Introduction: Who Are We Talking About?

Fourth-century authors did not merely “receive” the fifth-century Sophists, interpreting them in light of their own concerns. They also created them, deciding who they were, what they did, and what goals they had in mind. This is not to say they altogether invented them; in constructing a canon of Sophists, articulating a sophistic practice, and derogating “sophistry” against other intellectual pursuits, writers such as Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle drew from ample materials. As we have seen in previous chapters, the predecessors of these fourth-century writers were already speaking of “Sophists,” sometimes derisively, thereby designating various propounders of dubious intellectual and political savvy; and certain now-canonical Sophists had a nominal community, in fact sharing concerns, investigative approaches, and solution types.Footnote ¹ And yet some characteristic features of the “sophistic movement” were the creations of fourth-century writers who aligned themselves with philosophy: that there were four or five exemplary Sophists, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and maybe Antiphon; that there were practical criteria for deciding who counted as a Sophist; that the Sophists were money-hungry; and that they deployed sham wisdom. So even though, for example, Plato did not invent the sophistic movement, he did establish its canonical figures; and even though he did not alone give Sophists a bad name, he did write the Sophist, in which the Eleatic Visitor generalizes, stridently and influentially, about sophistic ignorance and manipulation. A central aspect of this chapter thus concerns the fourth-century creative reception of the Sophists: how they came to be as we now know them.

Part of the account of this creative reception involves the appraisal of the Sophists; and yet here we confront something quite puzzling. Scholars of Plato have increasingly acknowledged that, whatever the strident claims made by his characters against “Sophists” as a category, his portrayals of the canonical Sophists themselves do not reflect such animus.Footnote ² Plato may judge them witheringly as grandiose and self-contradicting, but these are problems he sees throughout the range of Socrates’ interlocutors. He does not obviously portray the individual Sophists as more monstrous or dangerous than others, and indeed he seems to show respect for their graciousness, intellectual sophistication, and substantial fellow feeling. We may no longer wish to speak, as G. B. Kerferd did in the dominant English text on the Sophists of the last four decades, of “Plato’s profoundly hostile treatment of them.”Footnote ³ A similar observation might be made about Aristotle, whose anti-“sophistic” rhetoric is just as strong but who derogates neither the canonical Sophists nor those fourth-century thinkers he refers to as “So-and-so the Sophist,” and who, more importantly, engages dialectically with their thinking with as much seriousness as he does the thinking of natural philosophers or metaphysicians. The puzzle, then, is as follows. If the canonical or named Sophists are exemplary of sophistry in the fourth century, and are treated as legitimate and even admirable thinkers – if perhaps not the ideals of Socrates or Democritus – whence the harsh abuse against Sophists in general? Are the canonical Sophists “great” because they are exceptions to the rule? Or are the definitions of “sophistry” ideal types, not meant to describe a sociological category? Or is there a chronological distinction between the fifth-century Sophists, innocents in an as-yet-immature discipline, and the fourth-century Sophists, jaded opportunists in a decadent enterprise? The answer to all three possibilities is yes, as another central aspect of this chapter will go to show.

The upshot here is that the question “What did fourth-century authors think about the Sophists?” is an infelicitous question to ask. “The Sophists” fails to have a unitary referent. It can point to named individuals, a general category, persons from the fifth century, and persons from the fourth century. A better, if bulkier, question is “Who variously were ‘(the) Sophists’ for fourth-century authors, and why did those authors have whatever thoughts they did about those so designated?” For each major fourth-century author, the answer differs somewhat. How it differs depends on, and reveals, their often complex disciplinary goals. Unresolved questions in scholarship about the Sophists – were they doctrinally sympathetic, professionally unified, methodologically concordant, broadly distrusted, and so forth – have depended largely on fourth-century evidence, and so its clarification should be of some use.

This chapter has two main halves, each answering a distinct though overlapping question. The first half concerns the fourth-century reception of the canonical fifth-century Sophists, with closest attention to Gorgias. Here we investigate what our fourth-century authors knew and felt moved to say about these five towering intellectual celebrities of a previous epoch. The chapter’s second half looks at fourth-century remarks about “Sophists” more generally, as kinds of people from the past or present. We ask what marks someone as a Sophist, what work this does for an author, and what results from the author speaking of Sophists in such a way. In the process, we lay out how Plato might have ended up defining the sophistic movement.

The Canonical Sophists as Seen from the Fourth Century

“Sophists” from a Fourth-Century Perspective

The topic of this chapter, the fourth-century reception of the Sophists, is ambivalent between the reception of the five men that we, following Plato, treat as the exemplary Sophists and the beliefs that fourth-century writers had about Sophists, whether earlier or contemporary figures or members of an intellectual program. To be sure, these issues overlap, as we have seen from the previous half of the chapter. In what follows, however, we concentrate on the various ways our writers treated the idea of “sophistry” in relation to their own intellectual programs. Those treatments are heterogeneous to the extent their programs were heterogeneous, especially the degree to which they cared about representing historically distant intellectual movements and the way they characterized their own method or norms of argumentation.

Conclusion

By contrast to the post-Hegelian reception of the Sophists, the fourth century did not find the fifth-century Sophists a doctrinally distinctive group in the history of philosophy. Nor, by contrast to the Eleatic visitor’s final definition of “Sophists” in Plato’s Sophist, did others in that century generally impugn the fifth-century Sophists as culturally corrosive. Rather, they ended up identifying them as proponents of public intellectual culture and teachers within it, emphasizing their connection between the study of speech and reasoning and the acquisition of social and political power. The enmity to the Sophists we do see seems likely aimed at fourth-century contemporaries, who were at risk of besmirching the authors’ reputation and whose dubiousness could be explained by an overpromising and underdelivering of moral goods.

Sometime around 230 CE, a Greek imperial prose writer named Philostratus addressed a two-book work to the future short-term Roman emperor Gordian I, in which he undertook to give an account of the lives of those eminent men who had been called “Sophists” since the beginning of the tradition in Classical Athens.Footnote ¹ “Sophist” was a title of respect in his own day, as we know from an assortment of contemporary inscriptions, especially from Asia Minor,Footnote ² and the profession was a topic of interest common to author and addressee. Philostratus was a Sophist himself, and Gordian was descended from one of the most famous of the latter-day Sophists, Herodes Atticus, whose life turns out to be the centerpiece of both Philostratus’ text and the educational network he portrays. The text received attention and response in its own time and has survived for us under the title Lives of the Sophists (abbreviated VS, from the Latin title, Vitae Sophistarum).Footnote ³ As far as we can tell, this is the first post-Classical text that looked back to a clearly defined and extensively described sophistic era, and in that respect its influence lasts into modern times.

Philostratus’ concern with the linear traditions of “sophistic” craft and practice is evident on all fronts, including his quasi-reification of what he calls the “ancient sophistic” and its sequel, the “Second Sophistic.” Insofar as Philostratus’ First Sophistic is the older phase of the sophistic practice of his own day, it differs from both modern conceptions of the sophistic movement and conceptions in the Classical period. It is foremost an oratorical tradition, albeit featuring oratory described as “philosophizing.” In his account of the First Sophistic, Philostratus privileges features of sophistic practice in his contemporary world, such as skills associated with extemporaneous speaking and functions of service to the state. He describes interactions and personal relationships among the early Sophists about which we hear nothing elsewhere. Yet most of the nine characters on Philostratus’ list of the first Sophists – Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Thrasymachus, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates – are the figures who constitute the bulk of modern lists. (The exceptions are Polus and Isocrates.Footnote ⁴) They also coincide with many of the figures Plato and Xenophon portray in opposition to Socrates. The writings of Xenophon and Plato are indeed built into Philostratus’ project, despite the fundamental difference between the earlier authors’ negative conception of sophistry as sham philosophy and Philostratus’ celebration of the first Sophists as men who practiced “philosophizing oratory.”

Philostratus’ construction of the First Sophistic has been definitive since antiquity. Lives of the Sophists was being cited by title soon after its production, notably in the fourth-century Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (an extension of Philostratus’ project), and explicit references continued through the Byzantine period. Whereas Philostratus probably had predecessors in his effort to compose a list of the ancient Sophists, he is the earliest surviving author after Plato to have written at length about a “sophistic” movement or era – that is, a period of time characterized by definite boundaries, a common endeavor shared by identifiable individuals, and historical consequence. Elements of what might have been imagined as a “First Sophistic” period appear in works by some of Philostratus’ predecessors, as we shall see, but nothing like the strong conception of a movement and an age we find in the Lives of the Sophists.

In modern times, Philostratus’ list of Sophists and conception of a First Sophistic appears to have influenced Hermann Diels’s original collection of the “older Sophistic” (Ältere Sophistik) in an appendix in the first edition of the fragments of the Presocratics (1903), which has been fundamental for modern treatments of “the Sophists.” Diels’ first edition classified eight individuals as older Sophists: Protagoras, Xeniades, Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, Antiphon, and Critias (it also included two anonymous texts, the Dissoi Logoi and the so-called Anonymus Iamblichi). This twentieth-century set of named figures differs from Philostratus’ only by the omission of Polus and Isocrates and the inclusion of Xeniades.Footnote ⁵ (Lycophron, whose paradoxes are discussed by Aristotle, was added in the fifth edition of Diels and Kranz in 1934.) The Diels-Kranz list, in turn, is the foundation of the influential modern accounts of the individuals making up the group, such as “the men” described as players in the fifth-century enlightenment by W. K. C. Guthrie in 1969, “the individual sophists” profiled by G. B. Kerferd in 1981, and “the protagonists” surveyed as an appendix by M. Bonazzi in 2010.Footnote ⁶ A closer understanding of how Philostratus framed, populated, and characterized the First Sophistic and how his version builds on and exceeds other ancient conceptions of the phenomenon illuminates the formation of this tradition.

Here we begin by identifying elements of a “sophistic” in surviving works by those of Philostratus’ post-Hellenistic predecessors and contemporaries who most nearly approach such a concept. Next, we extract and examine the clearest characteristics of Philostratus’ First Sophistic, its boundaries, and its members, with attention to apparent assimilations of the First Sophistic to the Second. Finally, we assess Philostratus’ complicated relationship to Plato. The membership of the First Sophistic in Lives of the Sophists indicates that representation in the works of Plato and Xenophon was Philostratus’ basic criterion for inclusion. Philostratus also cites works by Plato and Xenophon as evidence for his own accounts of these Sophists. But nowhere does Philostratus describe a Sophist by reproducing any account from canonical Socratic literature. Rather, he expands Classical evidence for oratorical performances with extra narrative, while ignoring the negative views of the Sophists’ philosophical contributions. Philostratus’ Sophists are in fact praised for their knack for speaking without knowledge – a typical Platonic bugbear – and presented as successful in their endeavors to promote civic goals. Despite these fundamental differences in evaluation, Philostratus emphasizes the “philosophical” credentials of his own Sophists, drawing attention to his contestation of Plato’s image of the Sophist.Footnote ⁷

In Search of a First Sophistic before Philostratus

Some dialogues of Plato, and in particular his Protagoras, portray a community of competing intellectuals who perform for an audience and are called “Sophists.” The four who eventually became the most frequently cited Sophists – Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias – are listed together as international celebrities in Plato’s Hippias Major 282b1–d5. These are the four who come to mind as the “Sophists” some fourteen centuries later for a Byzantine commentator on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, representing a tradition presumably independent of Philostratus. When Aristotle states that “sophistic” is apparent wisdom and not really what it appears to be (Sophistical Refutations 165a19–22), the commentator, writing under the name of Alexander of Aphrodisias, and commonly identified as Michael of Ephesus, notes (with some unusual plurals): “This is clear from Hippiases and Protagorases and Gorgiases and Prodicuses: and anyone who wants to understand their ‘wisdom’ and the wealth they collected from it should read the dialogues of Plato named for them.”Footnote ⁸ Whereas uses of the word “Sophist” and lists of individuals who would become canonical Sophists are fairly common in the extant literature composed during the centuries separating Plato and Michael, groupings that imply intellectual unity or collective historical consequence are surprisingly infrequent.

