The Presocratic philosophers dealt to a large extent with questions which might be said to have been settled long ago, and to possess now an interest which is purely historical. We no longer debate whether the earth is round or flat, and if we want to discover the origin and substance of the stars, we are hardly likely to be helped by the speculations of Xenophanes or Anaxagoras. With the change that came over philosophy in the fifth century, we are plunged into a discussion of questions which are as relevant now as they were when first raised by the Sophists. Whatever we may think of the Sophistic movement, we must all agree that (as Alban Lesky puts it in his history of Greek literature) no intellectual movement can be compared with it in the permanence of its results, and that the questions which the Sophists posed have never been allowed to lapse in the history of Western thought down to our own day. This is obvious from many recent writings on the period, in which the conflict between the Sophistic and Platonic points of view is expounded, even by professional scholars, in tones not so much of dispassionate historical investigation as of vehement partisanship. It is difficult to remain impartial in discussing questions which are of such vital importance to the preservation of civilized values in our own day.

In spite of the shift of interest from natural phenomena to human affairs, there are nevertheless essential connexions between the Pre-socratic tradition and the new intellectual ferment generated by the Sophists. The Presocratics may fairly be said to have been pre-occupied with the nature of reality and its relation to sensible phenomena.

(Seeming and being, believing and knowing, persuading and proving)

GENERAL

Rhetoric has already been mentioned in these pages (20, 50 f.), but demands a closer look. Obviously we are not here concerned with appraisal of the works of Lysias, Andocides or other Attic orators, nor with questions of manner and style; but the theory behind Greek rhetoric had philosophical implications, with which not only the Sophists but Plato himself felt that they had to come to grips. Plato could even describe his own dialectical philosophy as the substitution of good rhetoric for bad, and it has been contended that rhetoric alone was the distinguishing mark of a Sophist. That this is an exaggeration will have already appeared, but all the leading Sophists were deeply concerned with it, in its forensic, political and epideictic branches, both as active practitioners and as teachers, systematizers and writers of rhetorical handbooks. Plato, who knew his Sophists, distinguishes sophistic and rhetoric by an elaborate analogy, designed to show how ‘though they differ in nature, yet they are so closely related that Sophists and orators, working in the same sphere and on the same subject-matter, are confused, and know not what to make of themselves, nor others of them’. It must be read in the light of his own doctrine of the superiority of knowledge, reality and teaching to belief, appearance and persuasion. As gymnastic keeps the body fit, so legislation keeps a state sound and healthy. If the body falls sick, medicine will cure it, and the corresponding art in the state is the execution of justice. All these arts have their counterfeits. To gymnastic corresponds make-up, giving the appearance of health, and to legislation sophistic, claiming to impart what keeps a state sound, but without real knowledge. The counterfeit of the doctor is the chef, who claims to know the best diet for the body but in fact aims only at pleasing the palate, and similarly rhetoric corresponds to the due execution of justice in that it aims at cajoling an audience and producing the semblance, not the reality, of justice.

The two terms nomos (pi. nomoi) and physis are key-words—in the fifth and fourth centuries one might rather say catch-words—of Greek thought. In earlier writers they do not necessarily appear in-compatible or antithetical, but in the intellectual climate of the fifth century they came to be commonly regarded as opposed and mutually exclusive: what existed ‘by nomos’ was not ‘by physis’ and vice versa. It is with this use of the terms that we shall now be chiefly concerned.

The meaning of physis emerges from a study of the Presocratics. It can safely be translated ‘nature’, though when it occurs in conjunction with nomos the word ‘reality’ will sometimes make the contrast more immediately clear. Nomos for the men of classical times is something that nomizetai, is believed in, practised or held to be right; originally, something that nemetai, is apportioned, distributed or dispensed. That is to say, it presupposes an acting subject—believer, practitioner or apportioner—a mind from which the nomos emanates. Naturally therefore different people had different nomoi but, so long as religion remained an effective force, the devising mind could be the god's, and so there could be nomoi that were applicable to all mankind. ‘Human laws (nomoi) are sustained by the one divine law’ said Heraclitus (fr. 114, vol. 1, 425), and for Hesiod (Erga 276, echoed in the myth of Protagoras, Plato, Prot. 322d) Zeus has laid down ‘a law for all men’, that unlike the beasts they should possess justice. This conception persisted in the Sophistic age. Even the rationalist Thucydides can speak of the self-seeking party politicians of his day as partners in crime rather than observers of the divine law. It appears also in the ‘unwritten laws’ of Sophocles's Antigone, which are divine and everlasting and which no mortal can successfully defy, as Creon learns too late (v. 1113; on ‘unwritten laws’ see pp. 118ff. below).

