This chapter concerns itself with the Sophists’ professional activities. Their professionalism – especially the claim that they were first to teach for pay – has often been used as the only meaningful characteristic to distinguish them from other wisdom experts. When reviewing the evidence for their professional activities, however, a different picture emerges, one in which the Sophists appear to be less exceptional and more embedded in a broader economy of wisdom than has hitherto been realized. The chapter reviews the primary sources and discusses the difficulty of reconstructing the Sophists’ professional lives based on authors who, like Plato, seem hostile and frequently mention the Sophists in invective contexts. By paying attention to the Sophists’ professional activities, we can gain a better understanding of their social position and the cultural legitimacy accorded them by their contemporaries. How we interpret their professional activities can further help shape our understanding of their contribution to Greek philosophy and their intellectual legacy.

Known chiefly from sources related to democratic Athens, the Sophists emerge from the competitive ethos of aristocratic Greek society. The impetus for the Sophistic movement was the transformation of social and political relations within the Greek world following the defeat of Xerxes. These changes were most dramatically felt and best recorded at Athens. The phenomenal wealth of fifth-century Athens increased the number of Athenians aspiring to an aristocratic lifestyle and intensified the competition for social recognition and for preeminence in politics. Verbal dexterity was a key attribute in the pursuit of such standing. Sophists attracted students by promising to impart such skills in the young men of wealthy families. The turmoil of war in the late fifth century encouraged some of those influenced by Sophists to turn toward oligarchic revolution at Athens, tainting the reputation of Sophistic learning, leading to the condemnation of Socrates for his engagement with these self-proclaimed teachers of political virtue and wisdom.

This chapter discusses connections between the Sophists and their wider intellectual context. It argues for the value of the term “enlightenment” as a characterization of the period in two respects: as pointing to a widespread self-consciousness of intellectual change, and as encompassing a range of discourses and thinkers beyond the philosophical. Using Aristophanes’ Clouds as a guide, the chapter discusses three modes of thinking that are characteristic of the sophistic period as an enlightenment, understood in these senses: an interest in empirical research and collection, particularly in the human social realm; a concentration on methods of argument and widespread employment of antilogistic forms; and a skepticism toward causal reasoning concerning divinity and the unseen generally. These three modes of thinking are found importantly among the Sophists, but are manifest widely beyond their thought, and are best understood as characteristic practices and attitudes of a fifth-century enlightenment.

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.

This chapter discusses the importance of rhetoric to the rise of the Sophists and the way that an attention to language as such conduces to a novel and controversial understanding of reality. Language, for the Sophists, is more than a medium for conveying meaning; it is itself creative of meaning, making the education that they offer uniquely powerful. This is the fuller sense of their professing to make their students “clever at speaking” (deinos legein). The chapter traces three specific areas on which the Sophists brought to bear their interest in logos: grammar and the issue of the correct names; the criticism of and engagement with poetry; and rhetoric and the effectiveness of argumentative techniques. We see that these explorations cannot be said to aim at a systematic theory. But they helped to inaugurate the study of language for its own sake, a topic that would play an important role in the philosophical debates of the following centuries.

The chapter argues that the antecedents of Greek philosophical interest in logical argumentation can be found in the late-fifth-century sophistical practice and teaching of technê logôn or “the art of arguments.” It assembles the extant evidence for the teaching of technê logôn by figures such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Antisthenes, Antiphon, Prodicus, Socrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. Original and provocative features of technê logôn taught by these figures include: (i) the ability to produce opposing arguments on both sides of any question (antilogiai); (ii) the ability to refute any given position or argument; (iii) the ability to skillfully question another person, or to answer such questioning, on any topic; and (iv) the subject-neutral ability to produce arguments on any subject. These features would later become important elements in what fourth-century philosophers would call “dialectic,” “rhetoric,” and other successors to the fifth century “art of argument.”

The Lives of the Sophists, written by the third-century-CE author Philostratus, contains the most detailed and thorough image of a Classical-period sophistic age surviving from antiquity. Previous ancient accounts of the period are comparable with that of Philostratus in various respects but never emphasize a discrete sophistic age. Philostratus’ text has been known continuously since its production, and the individual members of Philostratus’ First Sophistic were arguably the core for modern lists of the individual Sophists. Yet Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic is colored by oratorical practices of his own day, privileging the craft of speaking performance, networks of influence and rivalry, and leadership of the city over the kind of intellectual performances that interested philosophers such as Plato. Despite his obvious departures from Plato, Philostratus also depends on Plato for qualities that establish a “Sophist” under his concept, both in the Classical period and in his own.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

In the late fifth century BCE, traditional religious beliefs and practices were being reconsidered from a variety of intellectual fields and viewpoints, but perhaps most vigorously interrogated by the Sophists. Although ancient Greek religion was characteristically open to change and local variety, the Sophists and contemporaneous thinkers put this flexibility to the test, as ancient reports of trials against intellectuals on account of their religious views attest. Anaxagoras and Socrates, in different ways, offer novel perspectives on what the divine is and is not; Protagoras in one way and the Derveni author in another question traditional certainties about our access to and knowledge of the divine; Prodicus, Democritus, and the so-called Sisyphus fragment provide psychological and/or sociological explanations of religious beliefs; and characters in plays by Euripides and Aristophanes deny outright the existence of the gods and, with that, the existence of traditional moral values.

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed.

This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.