Three of Philostratus’ near contemporaries of the early third century CE – Diogenes Laertius, author of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Athenaeus of Naucratis, author of the Dinner-Sophists (Deipnosophistai, sometimes translated Wise Men at Dinner), and Claudius Aelianus (Aelian), author of the Historical Miscellany – provide telling contrast to the project of Lives of the Sophists.Footnote ⁹ Like Philostratus, these writers were well read in certain traditions of Greek literature, and each pays special attention to the works of Plato. To some extent, their works are parallel efforts in a similar project, to collect outstanding products of classical Greek wisdom and integrate them into a single book for the benefit of the third-century reader. If there had been a concept of a First Sophistic circulating in a general intellectual and cultural discourse of the early third century CE, it is likely that at least one of these authors would have known it. Yet apart from Philostratus, they pay no special attention to the classical Sophists as a movement. For Diogenes Laertius, discussed further below, “Sophists” are excessively clever dialecticians or itinerant lecturers of respectable status, who lived in all generations from the Archaic period into Hellenistic times, the entirety of Greek experience covered in his book. Athenaeus, despite adopting the name “Sophist” in the title of his book, portrays his own characters using “Sophist” as a derogatory form of address when they interrupt each other, and several of his “Sophists” are experts merely in cuisine, a prominent topic of the learned conversation portrayed. When a speaker claims to list “the second seven wise men (σοφοί)” as successors to “those Sophists of old,” these turn out to be seven disciples of an eminent chef, a set of cooks who are modeled on the legendary Seven Sages, neither being a group with any correspondence to Plato’s Sophists.Footnote ¹⁰ Aelian in the Historical Miscellany refers more often, in more positive tones, to Indian “Sophists” allegedly encountered by Alexander the Great than to Greek Sophists of any age. All three of these contemporaries mention some of Plato’s ancient Sophists individually or in groups, but the canonical Sophists constitute only a few of the many experts in Greek wisdom discussed, and they have only a faint collective identity. We can conclude that the First Sophistic was not a generally recognized phenomenon in the broad Graeco-Roman intellectual world of the early third century CE.

To be sure, Philostratus’ project was anticipated – faintly, partially, and in contrasting parallel – by older authors in the rhetorical and philosophical traditions. His notion that the First Sophistic was a bounded period of time appears in several writers who practiced oratory themselves and explored antecedents to contemporary practice. Cicero integrates eight of those who would be Philostratus’ Sophists (all but Polus) into the histories of oratory embedded in his three chief works on the topic (Brutus, On the Orator, and Orator), mentioning most of them in clusters, but with special attention to Gorgias and (even more) Isocrates.Footnote ¹¹ Only in the latest of these works, Orator, does Cicero use the term “Sophists” to refer to such a group, which there consists of Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Theodorus of Byzantium, all teachers of oratory according to Plato’s Phaedrus (but not all on Philostratus’ list).Footnote ¹² The dialogues Brutus and On the Orator contain narratives of the rise of Greek oratory, also informed by Plato, and these narratives contain some intimation of a “sophistic” era. Two factors that would color Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic are also present: the use of oratory for statesmanship (such as Cicero practiced himself) is assumed throughout Cicero’s rhetorical texts and implicit in the history of Greek oratory sketched in Brutus; and skill in extemporaneous speaking is central to the discussions of Hippias and Gorgias in On the Orator.

In Brutus 27–38, a character named Cicero, an apparent surrogate for the author, presents a history of Greek oratory in four phases, of which the third phase could potentially be understood as the sophistic era. The first two phases extend from oratory’s beginnings in Homer through the period of Pericles, who transferred to his oratorical practice the skills in sharp thinking that he learned from the natural philosopher Anaxagoras.Footnote ¹³ It was during the second of these early phases that Critias flourished, together with Cleon, Alcibiades, and Theramenes, all fifth-century politicians with reputations for treachery. The third phase began with the rise of the earliest teachers of rhetoric (magistri dicendi), namely, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias.Footnote ¹⁴ These “enjoyed great honor” (in honore magno fuit) and taught a single subject, “how the lesser cause could be made the better by speaking” (quem ad modum causa inferior … dicendo fieri superior posset) – evidently like the promise that drew pupils to Socrates’ school in Clouds and was also attributed to Protagoras in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. These are the core Sophists portrayed in argument with Socrates across Plato’s dialogues, and all are mentioned in Socrates’ discussion of contemporary oratory in the Phaedrus.Footnote ¹⁵ These first masters of rhetoric, according to Cicero, earned chastisement by Socrates, whose intervention opened the way to the fourth phase of oratory, the climactic period of the Attic orators, including Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Aeschines, the statesmen whose speeches are the most important models for Cicero.Footnote ¹⁶

A more positive evaluation of what would become the ancient sophistic appears in On the Orator 3.127–9, again without use of the word “sophist.” There a character named Catulus praises the thesis that universal knowledge is necessary for good oratory by pointing, as examples of this success, to Hippias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Protagoras, and Gorgias (the same five named in Brutus, in a different order). To make this point in favor of Plato’s “Sophists” but counter to Plato’s implied evaluation of them, Catulus poses a friendly interruption to Crassus, an orator serving as the dialogue’s main speaker and mouthpiece of its major messages. Catulus expands the praise of Hippias and Gorgias through embellished restatements of Plato’s Hippias Minor 363c7–364a9 and Gorgias 447c6–8, where the respective figures boast of their ability to speak extemporaneously on a range of topics, including those proposed by the audience. Catulus reverses the negative evaluation of these skills implied by Plato, just as Philostratus later will do. The anticipation of Philostratus’ association of extemporaneous speaking with knowledge is so close that there might be a real influence. Philostratus certainly knew Cicero, as he was alluded to in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (7.11.1).

Dio of Prusa, one of five latter-day figures discussed in Lives of the Sophists whose texts survive for us, is the only one of those five whose writings present an image of a First Sophistic.Footnote ¹⁷ Unlike the image in Philostratus, Dio’s is delivered without narrative and with a negative evaluation that echoes Plato’s. In his short Oration 54, On Socrates (possibly intended as a kind of prologue to his longer orations), Dio lists Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, and Gorgias as four Sophists who collected money for their intellectual performances.Footnote ¹⁸ All are differentiated from Socrates on the basis of their holdings in money, a main point of the text. Furthermore, according to Dio, Socrates proved the enduring value of his words (λόγοι) by inspiring his followers to commemorate them. The Sophists, while popular for live audiences, inspired no such legacy, and their logoi have been lost. Dio uses the Sophists much as Plato did, as foils to extol Socrates. By attributing a common activity to all and opposing this to the profile of Socrates, Dio resembles Cicero as well. Whereas Cicero inscribes his sophistic age as a small piece in a larger story, Dio’s small narrative of comparison occupies his whole short oration, so making his sophistic age appear as a separate, coherent world.

More complicated suggestions of a sophistic age appear a generation after Dio, in some of Lucian’s humorous dialogues from the second century CE. Lucian was probably himself a public performer of speeches and thus, by Philostratus’ definition, a type of Sophist, although he is absent from Philostratus’ list.Footnote ¹⁹ One short text in Lucian’s corpus, Herodotus (probably a prologue text for a longer performance), lists Hippias, Prodicus of Ceos, Polus of Acragas, and one Anaximenes of ChiosFootnote ²⁰ as Sophists who, like Herodotus, found a “shortcut” to fame by performing recitations for large, trans-political gatherings, namely, at the Olympics, rather than by traveling from city to city. Not only does this list overlap with that in Philostratus, notably by its unusual inclusion of Polus, but, as in Philostratus, the setting is oratory at the Olympics. Lucian’s description of the mode of performance and clever shortcut of “those ancient Sophists”Footnote ²¹ becomes a precedent for his own mode of performance, and hence Lucian seems playfully to claim the title of Sophist for himself. The speaking persona is aligned not with the Sophists of the present day, however, but with the ancients, and this creation of an ancient sophistic allows him to escape the pejorative implications of the title “Sophist” that the word normally carries in his corpus.

Throughout his corpus, Lucian creates humor from the failure of modern philosophers to live up to their ancient precedents. The age of the ancient orators and Sophists is less clearly portrayed, but several texts – Teacher of Orators, Lexiphanês (“Word-Shiner”), and The Mistaken Critic – berate individual contemporaries or types through comparison to classical standards they fail to emulate. The sympathetic first-person accuser in The Mistaken Critic 5–9 claims to recite a prologue from a comedy by the late-classical Athenian poet Menander to make the point that orators pretend to deliver extemporaneous speeches that are actually prepared and staged carefully. The speaker is not named, except as a “Sophist claiming to be such,” but the scene is Olympia, and the topic of his speech is the ethnic identity of Pythagoras. Hence this Sophist appears to be modeled on a traveling classical Sophist, such as Hippias. Lucian’s ancient Sophist, in this case, is no better than the modern one (unless by an implication comprehensible only to Lucian’s contemporaries), but the Sophist’s wish to avoid the appearance of saying “stale things” by reading from a book rather than speaking extemporaneouslyFootnote ²² is a precedent for the image of the contemporary Sophist of the Roman Empire, as presented by both Lucian and Philostratus. This text anticipates Philostratus’ discussion of classical precedents for contemporary practice and uses similar vocabulary.

Alongside these partial antecedents of Philostratus’ First Sophistic as an age of orators, we can compare surviving texts that suggest a First Sophistic constituted on intellectual grounds. Most texts from the philosophical tradition seem to be remote from Philostratus’ concerns.Footnote ²³ Yet certain treatments of canonical Sophists as skeptics and dialecticians bear comparison to the way Philostratus portrays Sophists in general. Most relevant for present purposes are Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Professors, composed probably a generation before Philostratus’ work, and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, roughly contemporary with Philostratus’. Overall, the philosophical tradition is loyal to Aristotle’s concept of “sophistry” as deceptive speech involving logical fallacy, as developed by the Stoics. But the individual canonical Sophists are treated, at least by Sextus, without designation as “sophists.” In a section of Against the Dogmatists treating the criterion of truth, Sextus discusses Protagoras and Gorgias at length, in company with seven others ranging temporally from Xenophanes of Colophon of the sixth century BCE to Monimus the Cynic of the late fourth (and including the Xeniades of Corinth admitted to the canon of Sophists by Diels), for abolishing the criterion of truth. In another section, on atheism, Prodicus, Critias, and Protagoras are featured in shorter form among the six pre-Epicurean atheists.Footnote ²⁴ Protagoras is examined by Sextus in additional passages, for his claim that man is the measure of what is and that every presentation to the aesthetic senses is true.Footnote ²⁵ Isocrates is mentioned once, among a list of seven, for a definition of the end of rhetoric as the knowledge of persuasion. As we know from Isocrates himself, persuasion was his central science.Footnote ²⁶ The other Sophists found in Philostratus – Hippias, Polus, Thrasymachus, and Antiphon – make no appearance. Sextus recognizes no special period of time for the success of particular philosophical views, and hence he has no sophistic age literally speaking. His association of some Sophists with skepticism is, on the face of it, just the opposite of Philostratus’ claim, considered below, that the Sophists were outstanding for their confident knowledge.

Diogenes Laertius, writing a generation after Sextus, treats only Protagoras among the philosophers whose lives he discusses but makes broader use than Sextus of the term “sophist,” sometimes in a neutral, nonpejorative sense. The similarity of titles between Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers and Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is not matched by a similarity in the books; Diogenes includes more information, cites more sources, and engages in more technical topics than Philostratus. Diogenes places Protagoras in his ninth book, which includes the “scattered” or “isolated” Heraclitus and Xenophanes; the Eleatics Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno; the Atomists Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Anaxarchus; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonians – many of these are claimed by Sextus to be skeptics.Footnote ²⁷ In this biography, Protagoras is explicitly said to “practice sophistry,” which refers to itinerant teaching for pay. Any assumption of direct opposition between Protagoras and Socrates, such as his role in Plato’s dialogues would imply, is disrupted by the observation that Protagoras was also an innovator in “the Socratic form of arguments.” Intellectual achievements are attributed to Protagoras largely in the realm of language, both in analysis and method and also in trickery and eristic competition, and the latter are called “sophistries.”

Throughout Diogenes’ work, the description “sophist” or the activity of “practicing sophistry” is attributed to about a dozen additional figures of various generations. These include fourth-century Socratic disciples (Aristippus and Euclides, but not Aeschines, of whom sophistry is explicitly denied), a Pythagorean (Eudoxus), the later eristic Stilpo, and the poet Timon, who celebrated the skeptic philosopher Pyrrho and satirized philosophers of earlier traditions. Polycrates, the pamphleteer who allegedly attacked Socrates, is called a “sophist,” as is the third-century eclectic Bion of Borysthenes. Diogenes, moreover, associates Prodicus with Protagoras through citation of Plato’s Protagoras, and in the biography of Plato he lists the figures who are presented as “being refuted concerning falsehood,” which includes “Thrasymachus, Callicles, Polus, Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Euthydemus, and those similar.”Footnote ²⁸ But Diogenes Laertius does not call these figures “the Sophists.” Overall, Diogenes Laertius admits a neutral sense for “practicing sophistry,” a mode for making a living through itinerant teaching, but mostly uses “sophist” and “sophism” to designate deceptive verbal tricks in a realm that should be rigorous.Footnote ²⁹

In sum, we find various aspects of Philostratus’ First Sophistic anticipated in an array of earlier authors. The most immediate likely inspirations for his creation are lost to us; these would have included the ideas and teachings of Herodes Atticus and other players in the world of the Second Sophistic. Among surviving authors, Cicero comes closest to Philostratus in his listing of Sophists who made a definite contribution to the history of rhetoric, and his character Catulus’ admiration of the extemporaneous speaking of Gorgias and Hippias resembles the account Philostratus gives. Dio first presents an image of a sophistic period that fills a whole text, even though this text is short. Lucian presumes performance at the Olympics and extemporaneous speaking as key components of the sophist’s craft. Ties between Philostratus and the philosophical tradition are more obscure, but, as we see below, Philostratus did claim philosophy as part of his concept of sophistic. Both Sextus and Diogenes take a more philosophical approach in their presentation of ancient Sophists, in contrast to the more rhetorical and social conception of Philostratus, but their images of the Sophists are broadly consistent with Philostratus’ elevation of linguistic skill above philosophical knowledge.