INTRODUCTION

In the foregoing chapters many of the views of Sophists and their contemporaries have been introduced in a discussion of the main topics of philosophical interest in the fifth century. The priority given to this discussion over a treatment of each thinker individually may be justified by the reflection that on the whole this was a debate of con- temporaries eagerly exchanging views and that the subjects of perennial human interest on which they argued do not admit of the same linear progress from one thinker to the next which can be detected in the more scientific theorizing of the Presocratics. It seemed best there-fore to reproduce, so far as possible, the interplay of their minds on this topic or that. There is the further consideration that, as I have tried to bring out more than once during the discussion, it is not always possible on the evidence available to assign a particular view to its author with certainty. Salomon went so far as to say (Sav. Stift. 1911, 131) that ‘the picture of the individual Sophists which we construct on the basis of such of their dicta as are preserved is, in so far as it is determined by the vicissitudes of the tradition, the result of pure chance.’ At the same time there is something in Nestle's reasons (in the preface to Vom Mythos zum Logos) for choosing an arrangement by persons rather than by subjects, namely that ‘other-wise much repetition would have been necessary and the contributions of the great personalities, whose unitary vigour was in fact responsible for the intellectual progress achieved, would have been dismembered’. An attempt to have the best of both worlds will obviously increase the risk of repetition, a point which must be borne in mind.

The third volume of my History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1969) was divided into two parts, entitled respectively ‘The World of the Sophists’ and ‘Socrates’. By issuing the two parts separately in paperback form, the Press hopes to make them more easily and cheaply available to students. This book reproduces the first part, with the minimum of alterations necessary to allow it to appear as a separate publication. Mentions of ‘vol. I’ or ‘vol. II’ in the text refer to the earlier volumes of this work.

The original title for the first part was chosen to mark the fact that it is impossible to understand the Sophists without taking into account a wider circle of writers and indeed the general contemporary climate of thought. Philosophy in the middle of the fifth century B.C. was closely bound up with problems of practical living, with views on morals and politics and the origin and purpose of organized societies, and the biggest difficulty which it presented was that of setting limits to the subject. What an authority on the eighteenth century has said of the philosophes of that epoch is equally true of the Sophists, namely that ‘while the Enlightenment was a family of philosophes, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophes acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempted to impose their programme’. One cannot isolate the Sophists from their contemporary world, from writers like Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes and the orators, while at the same time any tendency to allow the volume to develop into a history of Greek literature had, for obvious reasons, to be resisted.

A recent writer has remarked on the powerful impact which has always been made by fresh and immediate contact with the great minds of ancient Greece.

POLITICAL EQUALITY

In the fifth century democracy, both as an established political constitution and as an ideal, reached its climax in Athens and some other Greek cities. Against it stood oligarchy, by no means a spent force, and whether in power or in opposition always a foe to be reckoned with. Naturally therefore an ideological conflict developed which led men on beyond constitutional questions to larger problems of human nature and human relations. Democracy was part of a general movement towards equality, and the need to defend democracy was a spurto further arguments in its favour. Thucydides provides some of the best examples of this, for instance in the speech of Athenagoras, democratic leader of Syracuse, who says to the young oligarchs of his city (6.38.5):

Do you dislike being politically on an equality with a large number? But how is it just for members of the same state to be denied the same rights? I shall be told that democracy is neither sensible nor fair [literally ‘equal’], and that the wealthy are also the best fitted to rule; but I reply, first, that demos means the whole state, oligarchy only a part; secondly, that the wealthy may be the best guardians of property, but the best counsellors are the intelligent, and the best at listening to and judging arguments are the many. And in a democracy all these, whether acting separately or together, have an equal share.

Here we have the ideal of a democracy, in which the rich have their place, but it is for the most intelligent to give counsel—possibly conflicting counsel, for there are two sides to every question—and the decision is in the hands of the whole people, when they have listened to the arguments and sized them up. In practice it did not always work out like that, for demos no less than oligoi could be applied to a section only of the population—could mean plebs as well as populus — and as such could be ruthless in its treatment of the rich or intellectual.

Opinions differ as to how far the theory of the social contract, or compact, as understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D., was anticipated in our period of Greek thought, and the differences spring largely from the different meanings which scholars have given to the phrase. We shall look at the evidence first (briefly in some cases where it has already been touched on), and may then, if we wish, see how close the Greek conceptions were to those of later Europe.

