' view that there was no absolute standard of
truth, that there were two sides to every question. For example, if one person
feeling a breeze thinks it warm, while a different person judges the same wind to be
cool, there is no decision to be made concerning which judgment is correct; the wind
simply is warm to one and cool to the other. Protagoras summed up his subjectivism
(the belief that there is no absolute reality behind and independent of appearances)
in the
much-quoted opening of his work7 entitled
Truth
8 (most of which is now lost): “Man is the measure of all things, of
the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are
not.” “Man” in this passage (anthropos in Greek, hence our word anthropology) seems to refer to the
individual human being (whether male or female), whom Protagoras makes the
sole judge of his or her own impressions.9
The Perceived Dangers of Relativism
Two related views taught by sophists aroused special controversy: the idea that
human institutions and values were only matters of convention, custom, or law
(nomos) and not products of nature (physis), and the idea that, since truth was relative,
speakers should be able to argue either side of a question with equal
persuasiveness10. Since the first idea implied that traditional human institutions were
arbitrary rather than grounded in immutable nature and the second made rhetoric into
an amoral skill, the combination of the two seemed very dangerous to a society so
devoted to the spoken word because it threatened the shared public values of the
polis with unpredictable changes. Protagoras
himself insisted that his doctrines were not hostile to democracy, especially
because he argued that every person had an innate capability for
“excellence” and that human survival depended on the rule of law
based on a sense of justice. Members of the community, he argued, should be
persuaded to obey the laws not because they were based on absolute truth, which did
not exist, but because it was expedient for people to live by them. A thief who
claimed, for instance, that in his opinion a law against stealing was not
appropriate, would have to be persuaded that the law forbidding theft was to his
advantage, both to protect his own property and to allow the community to function
in which he, like all human beings, had to live in order to survive.
Unsettling Cosmologies
Protagoras' relativistic approach to such fundamental issues as the moral basis of
the rule of law in society was not the only source of disquietude for many Athenian
men concerning the new intellectual developments. Philosophers such as
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae11 in
Ionia and
Leucippus12 of
Miletus13 propounded unsettling new theories about the nature of the cosmos in
response to the provocative physics of the Ionian thinkers of the sixth century B.C.
Anaxagoras' general theory postulating an abstract force he called
“
mind14” as the organizing principle of
the universe probably impressed most people as too obscure to worry about, but the
details of his thought seemed to offend those who held the assumptions of
traditional religion. For example, he argued that the sun was in truth nothing more
than a lump of flaming rock, not a divine entity.
Leucippus, whose doctrines
were made famous by his pupil Democritus15 of Abdera, invented an atomic theory of matter to explain
how change was possible and indeed constant. Everything, he argued, consisted of
tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to
combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms. This physical explanation of
the source of change, like Anaxagoras' analysis of the nature of the sun, seemed to
deny the validity of the entire superstructure of traditional religion, which
explained events as the outcome of divine forces.