Philostratus’ First Sophistic

Against this background, plausibly with inspiration from these ancestors, emerges Philostratus’ original account of the First Sophistic. Here we set out its literary presentation and the premises of its identity according to Philostratus, then look closely at features that mark it as a product of its time.

Philostratus’ account of the First Sophistic occupies about one-tenth of the Lives of the Sophists and consists of two parts. The first part is a narrative of the beginning and end of the period, each an episode of rivalry between two individuals: first, the canonical Sophists (and figures in Socratic dialogues) Gorgias of Leontini and Prodicus of Ceos; second, the Athenian orators Aeschines son of Atrometus and Demosthenes.Footnote ³⁰ The second part is a list, with anecdotal and biographical discussions, of nine prominent ancient Sophists: Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Polus, Thrasymachus, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates.Footnote ³¹ This list continues seamlessly into the biographical discussions of forty-two members of the Second Sophistic that constitute the remaining 90 percent of the work, which ends with no concluding narrative or return to the opening frame.Footnote ³² As preamble to the lives of the Sophists proper, Philostratus lists eight additional men active after the time period of the First Sophistic, beginning with pupils of Plato, who were properly philosophers but “seemed to be Sophists” because they spoke with fluency.Footnote ³³ The final two of these, Dio of Prusa and Favorinus of Arles, are treated at length and reappear later in the text as teachers of the Sophists properly so called. This curious interlude, as will be discussed below, points to the power of the Platonic legacy, even in a project that largely seeks to rescue the Sophists from Plato’s opprobrium.

The “ancient sophistic” was Philostratus’ termFootnote ³⁴ for the first phase in the long tradition of the Sophists, extending from the career of Gorgias of Leontini to the career of Demosthenes (or at least his teacher Isocrates). In the course of this interconnected tradition, figures known to Philostratus from canonical texts allegedly interacted with one another in rivalry and mentorship, converging around a practice of public, extemporaneous speech about common topics. Appropriations from Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, and others are recognizable in the nine biographies, and coincidences with the pseudo-Plutarchan Lives of the Attic Orators and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers allow that Philostratus used now-lost Hellenistic sources.Footnote ³⁵ According to Philostratus, the “ancient sophistic” – technically an adjectival phrase that implies the noun technê, “craft,” as its complement – was a special kind of rhetoric, rhetoric that is “philosophizing” (ῥητορικὴ φιλοσοφoῦσα).Footnote ³⁶ From the perspective of his own time, “philosophizing” is an unexpected ingredient in Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic. Aelius Aristides, one of the subjects of Philostratus’ later-period biographies, famously claimed the functions of eminent speaker, ambassador, and benefactor for the “Sophist” but denied them to the contemporary “philosopher.”Footnote ³⁷ Contemporary portraiture of the orator and the philosopher shows them as distinct types with distinct iconography.Footnote ³⁸ The surprising specification that the ancient sophistic craft was “philosophizing” is discussed further below.

Philostratus’ transmission of literary and scholarly knowledge from his own period is so robust that his text is uniquely informative for modern study of the Second Sophistic. He often cites texts composed and published by Sophists as source material, and even includes material from letters that must have been available in archives.Footnote ³⁹ His account of the First Sophistic, by contrast, is dominated by reports about activities and performances of the Sophists from classical authors, often cited by name, which seem to compensate for the unavailability, in general, of texts composed by the ancient Sophists themselves. Dio of Prusa, as we saw, noted that the words (λόγοι) of the Sophists had all perished. As it turns out, half of Philostratus’ biographies of the older Sophists are composed with no reference to any transmitted texts of their own or even the notion that they were writers. Prodicus’ speech the Choice of Heracles (as it is titled) is cited in what is explicitly called Xenophon’s imitation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Only for Gorgias, Hippias, and two of the last three Athenians on his list of the ancient Sophists – Antiphon and Isocrates – does Philostratus apply the method favored in his treatment of the Second Sophistic, citing verbal performances by title and sometimes summarizing their content (and for Hippias, Philostratus simply cribs the description of the Trojan Speech found in the Platonic Hippias Major). Only Isocrates is quoted, and all the titles mentioned seem to be orations.Footnote ⁴¹ In the absence of much textual evidence, Philostratus provides narratives of performances for most of his early Sophists, sometimes rewriting information provided by Plato, Xenophon, or Thucydides – in fact, the same passages Cicero seems to have used in Brutus – and sometimes, it seems, filling out the stories from his own imagination or lost sources from second-sophistic culture. Philostratus’ frequent references to his own opinion in his narratives of the First Sophistic are explicit indications that his interpretation exceeds what he found in his source material.Footnote ⁴²

Aside from the difference in source material, the Second Sophistic shapes Philostratus’ construction of the First Sophistic in several clear ways. First, the ancient founder of each phase in the sophistic tradition is characterized as a pioneer in extemporaneous speaking (αὐτοσχεδιάζειν), the most important skill for the contemporary Sophist according to Herodes Atticus. Second, the individual members of the First Sophistic are portrayed as linked by personal relationships, whether divisive quarrels or continuous mentorships, which also constitute the nexus of the Second Sophistic. Finally, the First Sophistic’s individual members are commemorated as much for their public achievements and benefactions as for intellectual expressions or contributions, which are in the field of rhetorical style. They were not statesmen in Cicero’s sense, but their political activities become unexpectedly important for Philostratus’ story.

Philostratus relates how extemporaneous speaking was invented almost by accident, as part of Gorgias’ quest to outdo Prodicus. We learn, in an anecdote unparalleled elsewhere, that Gorgias had heard Prodicus giving performances of his “Choice of Heracles,” a “not unpleasant text” composed in writing.Footnote ⁴³ Although Prodicus won fame and charmed his audiences, Gorgias judged his speeches to be “stale and commonplace,”Footnote ⁴⁴ and, whether in the spirit of reform or rivalry, turned to the contrary mode of extemporaneous speaking. The capacity to perform without preparation or reading gave the appearance of “knowing everything.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This demonstration of knowledge was superior to that of the philosophers. Whereas philosophers justified their claims to knowledge through careful method, the Sophists spoke clearly and confidently on their topics without concern for reasoning or method, like oracles.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Sophists’ clarity, according to Philostratus, is preferable to the minute precision of the philosophers, because the former demonstrated their “clear grasp of what is the case,” whereas the latter were like astronomers who “guessed at what is the case from parts of stars.”Footnote ⁴⁷

The Athenians prove to be the most demanding audience for extemporaneous speaking in both phases of the sophistic. Philostratus tells us that Gorgias “began” the First Sophistic in Thessaly (in accord with Plato Meno 70a), but his first narrated performance was, importantly, in Athens, when Gorgias appeared before the Athenians and challenged them to “propose a theme” on which he would speak without preparation or script but by “yielding to the moment.”Footnote ⁴⁸ During the Second Sophistic, extemporaneous speaking turns out to be a favorite skill of Herodes Atticus, who admired it from boyhood, taught it in his school in Rome, and expected it of students and guest performers at his famous school in Athens.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although Philostratus’ latter-day Sophists perform in cities across the Roman Empire, the community that most loves extemporaneous speaking in his own time is still the Athenians, who are the audience for the most detailed episodes of performance, for example, when the disciples of Herodes Atticus inspired a double performance from Alexander, a star of the Second Sophistic visiting Athens from Seleucia.Footnote ⁵⁰

Along with improvisation, the other major assimilation of Philostratus’ First Sophistic to the Second is in the centrality of personal relationships, both positive and negative, which constitute the periods’ unity and mark their boundaries. Whereas mentorships are more densely charted for the Second Sophistic, quarrels are definitive of the first. Both Gorgias and Prodicus survived their quarrel to become core members of the First Sophistic, but the quarrel that ended the era was more divisive. After Demosthenes defeated Aeschines in the dispute over honorable service to Athens during the Macedonian expansion – the topic of the surviving Demosthenic oration On the Crown and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon of 330 BCE, which was still replayed in extemporaneous performances of the Second SophisticFootnote ⁵¹ – Aeschines conceded his loss by departing from Athens and moving to Rhodes, where he founded the Second Sophistic. Aeschines made the whole city, as it appears from Philostratus’ articulation, into a “think tank for Sophists,”Footnote ⁵² an apparent imitation of the term (phrontistêrion) used in the Clouds for the school run by Socrates – but without the play’s sense of derision. Aeschines, apparently, soon had the acceptance of all the Rhodians, even though he was introducing Attic practices among Dorians. Beyond this geopolitical break and institutional turn, Aeschines’ sophistic craft differed from what preceded it in both subject matter and style. In subject matter, the Second Sophistic turned away from topics shared with philosophers, for example, ethics, myth, and cosmology, toward those drawn from historiography, specifically typologies of social groups: paupers and wealthy men, aristocrats and tyrants.Footnote ⁵³ In style, Aeschines was the first to speak as though “by a divine impulse” rather than “with outstanding wisdom” (the mode of Gorgias, founder of the ancient sophistic).Footnote ⁵⁴ Both changes diminish the connection to “philosophizing.”

The odd choice of Aeschines as founder of the Second Sophistic, which was really an Imperial-period tradition that began some five centuries after Aeschines’ lifetime, is underlined by a sort of apology from Philostratus. He cannot call his Second Sophistic the “new” sophistic in comparison to the “ancient sophistic” because both had ancient beginnings.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet Aeschines’ founding role seems to follow from his successful new start after a divisive quarrel and the disruption entailed in his move to Rhodes, presumably the beginning of a diaspora that resulted in the location of sophistic schools in cities of Asia Minor, key sites in the Second Sophistic such as Miletus, Tyre, Pergamum, and especially Smyrna. Reenactments of ancient oratory during the Second Sophistic would have implied a continuity between ancient and modern eras, and implied the inclusion of figures like Aeschines and Demosthenes in Philostratus’ vision of the long sophistic tradition.Footnote ⁵⁶ Feuds and quarrels between rivals accounted for major developments of the Second Sophistic, especially the branching of institutional schools In the generation before Herodes, for example, a stylistic quarrel between Timocrates and Scopelian resulted in a division of their pupils.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hence it must have seemed plausible that the most famous feud of classical antiquity, in the view of Philostratus and his peers, was also the cause of an important break in tradition, the boundary between the First Sophistic and the Second. The implication that Demosthenes is a figure of the First Sophistic lurks within Philostratus’ account, and his literal exclusion from the list is most likely explained from a basic allegiance on the part of Philostratus or his sources to the principle that the first Sophists come from Socratic literature.

Whereas quarrels mark the boundaries of the First Sophistic, positive relationships such as those between teacher and pupil contribute to its inner constitution. One of these, Polus’ discipleship of Gorgias, is portrayed by Plato.Footnote ⁵⁸ But other reports of such pairs, namely, the assertion that Demosthenes emulated Isocrates and the highly surprising assertion that Aeschines was a pupil not only of Isocrates but of Plato as well,Footnote ⁵⁹ seem to have been contrived in order to create a coherent tradition of the First Sophistic, before the disruption that accompanies the start of the Second Sophistic. Traditions of teacher and disciple were standard long before Philostratus, as demonstrated by the Hellenistic “successions” literature cited by Diogenes Laertius and by the successions that Philostratus mentions but dismisses.Footnote ⁶⁰ Philostratus revises these stories to suit his purposes He devotes so much space within the biography of Isocrates to explaining the ways in which Demosthenes was more importantly a rivaling imitator (ζηλωτής) of Isocrates than a pupil (μαθητής) of Isaeus that he reinforces the continuity of the sophistic tradition down to Demosthenes’ quarrel with Aeschines.Footnote ⁶¹ That is, the last member of the First Sophistic, Isocrates, leaves an heir in the person of Demosthenes. Meanwhile, the founder of the Second Sophistic, Aeschines, while also heir to Isocrates, seems to descend from a new line, having been taught by Plato in addition to Isocrates. No other ancient source reports Plato as teacher of Aeschines the orator, and this original touch is one of at least three subtle indicators – together with the association of Aeschines’ Rhodian school and the phrontistêrion of Socrates as well as the Platonic heritage of the philosophers like Dio of Prusa – that Plato was a kind of ancestor to the Second Sophistic as well as an important contributor to the construction of the first.