One ancient belief about law attributed it ultimately to the gods. The human lawgiver or constitution-maker (whose existence was not denied) was only the channel through which the commands of heaven became known and effective. In Tyrtaeus's poem (seventh century, fr. 3 Diehl) Lycurgus's constitution for Sparta is actually dictated in detail by Apollo at Delphi. Later, men tended to say that Lycurgus drew up the constitution himself but went to Delphi for assurance that it had the god's approval (Xen. Rep. Lac. 8.5). Herodotus (1.65) finds two versions side by side, the traditional one of a religious origin for the laws, and a rationalistic—based on the similarity of Spartan and Cretan laws—that Lycurgus copied the constitution of Crete. The Cretan laws in their turn were said to have been the work of Zeus (Plato, Laws, adinit.). Even Cleisthenes, making his democratic reforms at the end of the sixth century, received the names for his new tribes from the Pythia (Arist. Ath. Pol. 21-6), and probably therefore sought the oracle's ratification of his whole scheme.

By the fifth century an impersonal nature had in some men's minds replaced the gods as the worldwide power that produced the whole order of which men are a part. For others, like Hippias, the two can exist comfortably side by side, and Euripides, when he speaks in ‘Presocratic’ language of the ‘ageless order of immortal nature’, and elsewhere in his poetry, shows a desire to keep them united.

‘Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? Or is it a matter of practice, or natural aptitude or what?’ The urgency with which this question was debated in the fifth century has been mentioned in an introductory chapter (p. 25), where the meaning of areté was briefly outlined and it was suggested that it had powerful social implications inclining a writer to answer in one sense or another on grounds not purely rational. The debate reflected the clash between older aristocratic ideals and the new classes which were then rising to prominence under the democratic system of government at Athens and seeking to establish what would today be called a meritocracy. The claim of Sophists that areté could be imparted for fees by travelling teachers, instead of being freely transmitted by the precept and example of family and friends, and by association with ‘the right people’, coupled with the qualities of character native to any young man of good birth, was to the conservative-minded profoundly shocking. Philosophically, the question whether it was a matter of natural talent, or could be acquired by either teaching or assiduous practice, is chiefly important because, as a commonplace of the time, it was caught up in the thought of Socrates and Plato, who tried to answer it at a deeper level. Since the present study must be in part preparation for meeting these two great figures we may take a brief look at the kind of answers offered in and before their time. After-wards, of course, the topic became more commonplace still, till we get to Horace's ‘fortes creantur fortibus et bonis … doctrinased vim promovet insitam’.

The old idea is typified by Theognis in the sixth century. To his young friend Cyrnus he writes (vv. 27 ff. Diehl; the rest of the poetry makes it abundantly clear that for him ‘good ’ and ‘noble’ mean ‘of the right class’):

Out of the goodwill I bear you I tell you what I myself learned from good men when I was still a child.

The chapter on the Sophists (p. 49) mentioned Sir Alexander Grant's division of morality into three stages, corresponding in a nation to childhood, adolescence and maturity in the individual. In one respect his division would not pass unchallenged today. He calls the second, sceptical or sophistic era ‘transitional’, and implies that only the third, that is, a return to earlier beliefs more deeply held because attained by independent thought, represents maturity. In Greek thought the transition was to the idealism of Plato, a philosophical reaffirmation and defence of those absolute values which are accepted by the ‘simplicity and trust’ of childhood as they are in the pre-critical stage of society. The second or sceptical stage might equally well be called positivist, and it is by no means generally accepted that belief in absolute values is more mature than positivism. Not every adult recovers the convictions of his childhood. The positivist rejects the view that positive law must set out from the ideal of a natural, i.e. universally valid, standard of right: there is only a relative right or goodness, which is derived from the positive law prevailing at a particular time. The positivist knows that the search for goodness is a chimaera-hunt. Similarly beauty, as it was for Hume, is ‘no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the minds which contemplate them, and each mind perceives a different beauty’. In statements like these the modern positivist would not wish to be told that his standpoint was either pre-Platonic or adolescent, but he is in fact repeating the Sophists' assertions in the controversy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Value for him, as for Archelaus, exists by nomos only, not by physis.