A final striking way in which Philostratus’ First Sophistic mirrors the sophistic of his own time is the emphasis in the individual biographies on public affairs and benefactions to a unified Greece or to Athens, often through virtues of oratorical style. Philostatus relates such matters as if to fill the space left open by ignoring Plato’s intellectual objections to the Sophists. Philostratus’ references to Plato are multiple, but they never address Plato’s substantive disagreements with the sophists. Rather, in two of the four biographies where Plato is explicitly cited (Protagoras and Polus), the citations address style only.Footnote ⁶² In a third (Hippias), Plato is cited for implying that the Sicilians paid Hippias too much.Footnote ⁶³ The fourth case is Thrasymachus, and there a citation from Plato’s Republic is used to dismiss Thrasymachus from the list of the Sophists.Footnote ⁶⁴ The intellectual components of Plato’s portraits are replaced in Philostratus by statements about unifying activities among the Greeks and benefactions, or the contrary, to the Athenians. This replacement is especially evident in the biography of Gorgias, which contains no definite reference to Plato at all.

Gorgias’ Olympic orations urging Greek unity against the barbarians and his funeral oration in praise of fallen Athenians form the climax of Philostratus’ account. Gorgias also developed excellent oratorical style, taught important Athenian leaders, and led religious observances.Footnote ⁶⁵ Protagoras, for his part, implicitly failed as a benefactor on account of his impiety, which, as Philostratus opines, was developed under the influence of the Persians and inflicted on the unwitting Athenians. Hippias traveled throughout the Greek cities, becoming an honorary citizen of many (on unspecified evidence), and “used to charm” a unified Greece – also at Olympia – by his variegated and thoughtful speeches. Prodicus, too, was a traveling teacher, and his reputation as a speaker was so great, according to another anecdote that has no ancient parallel, that it inspired Xenophon to bail himself out from prison in order to hear the lectures.Footnote ⁶⁶

The most expansive discussions Philostratus offers for the earlier Sophists are devoted to the Athenians on his list, Antiphon, Critias, and Isocrates, none of whom is identified as a Sophist by Plato. These discussions devote considerable attention to each Sophist’s contribution to the political events of his day, especially events that preserved or threatened the survival of Athens. This emphasis on the integrity of Athens, and possibly even the inclusion of Athenians among the Sophists in departure from Plato, is likely related to these figures’ service as politicians. Herodes Atticus’ own performance as a Sophist coincided with and was possibly related to his many financial benefactions to his city. A similar coincidence of oratorical performance and civic benefaction characterizes the lives of several other members of Philostratus’ Second Sophistic.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite acknowledgement of Antiphon’s role in the oligarchic revolution of 411, Philostratus seems intent overall on exonerating Antiphon from blame. Antiphon’s fame as an orator and rhetorical theorist are briefly discussed, but the criterion for Philostratus’ judgment “whether one should call him a good or bad man” is his service to Athens.Footnote ⁶⁸ Philostratus apologizes at length for Antiphon’s bad reputation among the comic poets, which he assigns to jealousy and mistrust of the rhetorical craft.Footnote ⁶⁹ Most surprisingly, he displaces Antiphon’s death by execution from Athens, at the hands of the Athenian people, to Syracuse, at the hands of the tyrant Dionysius, by conflating his fifth-century subject with a fourth-century tragic poet also named Antiphon.Footnote ⁷⁰ This conflation was already in the information about Antiphon that Philostratus would have inherited, for the biography of Antiphon included in the pseudo-Plutarchan Lives of the Attic Orators lists execution in Syracuse among three conflicting accounts for his death. But Philostratus’ story is embellished beyond that version. It explicitly contrasts Antiphon’s literary activity and politics in Syracuse, where he was trying to liberate the people from tyranny through his rhetoric, with his politics in Athens, where he enslaved the people. Hence the death of Antiphon in Syracuse is made to cap the story of his political activity in Athens and in a sense reverse Antiphon’s anti-democratic Athenian career.

In the case of Critias, Philostratus again confronts the difficulty in glorifying a violent enemy of the Athenian democracy for rhetorical excellence, but the outcome is much different. For Critias, Philostratus makes little effort to construct an apology, but instead entirely separates the political evaluation from the rhetorical. The longest section of the biography is a rant about Critias’ treachery toward Athens, favor for Sparta, and brutality. With little transition, Philostratus follows with an admiring description of Critias’ style, which is outstandingly “Attic” in its diction as well as terse.Footnote ⁷¹ What is given in the way of transition is puzzlement over the way Critias deployed his talents, not using them as Socrates would have, with wisdom and justice, but instead imbibing the arrogance of the Thessalians, among whom Critias could have surpassed even Gorgias in his rhetorical influence and reputation. As in the case of Protagoras, it appears that Critias’ worst offenses were due to foreign influence. Whatever the source of Critias’ corruption, however, rhetorical skill is not enough to qualify as a good man; one must unify talent with service to the community.Footnote ⁷² Critias fails entirely to meet this standard. But the political discussion in Critias’ biography, included despite its detraction from the praise of Critias, illuminates the importance of political benefaction in Philostratus’ conception of the First Sophistic. Critias is retained among the Sophists, it seems, because the rhetorical criterion is so well fulfilled; Philostratus acknowledges Critias early in the preface to Lives of the Sophists and reports in another passage that Herodes Atticus exalted Critias as a model of style.Footnote ⁷³ But failure to display civic values calls for lengthy concession and explanation, even as it does not disqualify an individual from Philostratus’ list of the Sophists.

Even Isocrates, the final subject of biography among Philostratus’ first Sophists, is assessed for his political service, despite his claim, cited by Philostratus, that he shunned politics due to a weak voice.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to Philostratus, his speeches constituted a kind of service. Hence in the biography of Isocrates, extended discussion of verbal style appears first, and the proof of his contributions to public affairs is drawn from these writings. The content of his letters to Philip, his writings on peace, and his Olympic oration the Panegyricus, among other texts, are said to demonstrate Isocrates’ interest in public affairs (τὰ κοινά). And Isocrates’ death following the battle of Chaeronea demonstrates his loyalty to Athens and symbolizes, in a sense, the Athenian quality of the First Sophistic.Footnote ⁷⁵

Philostratus’ historical position in the third century CE under the Severan dynasty, at great distance from classical Athens, leaves its stamp on his image of the First Sophistic in multiple ways. Philostratus elevates the importance of extemporaneous speaking, for which he apparently created new anecdotes. He invents a rivalry between Gorgias and Prodicus and exploits the famous quarrel of Demosthenes and Aeschines. He accentuates the political benefactions of Gorgias and Hippias while ignoring Plato’s intellectual criticisms, and he rewrites the story of Antiphon. But Philostratus was also a reader of classical literature, and his paradoxical loyalty to Plato in particular is evident in his frequent citations, his choice of characters to populate the First Sophistic, and probably in the very concept of his First Sophistic. We turn now to the ways Plato influenced Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, despite his evident difference of opinion about the nature and value of the Sophist.

Philostratus and Plato

According to the last in a set of seventy-three letters attributed to Philostratus, addressed to Julia Domna, Plato was not hostile to the Sophists, as some believe, but competitive with them (φιλοτίμως πρὸς αὐτούς).Footnote ⁷⁶ He appropriated the stylistic techniques of Gorgias, Hippias, and Protagoras in order to persuade better than they did, and in like manner Xenophon emulated Prodicus’ Heracles text by rewriting it.Footnote ⁷⁷ The popular Gorgias inspired even the Socratic Aeschines of Sphettus to imitate him, together with many others such as Pericles, Thucydides, and Critias. Hence, Julia should persuade Plutarch, “boldest of the Hellenic race,” to cease casting aspersions on Gorgias.

The authenticity of this letter has been doubted on the basis of its anachronistic directive to Plutarch, but its resemblance to Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is also clear.Footnote ⁷⁸ The letter presents a sort of apology for Plato’s apparent hostility to Gorgias, Hippias, and Protagoras. Nothing about the philosophical basis of Plato’s opposition is mooted, but features of his style – its “resonance” (ἠχώ) and, implicitly, features of “Gorgianizing” that are attributed to others, “grandeur” (τὸ μεγαλόγνωμον), “solemnity” (ἡ ὀφρύς), “emphatic breaks” (αἱ ἀποστάσεις), “sudden transitions” (αἱ προσβολαί) – are traced to rivalrous imitation of the Sophists.Footnote ⁷⁹ In Lives of the Sophists, too, Philostratus ignores Plato’s suggestions about the value and substance of Socrates’ conversations with Polus, Protagoras, Thrasymachus, and Hippias and considers Plato’s contributions on a purely stylistic level. This silence is surprising, given that Philostratus’ precise references to Plato show that he has read the dialogues. Various signals in Lives of the Sophists, as reinforced by the letter to Julia Domna, suggest that it is also intentional. In some sense, Philostratus sets out to defeat Plato by subordinating him to his own conception of the Sophist, thereby refuting Plato’s condemnations.

The fields of rhetoric and philosophy, cast into rivalry in the dialogues of Plato, competed for priority throughout the Hellenistic period, as Cicero comprehensively describes.Footnote ⁸⁰ Cicero claimed to reunite these fields for the Romans, and honorific inscriptions under the Empire beginning in the second century CE occasionally attributed both titles “philosopher” and “rhetor” to the same person.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet Philostratus takes his own approach to the relationship by requiring that the Sophist of the ancient period be not so much the best of orators – hence the exclusion of Demosthenes – but rather someone with a connection to philosophy under some description. The ancient sophistic, as Philostratus defines it, was “philosophizing rhetoric” (ῥητορικὴ φιλοσοφοῦσα). Although Philostratus’ notion of philosophy is never adequately explained in Lives of the Sophists, and philosophical interests are explicitly attributed only to Antiphon and Critias among the early Sophists, Philostratus’ emphasis on what he calls a philosophical ingredient in his definition of the First Sophistic shows an intent to define the concept of the Sophist differently than a contemporary would have. This difference seems to be reconciliation with Plato.

When Philostratus refers to “philosophizing,” as he does repeatedly through his introduction to Lives of the Sophists, he is referring not to the technical, differentiated philosophical schools of the Roman Empire, but a broad and deep-seated knowledge or wisdom, exemplified in one case by the rustic Celtic Agathion, who impressed Herodes Atticus as “one philosophizing.”Footnote ⁸² In this conception, Philostratus resembles some of the earliest users of the term “philosopher” (φιλόσοφος) in the pre-Platonic period, when the domain of “philosophy” was not clearly differentiated from “wisdom” (σοφία), and the term “wise man” (σοφός) had a field of reference overlapping with that of the “philosopher.”Footnote ⁸³ In Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, his account of the activity of a philosopher from the previous century, the archaic model for Apollonius’ activity is Pythagoras, the same figure who is credited with first appropriating the name philosophos in differentiation from the sophos. Although Lives of the Sophists makes only light use of the simple terms sophia and sophos, by comparison with the Life of Apollonius, Philostratus’ frequent use of the substantive participle “one philosophizing” in place of the noun “philosopher” in Lives of the Sophists supports the probability that his concept of “philosophizing” was something more general and vague than the contemporary title “philosopher.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By contrast, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and Diogenes Laertius, on average, use the verbal form “philosophize” once for every five uses of “philosopher.”

The omission of explicit reference to philosophical doctrines, methods, or other kinds of positions by Philostratus for most of his first Sophists might imply that mere appearance in Socratic dialogues provides the “philosophical” component that Philostratus is, in fact, merely assuming. The nine individuals Philostratus places in his First Sophistic are a blend between the list of experts in rhetorical craft described ironically in Plato’s Phaedrus 266b3–267d4 and those antagonists of Socrates who appear as speaking characters (and title characters) throughout Plato’s dialogues and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. In Phaedrus 266b3–267d4, aspects of rhetorical craft are attributed to Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Protagoras, Polus, and Thrasymachus, the first six members of Philostratus’ list, as well as three who do not appear on Philostratus’ list (Theodorus of Byzantium, Euenus, and Tisias).Footnote ⁸⁵ At the end of Phaedrus (278e8–10), Isocrates is ambiguously praised for his potential as a “philosopher.” Even the rhetorical craft of Pericles, the founder of the First Sophistic according to an alternative account Philostratus records but does not accept,Footnote ⁸⁶ is touted – ironically – as a founder of rhetoric in Phaedrus (269e1). If Phaedrus is the basis for Philostratus’ list, only Antiphon and Critias are added to this set by Philostratus or his source. A basis in Phaedrus would also explain the omission of several other rhetorically inclined antagonists of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues who might have been included by Philostratus but were not: Callicles, Euthydemus, and Dionysodorus. The importance of Phaedrus as background for Cicero’s rhetorical works, and generally in Imperial literature, makes it plausible that this was the key text for the whole discourse about philosophizing rhetoric.Footnote ⁸⁷ The discussion of oratory in Phaedrus would have offered a clear connection to practices in the Second Sophistic. The end of Phaedrus outlines a concept of philosophical rhetoric, although no such phrase is articulated, and Plato’s point is quite different from that of Philostratus, in that Plato aims to differentiate his rhetoric from the practice of any of the named experts (with the possible exception of Isocrates).Footnote ⁸⁸

A far more subtle contribution by Plato to Philostratus’ “philosophizing” ingredient in proper sophistic is implied in the passage that divides the preface of Lives of the Sophists from its list of the Sophists proper.Footnote ⁸⁹ This list of the eight men who, by Philostratus’ description, were philosophers who “seemed to be Sophists” is populated entirely by Academics who form a tradition (albeit without direct continuity) from Plato to the immediate ancestors of Philostratus’ own world. The first three are figures from the fourth century BCE who studied either with Plato or his Academy (Eudoxus of Cnidus, Leon of Byzantium, and Dias of Ephesus).Footnote ⁹⁰ Next follows the second-century-BCE founder of the New Academy, Carneades,Footnote ⁹¹ then figures from Cleopatra’s Alexandria of the first century BCE and Plutarch’s Athens of the first century CE (Philostratus the Egyptian and Theomnestus of Naucratis),Footnote ⁹² and finally, at disproportionate length, two figures who are attached securely to Philostratus’ network of the Second Sophistic through multiple teacher-to-pupil relationships, Dio of Prusa and Favorinus of Arles.Footnote ⁹³ Although Philostratus does not characterize Favorinus as an Academic, as he is known in other sources,Footnote ⁹⁴ his Platonic sympathies seem to appear in the nickname of his most fully portrayed pupil, Alexander the “Clay Plato” of Seleucia, who is said to have gained “the form of his speech” from Favorinus.Footnote ⁹⁵ As for Dio, his own outstanding style was inspired by the Phaedo of Plato and On the False Embassy of Demosthenes, the texts that he took with him into exile.Footnote ⁹⁶

Chronologically speaking, this succession of eight Academic philosophers occupies a span of four centuries that is all but elided in Philostratus’ narrative of the sophistic art proper. Between the Rhodian career of Aeschines in the late fourth century BCE and the rule of Nero in the first century CE, Philostratus only mentions the names of three figures who received but did not deserve the title of “Sophist.”Footnote ⁹⁷ But in the succession of “philosophers who seemed to be Sophists,” the same temporal span is more densely filled. This list, and especially its culmination in Dio and Favorinus, implies that Philostratus considered the Academic tradition to be a positive contribution to his own Second Sophistic.Footnote ⁹⁸ Herodes Atticus was educated in the dialogues of Plato by his teacher Tarsus and likely included them in this own curriculum.Footnote ⁹⁹ The fact that skeptics as famous as Carneades and Favorinus are on the list of Sophists is consistent with Philostratus’ underlying principle that Sophists differ from philosophers by virtue of not accounting rigorously for their knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Presumably, the fine speaking of both Carneades and Favorinus was delivered with conviction and received with appreciation despite the failure of either to establish firm knowledge about their topics. In this sense, philosophical skepticism might come to the same thing as the confident and arbitrary “knowledge” Philostratus admired in his early Sophists. Needless to say, the Academic tradition departs in significant ways from Plato, but the literary approach to Plato taken in the second century CE is consistent with an inclination to ignore his doctrines and message about the rigorous pursuit of knowledge.

Hence Plato is shown to have inspired the Second Sophistic in three ways: by teaching Aeschines; by offering a literary model to Dio; and by spawning the sequence of philosophers called Sophists who span the temporal gap of the Hellenistic period and connect the two treatments of the First Sophistic in Philostratus’ text. If some of the information Philostratus transmits is traditional or even historically correct, the textual digression about the Academics suggests how creatively Philostratus may have reconciled an allegiance to Plato with a celebration of his reconceived sophistry. Not only was Plato made like a Sophist, in the ways described most directly in the letter to Julia Domna, but the later Sophists who lived long after the writing career of Plato became heirs to Plato in an oblique way. Perhaps Philostratus not only defeated and subordinated Plato, but in so doing also paid him homage. Even the reversal of Plato’s ideas depends on Plato.

Conclusions

The image of the First Sophistic presented in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is a unique survival amid our extant record of ancient thinking about rhetoric, philosophy, and the overlaps between these. We have no other record of a consolidated classical era or tradition of “philosophizing rhetoric” such as Philostratus described. Some of its characteristics, to be sure, were suggested by Philostratus’ predecessors, notably Cicero and Lucian, but on a smaller scale. Philostratus’ conception of sophistic eras was highly influential. Lives of the Sophists was cited by title in almost every century from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries CE. These citations include Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which sets itself as its sequel; three entries in the Suda, where it is cited as a source for entries on the later sophists; a comment in the Byzantine Tzetzes’ Prologue to Exegesis of the Iliad, where a statement by Critias in salute to Homer is quoted from Philostratus’ prologue; a lexical work by the fourteenth-century monk Thomas Magister; and the fifteenth-century collector of proverbs Michael Apostolius.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In most cases, the references are merely decorative but show that the book was read and the title was recognized. In others, Philostratus’ book seems to have been the best source available for its information.

Philostratus constructed his concept of the Sophist from the practices of his own day, a period when oratory was a dazzling performance of skill and knowledge, not a mode of teaching or even persuasion about substantive points. His image of the First Sophistic must be understood as a creative construction, for the most part. A close reading of Lives of the Sophists reveals how central Plato is to the very concept of a First Sophistic, even though the particulars of Philostratus’ conception defy Plato and it is a substantially original one.

Introduction

In 1903, Hermann Diels published the first edition of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Presocratics), which would become the standard resource for the twentieth-century study of “Presocratic” philosophy.Footnote ¹ The single volume’s appendix consisted of four chapters covering “Cosmological Poetry,” “Astrological Poetry,” “Cosmological Prose,” and “Older Sophistic,” the last of which gathered testimonia, fragments, and imitations relating to eight fifth-century thinkers – Protagoras, Xeniades (a single testimony), Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, Antiphon (“the Sophist”), and Critias – along with the texts of the recently discovered Anonymus Iamblichi and the anonymous Dialexeis (Dissoi Logoi, “Pairs of Arguments”).Footnote ² Diels’s inclusion of the “Older Sophistic” was a decisive step in the Greek Sophists’ gradual assimilation to the history of philosophy, five centuries after their rediscovery in the Latin West, while his choice of figures and texts gave definition to a previously amorphous sophistic canon. Diels would go on to produce three further editions before his death in 1922, when his former student, Walther Kranz, assumed full editorial responsibility for the now three-volume work. For the fifth edition (1934–7), Kranz expanded the sophistic material by inserting Lycophron between Gorgias (his possible teacher) and Prodicus, and added German translations of the fragments.Footnote ³ More importantly, he restructured the work according to Diels’s unfulfilled plan, moving the former appendix’s cosmological and gnomic material to a preliminary section (“Beginnings”) and making the “Older Sophistic” a third and concluding part of the main text.Footnote ⁴ The effect was not only greater chronological coherence but also the impression of a more or less continuous tradition, the Sophists marking the final phase of Greek thought before the “Socratic” revolution.

The authority of Diels’s Vorsokratiker might lead one to assume that the Sophists ended up where they always belonged, with (if not quite among) the “Presocratic philosophers.” But such an assumption ignores the fact that, in the century before Diels, their place in the history of philosophy was deeply uncertain – as indicated by their originally “appended” status in his collection. And though the Sophists’ inclusion in the philosophical canon now looks secure, several long-standing historiographical questions remain contested. These include: their relation to the early Greek natural philosophers (the paradigmatic “Presocratics”) and to Socrates and the “Socratic” tradition;Footnote ⁵ whether the Sophists constituted an intellectual “movement” with a distinctive set of interests and methods; and, if so, whether this movement can be understood in terms of a unifying philosophical doctrine or outlook.Footnote ⁶ More fundamentally, what is gained or lost by treating the Sophists as “philosophers” for our understanding not only of the ancient Greek Sophists but of the history of philosophy itself?Footnote ⁷

This chapter puts these questions in a larger historical context by tracing the Sophists’ modern reception prior to Diels. The Sophists present unique historiographical challenges, due to the highly fragmentary state of their surviving texts, the overwhelming influence of the Platonic sources, their connections to philosophy-adjacent fields (such as rhetoric), and the conventional image of “sophistry” as the enemy of genuine philosophy.Footnote ⁸ After briefly surveying the Sophists’ Renaissance and early modern reception, which is dominated by the Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), I turn to the beginnings of modern philosophical historiography in late-eighteenth-century Germany. It is in the earliest attempts to situate the Sophists in the history of Greek philosophy that our key questions come into view. The bulk of the chapter then focuses on the four nineteenth-century figures – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), George Grote (1794–1871), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) – whose accounts of the Sophists have done the most to shape contemporary discussions. The Sophists’ two chief “rehabilitators,” Hegel and Grote, offer sharply contrasting defenses of their historical significance. Zeller revises but also reinforces the Hegelian picture and brings it forward into the twentieth century. Finally, Nietzsche uses the Sophists to challenge the progressivist assumptions of modern historiography, anticipating more recent attempts to save sophistic thought from the philosophers.

The Rediscovery of the Sophists in the Latin West

A few weeks after the death of Petrarch in 1374, Coluccio Salutati wrote a letter in which he praised his late friend’s excellence in “philosophy”: “I speak not of the kind which the modern Sophists marvel at in the schools – with its windy, vain boasting and impudent garrulity – but of the kind which cultivates souls, builds up virtues, washes away the filth of vice, and, disregarding the circuitous paths of disputation, elucidates the truth of all things.”Footnote ⁹ The “modern Sophists” are the university schoolmen, the so-called scholastics, whose efforts to illuminate God’s design using Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy struck “humanists” like Petrarch and Salutati as mere quibbling and obfuscation.Footnote ¹⁰ The polemical use of “Sophist” is common in the humanist/scholastic debate, with each side trying to present itself as the heirs to true philosophy.Footnote ¹¹ About the ancient Sophists, however, very little was known in the Latin West prior to the fifteenth century. Petrarch could not read his prized collection of Plato manuscripts, and of the dialogues featuring Sophists or their students only Meno had been translated into Latin. His image of the Greek Sophists would have come mainly from Cicero (De Oratore and Academica), Quintilian, and Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, which had been at the core of the university logic curriculum since the twelfth century.Footnote ¹² And Petrarch is fuzzy on the details; in one place, he cites “Pythagoras” for the claim that both sides of any question are equally debatable, including the truth of that assertion itself.Footnote ¹³ His source for the dictum, Seneca’s Letter 88.43, attributes it to Protagoras. The slip suggests that Petrarch did not recognize the Sophist’s name or knew too little to amend a faulty text.