CRITICISMS OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION

The Presocratic philosophers, whether or not they retained a belief in a divine force or forces, all alike promulgated conceptions of religion which were far removed from the anthropomorphism of the popular or state cults based on the Homeric pantheon. Xenophanes openly attacked them, and substituted a non-anthropomorphic monotheism or pantheism, while others tacitly abandoned them in favour, first, of an ever-living world-stuff described vaguely as governing or steering the motions of the cosmos and everything in it, and later, in Anaxagoras, of a single Mind separate from the matter of the universe and the cause of the rational order which it displays. We have seen Heraclitus condemning phallic and other cults for their unseemliness and Democritus (doubtless under the influence of already existing evolutionary theories) claiming that it was only the alarming nature of thunder, lightning and similar phenomena that made men think they were caused by gods. As ‘enlightenment’ grows, it shows itself under two main aspects (whether in ancient Greece or Europe since the Renaissance): first, the determination to believe only what is reasonable and a tendency to identify reason with positivism and the progress of natural science, and secondly a genuine concern with morality. Morality is identified with the amelioration of human life and the elimination of cruelty, injury and all forms of exploitation of human beings by their fellows, and is based on purely humanistic and relative standards, for it is held that absolute standards claiming supernatural authority not only have led in the past, but must inevitably lead, to cruelty, intolerance and other evils. The Greek gods were very vulnerable in both these aspects, and as soon as conventional piety began to yield to a more thoughtful attitude—when nomos in all its aspects was no longer taken for granted but rather contrasted with what was natural and universal—scepticism and disapproval began to make themselves felt in increasing volume.

The Greek words sophos, sophia, usually translated ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, were in common use from the earliest times, and, standing as they do for an intellectual or spiritual quality, naturally acquired some delicate shades of meaning which can only be crudely illustrated here. At first they connoted primarily skill in a particular craft. A shipwright in Homer is ‘skilled in all sophia’, a charioteer, a steersman, an augur, a sculptor are sophoi each in his occupation, Apollo is sophos with the lyre, Thersites a contemptible character but sophos with his tongue; there is a law in Hades (for comic purposes) that whoever excels his fellow-craftsmen in ‘one of the great and clever arts’ shall have special privileges until someone else comes along who is ‘more sophos in his art’. This sense merges easily into that of generally knowing or prudent, by way of a line like that of Theognis (II9ff.) that it is easy for a sophos to detect counterfeit coinage, but much more difficult to unmask a man of spurious character. Here sophos might still mean an expert (there are experts in testing coinage, but alas none in testing humanity), though more probably it is going over to the meaning of knowledgeable in general. In a similar doubtful position is Hesiod's description of Linus, the mythical singer and musician, as ‘versed in all kinds of sophia (fr. 153 Rzach). In this way it was used of the seven Sophoi Wise Men or Sages, whose wisdom consisted chiefly of practical statesmanship and was enshrined in brief gnomic sayings, or of anyone of good sense (Eur. I. A. 749).

Along with generalization, a term of value like this, implying positive approval, inevitably suffers division into a ‘true’ and a ‘false’ meaning according to the user's point of view. The sophia of charioteer, shipwright or musician must have been to a large extent acquired by learning, but Pindar no doubt pleased his royal patron when he wrote that he who knows much by nature is wise (sophos), in contrast to the chattering crows who have gained their knowledge by learning.

In volume II (ch. VI) I briefly sketched the climate of thought in the fifth century, especially at Athens, and the effect in several different fields of the substitution of natural for divine causation. The present chapter will attempt an outline of the main causes and features of this changing outlook, before we go on to consider the meaning of Sophistic and investigate each separate topic in detail.

To determine the causes of an intellectual revolution is always a rash undertaking, and when a great many things are happening together it is not always easy to distinguish cause from effect; but a few things may be mentioned as more likely to belong to the former category. We are bound to dismiss, on chronological grounds, the assumption that the ‘Presocratics’, and in particular the Ionians, could all have been influential in moulding the thought of the Sophists. If there is any causal connexion between the ideas of Democritus and those of Protagoras or Gorgias, it is more likely to have been the other way round. On the other hand the influence of the Eleatics on Protagoras and Gorgias is undeniable, as is that of Heraclitus on Protagoras, and Gorgias is said to have been a pupil and follower of Empedocles. One of the most powerful influences for humanism is to be found in the theories of the natural origins of life and society which were a feature of Ionian thought from Anaximander onwards. Life, including human life, was the product of a kind of fermentation set up by the action of heat on damp or putrefying matter, and social and political groups were formed by agreement as man's only effective form of defence against non-human nature. The cosmogonies themselves assisted in banishing divine agents from the world, not because they were evolutionary rather than creative—the idea of divine creation was never prominent in Greek religion—but because they made more difficult the Greek habit of seeing divine or semi-divine beings every-where in nature.