Within a few decades of Petrarch’s death, the state of Greek learning in the Latin West had transformed.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1396, Salutati, now chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine scholar and diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek grammar and literature at the city’s university.Footnote ¹⁵ Chrysoloras arrived from Constantinople the following year and taught in Florence for three years before moving on to northern Italy and Rome. His most prominent pupil, Leonardo Bruni, completed the first Latin translation of Plato’s Gorgias by 1409.Footnote ¹⁶ Another student, Ambrogio Traversari, would go on to translate Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (1433), a key doxographical source for Protagoras (9.50–6).Footnote ¹⁷

Greek scholarship flourished in Italy throughout the century, with several Byzantine émigrés following Chrysoloras’s lead especially after the fall of Constantinople. Among their pupils was Marsilio Ficino, the central figure in the Renaissance revival of Platonism. Ficino’s Latin edition of the complete works of Plato, published in Florence in 1484, would have long-lasting consequences for the Sophists’ modern reception.Footnote ¹⁸ Ficino not only made available the first Latin translations of key sophistic dialogues – including Protagoras, Euthydemus, both Hippias dialogues, Theaetetus, and Sophist – which would be the most widely used versions for the next three centuries; he also introduced each translation with an argumentum or epitome, combining summary, exegesis, and digression in varying degrees of details and polish. His commentary on the Sophists is uniformly scathing, by his own admission exceeding Plato himself in his level of invective.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Protagoras epitome, for example, he portrays the Sophists as merchants of false and noxious opinions, who “pour out streams of errors in all directions every day … solely to amass riches and to chase after vulgar glory.”Footnote ²⁰ Dialogues like the Protagoras, Ficino explains, offer a kind of prophylactic medicine against the “wicked, venomous Sophists, so that men who wish to learn may take care to keep well away from the beguiling songs of the Sirens and the deadly draughts of Circe.”Footnote ²¹ The epitomes show virtually no interest in the Sophists as individuals, with distinct personalities, teachings, or methods. Their aim instead is to construct a generic type and foil for the “philosopher” – hence the tendency to substitute “the Sophist” for a character’s proper name. Whatever course his conversation with a Sophist might take, Socrates always proves his opponent to be the same: “boastful and vainglorious, reckless and greedy.”Footnote ²²

It is hard to gauge the extent to which Ficino’s portrait of the Sophists may have prejudiced later views, but we do know that his epitomes were widely read – often, it seems, in place of Plato’s own words.Footnote ²³ They accompanied the second Latin translation of the complete works (1561), by Janus Cornarius, and were reprinted numerous times with Ficino’s own more successful version. In 1578, Henri Estienne published his monumental Greek edition of Plato, with parallel Latin translations and a running commentary by Jean de Serres. The commentary departs from Ficino in various ways, but not in its basic characterization of the Sophists.Footnote ²⁴ The Ficinian picture would remain the dominant one during the early modern period, even as non-Platonic sources became more accessible throughout Europe.Footnote ²⁵ In the 1560s, Estienne published the first complete Latin editions of Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1562, reprinted with Gentian Hervet’s translation of Against the Professors in 1569), which contained important testimony on Protagoras (Outlines 1.216–19), a lengthy paraphrase of Gorgias’ On Not-Being (Professors 7.65–87), and the forty-two-verse “Sisyphus” fragment attributed to Critias (Professors 9.54).Footnote ²⁶ In 1566, Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes appeared in Latin translation, appended to William Canter’s edition of Aelius Aristides.Footnote ²⁷ Yet the two extant speeches ascribed to Gorgias would have remarkably little impact on the next 300 years of sophistic reception, as scholars tended either to ignore them (perhaps as belonging to a distinct “rhetorical” tradition) or to doubt their authenticity. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, Hegel, Grote, and Zeller would each treat On Not-Being as the sole surviving Gorgianic text.Footnote ²⁸

The earliest general historical accounts of the Sophists did little to challenge the Ficinian view.Footnote ²⁹ Louis de Cressolles’s Theatrum veterum rhetorum, oratorum, declamatorum quos in Graecia nominabant sophistas (Theater of Ancient Rhetors, Orators, and Declaimers, Whom in Greece They Called Sophists), published in 1620, devotes the second of its five books to the original Sophists and portrays their practice as a sham philosophy.Footnote ³⁰ The Sophists play only a bit part in Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655), considered the first modern work of its kind.Footnote ³¹ Its most influential eighteenth-century successor, Jacob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (Critical History of Philosophy) (1742–4; second edition 1766–7), holds the Sophists responsible for the death of Socrates. Humiliated by their Socratic encounters, they set out to destroy his reputation among the Athenians, and even engaged Aristophanes to write the Clouds. Naming Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias, Brucker denounces the Sophists one and all as “vain, ambitious, and greedy” – echoing Ficino’s verdict of three centuries before.Footnote ³²

Precursors to Hegel

While Hegel is often credited with “rehabilitating” the Sophists in his lectures on the history of philosophy, the groundwork had been laid by German scholars writing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. In Christoph Meiners’s Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom (History of the Origin, Progression, and Decline of the Sciences in Greece and Rome, 2 vols., 1781–2) and Johann August Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (General History of Philosophy, 1788; 2nd ed. 1796), “the Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category with a distinctive role in the story of Greek philosophy.Footnote ³³ This change reflects the burgeoning enthusiasm for Greek antiquity inspired by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764) marked a new approach to classical scholarship.Footnote ³⁴ Winckelmann presented ancient Greece as a paradigm of human culture, which develops according to an organic logic of birth, growth, maturity, and decay. The history of Greek art, he believed, could only be understood against the background of larger social, political, and intellectual conditions, or within the context of the culture as a whole. Meiners’s work applies this principle to the history of Greek philosophy and attempts to explain developments in the “sciences” in relation to Greek political history. Whether or not they should be considered “philosophers,” the Sophists were certainly a conspicuous part of the fifth-century intellectual scene, and so their presence and activities would have to be explained.

Meiners opens his second volume with a “History of the Greek Sophists” in two chapters: the first, a survey of Athenian political history before the Peloponnesian War; the second, a “History of the Old Sophists” (169–227). After the Persians were defeated, the wealth and freedom of the Greek city-states – democratic Athens especially – created a popular demand for oratorical and political training, but also for “general enlightenment” (allgemeine Aufklärung), that was answered by the Sophists.Footnote ³⁵ Meiners claims that the Sophists have been wrongly maligned, and their role in the Greek intellectual tradition never appreciated.Footnote ³⁶ The Sophists were in fact the “direct descendants” of the Seven Sages and formed a “substantial link in the chain of minds, through whose efforts [the] sciences were invented and expanded in Greece.” Their teaching included all the existing branches of knowledge, but they were also major innovators, being the first to teach statecraft and the art of rhetoric, and bringing language, virtue, and happiness within the scope of scientific study.Footnote ³⁷ In time, however, their pursuit of enlightenment devolved into atheism and immoralism, and the Greeks needed the pious Socrates to guide the youth away from the Sophists’ “dangerous principles.”Footnote ³⁸ Meiners explains the corruption of their teaching, just as he did its emergence, in terms of larger cultural forces; Athens’ wealth and luxury had fostered so much indulgence and vice that it was almost inevitable that the Sophists would succumb as well, and “that their principles would be corrupted to the same degree as were public morals.”Footnote ³⁹ Meiners thus introduces a narrative of late-fifth-century decline, with the Sophists at its center, that would become firmly rooted in the historiography of Greek philosophy.

No less important than his historicizing approach to the Sophists, but perhaps less obvious, is the fact that Meiners gives them a well-defined chronological position.Footnote ⁴⁰ While he acknowledges that the Sophists were not all close contemporaries, he locates them in the period from the 80th Olympiad (460 BCE) to the start of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE). They come after the fifth-century philosophers in the cosmological tradition – including Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Zeno, and Melissus – whom Meiners places between the 90th and 80th Olympiads; and they come before Socrates, who properly belongs to the period of the war, and who marks the start of something new. The Sophists thus fill a potential gap in the timeline, while forming a bridge from one tradition to the next. But there is a tension already in Meiners’s account between chronology and philosophical historiography. This problem of periodization comes into focus in Eberhard’s General History of Philosophy, which contains the earliest attested use of the term “Presocratic philosophy.” Eberhard applies it to the first period of the “scientific” (as opposed to “poetic”) part of Greek philosophy – the period from Thales to Democritus and his students (including Protagoras). The second, “Socratic” period begins with the Sophists (again including Protagoras), who are the focus of a brief chapter. Its opening signals Eberhard’s departure from the standard view: “One is accustomed to regarding the Sophists … as an entirely contemptible kind of people. But if one investigates their history more closely, one cannot deny their great contributions to culture, even to philosophy, of which, with a few exceptions, they were the only teachers in Athens before Socrates.”Footnote ⁴¹ Eberhard credits the Sophists with teaching rhetoric and politics and with advancing linguistic knowledge through their interest in poetic criticism. In a section on their “errors,” however, he claims that popular success made them want to seem polymathic and infallible, and so they developed a stock of dialectical tricks for winning any argument.Footnote ⁴² Socrates opposed the indiscriminate nature of their inquiries and the threat they posed to common morality.Footnote ⁴³

As the division between “Presocratic” and “Socratic” periods indicates, Socrates is the pivotal figure in Eberhard’s narrative. Yet it is the Sophists who inaugurate the “Socratic” period. Their ambiguous placement points to an enduring puzzle about the Sophists’ transitional status between the “Presocratics” and Socrates, or between “early” and “classical” Greek philosophy.Footnote ⁴⁴ Do the Sophists mark the end of an era, or do they signal a new beginning? If their thought is neither “Presocratic” nor “Socratic,” why include them in the history of philosophy at all?

If we look to Hegel’s immediate precursors at the end of the eighteenth century, it seems that a historiographical consensus was starting to form. Among the sources for his lectures, Hegel mentions the vast multivolume histories of philosophy by Dietrich Tiedemann, Johann Gottlieb Buhle, and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, whose surveys of the Greeks all appeared in the 1790s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Each devotes a chapter to the canonical Sophists, with most of the discussion focused on Protagoras’ “measure” doctrine and Gorgias’ On Not-Being. In all three cases, the Sophists mark a decadent stage in Greek philosophy’s history, characterized by skepticism, atheism, and the rejection of moral norms. And all three abandon Eberhard’s periodization. The Kantian Tennemann, for instance, places the Sophists at the end of Greek philosophy’s “first epoch.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The Sophists surveyed the cosmologists’ competing dogmas, which the Atomists tried and failed to reconcile, and inferred that objective knowledge of the world was impossible. Their skepticism also encroached on ethical terrain, reducing moral obligation to mere custom. The “second epoch” begins with Socrates, who redirected philosophy away from the external world and toward the investigation of knowledge itself, with the aim of discovering the true grounds of moral conduct.Footnote ⁴⁷ On this picture, the Sophists’ sole contribution to the history of philosophy was to bring its first, unpromising period to a decisive end. The nineteenth-century figures examined in the rest of this chapter would each, in a variety of ways, try to improve upon this reductive picture, though certain aspects of it would prove hard to resist.

Hegel

By the time Hegel gave his first lecture course on the history of philosophy in the winter of 1805–6 at the University of Jena, where Tennemann had taught until only a year before, the Sophists already held a firm place in the German historiographical tradition.Footnote ⁴⁸ What is unprecedented in Hegel’s account – at least in the form it took in the 1820s, when he was a professor at the University of Berlin – is the Sophists’ substantive role in the advancement of philosophical reflection.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is partly explained by Hegel’s teleological conception of history, which interprets cultural phenomena as necessary stages in the dialectic of consciousness – philosophy being the highest expression of a society’s evolving self-awareness as “Spirit” (Geist).Footnote ⁵⁰ A truly scientific history of philosophy must demonstrate the “one-sidedness” of each of its stages – its inherent limitations – but also its positive contribution to Spirit’s unfolding. From this perspective, the Sophists cannot be understood as a merely destructive phenomenon, as they are in Tennemann’s account. Like Meiners and Eberhard, Hegel acknowledges the Sophists’ importance as teachers of rhetoric, but he also identifies them with a world-historical moment in the dialectic of consciousness. With the Sophists, the Greeks first recognize that truth is not simply impressed on the mind by external nature but requires the subject’s own validation. The Sophists thereby introduce the “principle of subjectivity” into the history of philosophy, creating a gulf between them and their predecessors.Footnote ⁵¹ Thus, Hegel places them at the start of the second, middle period of Greek philosophy’s earliest epoch (from Thales to Aristotle) – a period shared with Socrates and the minor Socratics. The first period ends with Anaxagoras, who posited all-powerful nous (intellect) as the highest principle of nature. His conception of this principle, however, was purely formal, abstract, and objective. The Sophists then gave it content, by identifying nous, the highest principle, with the free, self-determining activity of the concrete, thinking subject.Footnote ⁵² At this moment, Spirit first becomes aware of its critical powers and of the dependence of the object on the subject.

Hegel connects this development at the level of philosophical consciousness to the Sophists’ role as teachers of “culture” (Bildung).Footnote ⁵³ Culture, for Hegel, involves the capacity to judge and act according to rational principles rather than blindly following religious authorities, social customs, or “the feelings of the moment.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But this in turn requires the capacity to reflect on any question from multiple points of view, and to feel the weight of the reasons for and against every possible position. That is precisely what the Sophists gave to the Greeks by teaching them the art of rhetoric – “the power of keeping diverse points of view present to one’s mind” so as to be able to speak well on any subject.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Greeks’ new mastery came at a social cost, however, because it taught them to doubt their most basic moral and religious beliefs, and so the unity of their ethical life fractured into a plurality of convictions.Footnote ⁵⁶ And because the Sophists had shown that “arguments for and against can be found for everything,” the “arbitrary will” of the individual subject became the sole and final authority.Footnote ⁵⁷

Although Hegel believes it is primarily on account of their teaching of culture, not their theorizing, that the Sophists deserve a place in the history of philosophy, he makes exceptions for Protagoras and Gorgias.Footnote ⁵⁸ His discussion of Protagoras focuses on the “measure” doctrine – “the human being is the measure of all things” – which Hegel interprets as the revolutionary thesis that the human mind produces the objects of its knowledge: “Since the human being, as subject, is the measure of everything, the existent is not alone, but is for my knowledge. Consciousness is really the producer of the content in what is objective and subjective thinking is thus really active.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But the Protagorean doctrine, Hegel points out, is ambiguous. Does each human being, in his contingent particularity, produce the content of his own knowledge? Or does “the human being in his rational nature and his universal substantiality” produce the content of knowledge in general?Footnote ⁶⁰ Drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus, Hegel reads Protagoras the first way: the objects of consciousness are strictly private and relative to the individual subject.

It is here that Hegel finds the essential “one-sidedness” in the sophistic position that Socrates and his successors would overcome. The Sophists failed to grasp that genuine thinking – as opposed to mere feeling or sensation – posits its object as universal and necessary, not contingent on the way an individual subject happens to be disposed.Footnote ⁶¹ With Socrates, who is the pivotal figure in Hegel’s history of philosophy, “the subjectivity of thought was brought to consciousness in a more definite and more thorough manner.”Footnote ⁶² While the Sophists discovered the infinite power and spontaneity of the subject, Socrates recognized human thinking (Protagoras’ “measure”) as the activity of universal Spirit, whose aim and substance is the true and the good, “raised above all particularity of interests and desires.”Footnote ⁶³

If, in the end, Hegel reinforces the consensus view that Socrates rescues philosophy from the Sophists’ errors, he revises it in three significant ways. First, he defends the Sophists against the standard charge of moral corruption. They were the educators of Greece, not its villains; their limitations were inherent to their age: “We must not blame the sophists because, in the aimlessness of their time, they did not discover the principle of the good; for every discovery has its time, and that of the good … had not yet been made by Socrates.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Second, Hegel (following Eberhard) blurs the boundary between Socrates and the Sophists, by grouping them in the same historical period. Typically cast as antagonists, they become collaborators in Spirit’s subjective turn. Third, Hegel presents the Sophists as making a positive contribution to the history of philosophy, not only through their teaching of “culture” but also through their reflection on truth and knowledge. Indeed, it is really in virtue of their theoretical achievement in epistemology and ontology that they belong to the history of philosophy properly speaking. That achievement, for Hegel, is epitomized by Protagoras’ “measure” doctrine, interpreted as a statement of radical subjectivism. Hegel thus exhibits the tendency, which prevails in later reception, to identify the Sophists with a core philosophical position or “principle” – be it subjectivism, skepticism, relativism, or realism. This tendency, on the one hand, works to legitimize the Sophists by bringing them into dialectical relation with other philosophical views. On the other hand, it risks obscuring their potential differences, or the nuances of their theories, or even the possibility, as Grote will argue, that their importance does not consist in doctrines at all.

Grote

Contemporaneous with Hegel’s Berlin lectures of the 1820s, several essays appeared in London challenging the view of the Sophists advanced in William Mitford’s influential History of Greece (1784–1810) and echoed by many other British scholars.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Mitford and his Tory followers, democratic Athens was a society of shallow populism, crass commercialism, and moral turpitude, with the Sophists being the mob’s exploiters and enablers. Among the opponents of this picture was the ancient historian and political reformer George Grote – a key member of Jeremy Bentham’s circle and close friend of James and John Stuart Mill – writing anonymously for the Radical Party’s Westminster Review.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reference GroteGrote’s 1826 essay anticipates the thorough rehabilitation of the Sophists published more than two decades later in his own History of Greece in twelve volumes (1846–56).Footnote ⁶⁷ Toward the end of the eighth volume (1850), Grote defends the Sophists as part of a broader revisionist account of fifth-century Athens, which he sees as a model for liberal democracy in the modern world. In the preface, he states the following.

Grote’s main targets are German historians and Platonic commentators who imagine the Sophists as “the moral pestilence of their age” – “ostentatious impostors, flattering and duping the rich youth for their own personal gain; undermining the morality of Athens, public and private, and encouraging their pupils to unscrupulous prosecution of ambition and cupidity.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The same scholars portray Socrates as a “holy man combating and exposing these false prophets, standing up as the champion of morality against their insidious artifices.” Grote rejects this entire narrative and argues that the Athenians at the end of the Peloponnesian War were in fact better men than their Marathonian forebears, as evidenced by their more advanced democracy.Footnote ⁷⁰ And insofar as the Sophists taught Athens the rhetorical and political arts, their influence was actually beneficial. But perhaps most importantly, from Grote’s points of view, the Sophists did not represent a new and distinctive intellectual phenomenon; the notion of a “sophistic” movement is a “monstrous fiction” dreamed up by modern Platonists, with no basis even in Plato’s texts themselves.Footnote ⁷¹

Grote grounds his discussion in a linguistic claim about the evolution of the term sophistês: “A sophist, in the genuine sense of the word, was a wise man, a clever man; one who stood prominently before the public as distinguished for intellect or talent of some kind.”Footnote ⁷² Grote derives this “genuine” sense from Isocrates and insists that the canonical “Sophists” were traditional teachers of domestic and political virtue, continuous with earlier poets and sages.Footnote ⁷³

This new generation of teachers responded to the needs of Athens’ flourishing citizenry and were able to charge considerable fees. The term sophistês was not at all negative at first, though it came to express the vague attitude of disapproval that always follows intellectual celebrity. It was Plato, says Grote, who transformed “Sophist” into the pejorative term familiar today. Partly out of snobbish disdain for their transactional model of education, and partly from opposition to their teaching itself, Plato “not only stole the name out of general circulation, in order to fasten it specially upon his opponents, the paid teachers, but also connected with it express discreditable attributes, which formed no part of its primitive and recognized meaning.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, any ordinary Athenian would have counted Socrates among his city’s leading sophistai, even though he famously did not teach for pay.Footnote ⁷⁵

Although Plato may have treated the Sophists unfairly, historians of philosophy are responsible for the greatest distortions, according to Grote. The problem is not just that they give too much credence to the Platonic evidence; even worse, they misrepresent Plato’s project and what the dialogues actually say.Footnote ⁷⁶ Scholars regard the Sophists as dangerous critics of social norms, failing to see that Plato was the true radical – that he despised the Sophists precisely because their teaching reinforced the democratic status quo.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Sophists’ task was to turn out citizens who fully embodied the conventional virtues, not to investigate basic questions of ethics.

Plato’s criticism of the Sophists, then, was that they were too pragmatic, too bound to this world and its limitations. Despite his clear hostility, however, Plato nowhere depicts the canonical Sophists as especially vicious or corrupting. That part of their image, Grote argues, is once again a modern invention, the result of the commentators’ prejudiced and careless reading.Footnote ⁷⁸ So even if Plato were a reliable witness, the Sophists’ reputation still would not be justified.

What Grote seems to object to most, though, is the idea that the Sophists constituted a philosophical school or movement. There are no “doctrines, principles, or method, both common to them all and distinguishing them from others,” he says, that would warrant using the label “sophistic” for anything but a shared professional role.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, even Plato’s Protagoras imparts “a distinct type of character and distinct method” to each of the Sophists depicted therein, and we have no reason to suppose that any particular Sophist would have accepted the opinions of any other.Footnote ⁸⁰ Grote acknowledges that some of the Sophists did engage in philosophical theorizing, but he finds that attempts to reconstruct their views exceed the limits of the evidence. He is especially critical of the tendency to treat Protagoras and Gorgias – and by implication all “sophistic” thinkers – as moral and epistemological skeptics.Footnote ⁸¹ We simply do not know how Protagoras may have qualified his “measure” doctrine, but it probably was not as radical as scholars assume. Regardless, he deserves credit for bringing into relief the relative nature of cognition in general.Footnote ⁸² As for Gorgias, Grote interprets On Not-Being as a critique of Eleatic metaphysics, designed to show the absurdity of searching for an “ultra-phenomenal something” (Kant’s “noumenon”) as the ground of knowledge.Footnote ⁸³ But even this complex theoretical work, he suggests, had a practical purpose – Gorgias wrote it to dissuade his students from fruitless abstract studies, so they would focus on their civic duties.Footnote ⁸⁴

Grote’s image of the Sophists as thoroughly practical men may well reflect his own distaste for metaphysical speculation. In any case, his account provided an important counterweight to the tendency, already seen in Hegel, to assimilate the Sophists to a core philosophical doctrine or principle. It encouraged later scholars to attend to their individual differences, to approach the Platonic sources more critically, and to refrain from condemning the Sophists en masse.Footnote ⁸⁵ In his attempt to save them from the standard picture, however, Grote exposed the Sophists to another potential attack – namely, that they might not be all that interesting from a philosophical point of view. As we have seen, Grote maintains that the Sophists’ theorizing was always subordinated to their professional and pedagogical concerns. Thus, he denies that the skeptical, atheistic, and immoralist views so often ascribed to “the Sophists” could really have been espoused by any of them.Footnote ⁸⁶ Their innovations were restricted to the field of rhetorical techniques and concepts, while on other questions their thinking was deeply traditional. From this perspective, one could doubt the Sophists’ importance to the history of philosophy, even if they clearly belong in a History of Greece. But in the nineteenth century that perspective did not take hold; by the time Grote published his account of the Sophists at the midpoint of the century, the Hegelian view had already found its most decisive advocate.

Zeller

Originally published between 1844 and 1852, Eduard Zeller’s three-volume Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (The Philosophy of the Greeks in their Historical Development) remained the most authoritative work of its kind deep into the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Like others in his tradition, Zeller aimed to reveal the “organic development” of Greek thought, but without imposing his own speculative categories on the historical material, as he believed Hegel had done.Footnote ⁸⁸ He instead wished to tell the history of philosophy from the ground up, through more careful analysis of texts and political conditions. The first edition of his opening volume concluded with a thirty-page section on the Sophists, revealingly titled “The Dissolution of Presocratic Philosophy.” For the second edition (Reference Zeller1856), Zeller expanded the section – now titled “The Sophistic” – to eighty-three pages, proportional to the revised volume’s overall length. Subsequent editions mainly add footnotes responding to other scholars, the third edition (Reference Zeller1869) being the first to engage with Grote.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although he considers Grote’s rebuttal of the usual broad-brush invectives to be of “paramount importance” for scholarship, Zeller also criticizes his defense of the Sophists as overly generous, even tending toward apologetics.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nor does he accept Grote’s revisionist picture of late-fifth-century Athens. Zeller fully endorses the standard narrative of moral and philosophical decline and puts the Sophists at the center of his story. In the “development” of Greek philosophy, Zeller’s Sophists serve as key transitional figures, precipitating the end of its unpromising first phase and preparing the ground for its regeneration through Socrates. Whereas Hegel had grouped the Sophists with Socrates and his circle, Zeller returns to Tennemann’s scheme and assigns them to a distinctly “Presocratic” stage – the periodization eventually adopted by Diels.Footnote ⁹¹ His account of the Sophists, nevertheless, remains deeply Hegelian, both in its teleological framework and in its interpretation of their core doctrine.Footnote ⁹²

Zeller explains the Sophists’ emergence as the result of two fifth-century developments, one philosophical and one more broadly cultural. The first was that natural philosophy had become thoroughly materialistic and thus unable to account for the mind’s knowledge of an objective world. Scientific thought was collapsing into radical subjectivism.Footnote ⁹³ The second was that, with the prosperity of Periclean Athens, higher culture had become more widely spread, making it hard for men to distinguish themselves through traditional education. Specialist teaching was needed, yet the study of nature – an activity confined to small friendship groups – had reached a dead end. The Sophists therefore turned the focus of scientific inquiry from the cosmos and its elements to the human subject and its rational powers. Their students learned to advance their practical goals through skill in persuasive speech; in religion and morals, they prized reasoned argument over adherence to custom.Footnote ⁹⁴ Echoing Hegel, Zeller describes the sophistic period as a revolutionary moment for the Greek mind: “Now people awoke to the consciousness that [obedience to authority] is not sufficient, that nothing can be of real worth or value for a man that is not approved by his personal conviction, or that has not attained a personal interest for him. In a word, the validity of the principle of subjectivity is asserted.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Although he acknowledges a narrow and “external” sense of “sophist,” meaning a paid teacher of culture, Zeller argues, in explicit opposition to Grote, that the term “sophistic” also describes a wider intellectual phenomenon.Footnote ⁹⁶ Its representatives may not have subscribed to a set of “fixed theorems,” yet their methods and teachings share an “unmistakable family resemblance.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Zeller locates the Sophists’ unity in their rejection of physical inquiry in favor of practical concerns, and, more crucially, in the “skepticism” or denial of objective knowledge that he takes to be the theoretical core of both Protagoras’ “measure” doctrine and Gorgias’ On Not-Being.Footnote ⁹⁸ The first-generation Sophists still clung to traditional values from sheer force of custom, and even professed to be teachers of virtue. But their claim to moral expertise was inevitably undermined by their own skeptical position.

And so sophistic education soon devolved into the teaching of mere formal rhetoric and eristic disputation, which are indifferent to the morality of the ends for which they are used.Footnote ⁹⁹ While the older Sophists did not themselves advocate immoralism, they nevertheless “scattered the seeds from which by a historical necessity it could not fail to be developed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Zeller draws a direct line from Protagoras to Callicles.

The “sophistic ideal” of life, Zeller infers, is ultimately the tyrant’s life: “unlimited power to rule” (unbeschränkte Herrschermacht), no matter how it is attained.Footnote ¹⁰¹

But rather than cast the Sophists as villains, Zeller (following Meiners) aims to historicize them – to understand their doctrine as “a natural product of historical development,” answering the needs of its time.Footnote ¹⁰² In his account, the Sophists prove “necessary” in more than one sense. Their skepticism was, on the one hand, the necessary consequence of the physicists’ decline into materialism – hence the “dissolution” of Presocratic philosophy. On the other hand, the Sophists’ critical turn was necessary in order for Greek philosophy to advance to a new “Socratic” stage. Zeller makes this point with a striking image.

The final sentence of Zeller’s opening volume anticipates Socrates’ rebuilding philosophy on a more solid foundation: “The true way of transcending the sophistic was shown by Socrates alone, who sought to gain in thought itself, the power of which had been proved by the destruction of the previous convictions, a deeper basis for science and morality.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The Sophists had demonstrated the “power” of thought, but they had not found its proper employment.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The comparison to the modern Aufklärer – Enlightenment philosophes such as Diderot and Voltaire – points to Zeller’s ultimate reluctance to count the Sophists as “philosophers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Their skeptical doctrine certainly earns them a role in the history of philosophy; yet the Sophists themselves, Zeller suggests, lacked the “moral seriousness” and “scientific devotion” that characterizes true philosophers, ancient or modern.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Genuine philosophy, in Zeller’s view, involves a commitment to objectivity that the Sophists rejected wholesale and that Socrates restored. Socrates saved philosophy – and Greek culture more generally – by redirecting the critical spirit of sophistic culture toward the search for objective truth.

On the face of it, Hegel and Zeller present contrasting ways to conceptualize the Sophists’ place in the history of philosophy, in particular vis-à-vis Socrates. Hegel, as we saw, puts the major caesura before the Sophists, to mark a new beginning with consciousness’s subjective turn. For Zeller, the Sophists instead signal the end of an era, with Socrates bringing the birth of something new. But one could argue that the difference between Hegel’s and Zeller’s periodizations is largely superficial. The teleological perspectives of both accounts, as well as their shared conception of a Socratic turning point, render the Sophists’ role essentially preparatory to Socrates. In both accounts, moreover, their philosophical position boils down to the “principle of subjectivity” and its concomitant denial of objective knowledge. Hegel focuses on the Sophists’ assertion of the power of the subject and groups them with Socrates, who overcomes the “one-sidedness” of their doctrine and realizes its potential.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His periodization thus reflects the dialectic of subject and object that governs all of history. Zeller, by contrast, focuses on the negative, destructive side of the Sophists’ teaching and imagines Socrates as having to start mostly from scratch. The choice of emphasis, and so the respective periodizations, might well seem arbitrary or to be guided by assumptions about Socrates’ uniqueness that have little to do with the Sophists themselves.

At any rate, Zeller’s restructuring of the Hegelian narrative succeeded; his arrangement of the Sophists under the heading of “Presocratic” philosophy would eventually lead to their inclusion in Diels’s Vorsokratiker, cementing their place in the discipline’s history. But perhaps more important is the way Zeller reinforces Hegel’s progressivist story by likewise reducing sophistic thought to a “one-sided” skepticism or subjectivism, which Greek philosophy in its next, more mature phase would have to transcend. This basic story recurs, with slight variations, in other influential histories of philosophy from the period – including those of ÜberwegFootnote ¹⁰⁸ and WindelbandFootnote ¹⁰⁹ – and it is still a prevalent view today (though with “relativism” replacing “skepticism” or “subjectivism” as the watchword). In recent decades, however, increasing attention has been paid to the progressivist view’s fiercest nineteenth-century critic.

Nietzsche

As a young professor of philology at the University of Basel in the early 1870s, Friedrich Nietzsche taught a semi-regular lecture course on the “pre-Platonic” philosophers.Footnote ¹¹⁰ His rationale for drawing the line before Plato is that the major figures from Thales to Socrates each presents a unique philosophical archetype, whereas Plato is the first great “mixed” type.Footnote ¹¹¹ In his introduction, Nietzsche names Protagoras as one of the archetypal philosophers, but neither he nor any other canonical Sophist receives a dedicated lecture. The Sophists make a brief appearance in the concluding lecture on Socrates, as the target of Socrates’ “polemic” against traditional education and science.Footnote ¹¹² Nietzsche explicitly endorses Grote’s conception of the Sophists as “regular teachers of customs, neither above nor below the level of the times,” against the “standard view” that they were a radical and morally dangerous “sect” within Greek society.Footnote ¹¹³ In his published works and voluminous notebooks, Nietzsche would say little more about the Sophists, whether as a group or as individuals, until the final productive year of his life.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1888, a decade after poor health forced him to resign his professorship, the Sophists feature in Nietzsche’s central project of a “revaluation of all values.” Even then, Grote’s view remains important to him, as Nietzsche continues to treat the Sophists as “representatives” of fifth-century Greek culture. But his conception of that culture – and so what the Sophists represent – has fundamentally changed. The Sophists emerge as the last spokesmen for a healthy and truly Hellenic “realism” before philosophy falls prey to the “decadent,” moralizing tendency of the Socratic tradition.

This view is anticipated in a striking passage from Daybreak (1881), subtitled Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality – the book with which Nietzsche would later claim his “campaign against morality begins.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a section titled “A Model” (§168), Nietzsche explains why he loves and honors Thucydides more highly than Plato. It is because Thucydides takes the “most comprehensive and impartial delight” in human affairs and searches for the “good sense” behind every action. He thereby shows greater “practical justice” than Plato, who always maligns and belittles his enemies. Nietzsche goes on to link Thucydides to several other fifth-century intellectuals, as representatives of a shared sophistic “culture.”

What unites these figures, Nietzsche suggests, is their refusal to let moral values, some view about the way the world ought to be, guide their inquiries or artistic and political projects. Sophistic culture is thus more “impartial,” more objective than Socratic philosophy, which assumes that the true world must ultimately be a good and just world. The “good sense” Thucydides finds in his subjects is not a moral virtue, such as compassion or self-restraint, but an attunement to their own interests and the best way to promote them. Nietzsche sees Thucydides as a “model” for his own attempt to overcome the “prejudices of morality” and study human nature with greater impartiality, indeed with greater justice. This includes doing justice to the Sophists themselves, since the Socratic verdict has obscured their true value.

The Daybreak passage mentions none of the canonical Sophists by name. Instead, Nietzsche lists figures for whom there survives far more evidence, as exemplars of a common “culture” (Cultur) that he says was imparted by the Sophists. We are meant to infer that the Sophists themselves viewed the world impartially or without moral prejudice, though no argument to that effect is put forward. Nietzsche is not interested in historiographical niceties; he wants to paint a broad picture of a fifth-century Weltanschauung that was chronologically prior to, and fundamentally at odds with, the Socratic-Platonic view that still dominates the European consciousness. As Socratic philosophy’s imagined enemies, the “Sophists” provide Nietzsche with an apt label for that pre-moralistic outlook, regardless of the Sophists’ actual teachings.

When he returns to the theme in his 1888 notebooks, however, Nietzsche advances a more specific claim about the Sophists’ achievement: “the Sophists touch upon the first critique of morality, the first insight into morality.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ They surveyed the plurality of social customs and concluded that any moral system can be dialectically justified, hence that “every justification of a morality must necessarily be sophistical” – as the philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant has unintentionally confirmed. The Sophists thereby discovered “the first truth” (presumably of Nietzsche’s own philosophy): “that ‘a morality in itself,’ a ‘good in itself’ does not exist; that it is a con to speak of ‘truth’ in this area.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Here Nietzsche reimagines the Sophists as forerunners of his own position on morality – as he puts it elsewhere, “that there are absolutely no moral facts.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Since the time of Plato, philosophers have lacked the “intellectual integrity” to face this truth, but their delusions are increasingly untenable: “every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has made restitution to the Sophists … .” In other words, modern philosophy is proving the ancient Sophists right.

In a separate notebook entry, Nietzsche says that Grote defended the Sophists in exactly the wrong way: “he wants to extol them as men of honor and moral exemplars – but their honor consisted in not perpetrating any cons with grand words and virtues.”Footnote ¹²⁰ That is because the Sophists were “realists”; they possessed “the courage that all strong spirits have, the courage to know their own immorality.” Nietzsche expands on this point in Twilight of the Idols (1888), the last book he saw into press before his mental collapse. In the concluding chapter, titled “What I Owe to the Ancients,” he returns to his “model” Thucydides: “My vacation, my preference, my cure for all things Platonic has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe, are most closely related to me in terms of their unconditional will not to be fooled and to see reason in reality, – not in ‘reason,’ and even less in ‘morality.’”Footnote ¹²¹ Nietzsche again presents Thucydides as a paragon of sophistic culture.

Whereas Thucydides had displayed “justice” in the Daybreak passage, he now exhibits “courage” – the strength and vigor to face the amorality of existence without retreating or regarding it as an error. Nietzsche here also offers a new explanation for Socratic philosophy’s moralistic turn – it is a sign of decadence or degeneration, of weakening instincts that find comfort in the vision of a morally ordered world.Footnote ¹²² Sophistic culture, Nietzsche suggests, was the last and greatest expression of genuine Greekness; from Socrates and Plato onward, “Greek” philosophy was no longer truly Greek.

Nietzsche’s last words on the Sophists thus effect a complete reversal of the progressivist narrative established by the previous century of German historiography. No less than Zeller, Nietzsche identifies the sophistic “movement” with a unifying perspective that divides it sharply from Socrates and his followers – in this case, the Sophists’ “realism” or rejection of moral ideals. But now the Sophists’ pre-Socratic status is precisely to their credit. Nietzsche, too, embraces the standard picture of late-fifth-century decline.Footnote ¹²³ Yet he finds evidence for Greek degeneration – which is now conceived in physiological terms – not in the Sophists’ immoralism but in the philosophers’ reaction against it. The ugly truth about the philosophers has remained hidden, according to Nietzsche, because Socratic values have dictated the way the history has been told, so as to vindicate their hegemony. To see “sophistic culture” clearly, then, we need somehow to overcome the Socratic perspective, to view the late fifth century with the Sophists’ own “strong, severe, harsh objectivity” – in other words, we need to become Greeks.

Conclusion

Nietzsche’s reading brings into focus the malleability of “the Sophists” as a historiographical category, and the tendency for one figure – usually Protagoras, but in his case the noncanonical Thucydides – to stand in for the whole. The amorphousness of the concept, fragmentary state of the evidence, and often puzzling character of the texts we do have all means that our picture of the Sophists is necessarily, and flagrantly, incomplete. The nineteenth-century thinkers we surveyed showed us several ways to fill that picture in, according to the story one wants to tell about Greek philosophy’s formative period. For Hegel, the Sophists mark the awakening of subjectivity, when consciousness becomes aware of its critical powers. For Grote, they represent the practical virtues of democratic Athens, the preference for the serviceable over the speculative, that Plato’s idealistic nature could not accept. Zeller makes the Sophists the necessary agents of “Presocratic” philosophy’s dissolution, so that Socrates can rebuild philosophy on a better foundation. Nietzsche, finally, posits a “sophistic culture” that is wholly alien to the philosophical tradition’s values and provides a model for his own critique of morality.

The nineteenth century also helps us see the stakes of assimilating the Sophists to the history of philosophy. If we judge their thought by the standards of the Socratic tradition, they might seem to be fumbling in the dark or to be advancing primitive versions of ideas that will be developed more successfully later on. The risk is that reading the Sophists through the lens of philosophy might cause us to miss their true intellectual contribution, or deprive them of their critical potential, as Nietzsche warns.Footnote ¹²⁴ But to insist on their “otherness” from philosophy also brings a cost, insofar as it reinforces a divide between “sophistic” and “philosophical” thinking that is itself a historiographical creation – one that likely tells us more about the uses of the past than it does about the ancient Greek Sophists.