Persuasion in Ancient Greece

Andrew Scholtz, Instructor

Study Guides. . .

Selections from the Sophists

Readings Journal Project

Something a bit more creative than the usual. . . .

Record your personal reactions/responses to a sophist or sophists of your choice. What do you think about his/their ideas? What do you want to say to him/them? What do you think they'd say back to you?

Access to Readings

Click here.

General Issues

• What are the limitations of logos?
• What is the utility of logos, especially under democracy?
• What are the ethical problems posed by logos, especially under democracy?

General Background: The Sophists

Who were the Sophists (that's "SAH-fists")? To quote from Webster's Dictionary, "In ancient Greece, any of a group of teachers of rhetoric, politics, philosophy, etc., some of whom were notorious for their clever, specious [= "attractive but tricky"] arguments."

To quote from my own terms document (s.v. "sophist"):

Prior to the later 400s BCE, a "wise man," one who stood out for sophia: wisdom or skill. By about 430, sophistes had come to refer to an itinerant professional (i.e., paid) teacher of subjects of interest to young men intending to enter public life. The term could carry negative connotations; to ordinary Athenians, it seems to have suggested a teacher of the art of verbal deception.

Intellectually, the sophists seem to have been willing to go farther than other early Greek thinkers in challenging traditional ideas. Other thinkers elevated natural forces over mythical gods as the causes of things; the sophists (at least some of them) challenged the notion that the causes of things - anything - could even be understood with any sort of objective certainty at all.

Why are the sophists interesting to us? It is at least interesting that one of the sophists, and an important sophist at that, namely, Protagoras, from the Thracian city of Abdera, was friends with Pericles. Pericles and he are said to have discussed the question of responsibility if, in a gymnasium, someone were to die by accidentally walking into the path of a thrown javelin. Should the javelin thrower be charged with involuntary manslaughter, or should the victim be "charged" with causing his own death? (Compare Antiphon Tetralogy 2.) Pericles would appoint Protagoras to draw up laws for the Athens-sponsored colony of Thurii in Italy.

More to the point, much of the teaching of the sophists was focused on linguistic matters, that is, on logos. Skill in logos now being essential to anyone seeking success in the courts (which were very busy!) and in the democratic assembly, the sophists, teachers of, among other things, logos, attracted numerous pupils. Some sophists (e.g., Protagoras, Gorgias) could command high fees. At Athens, most all the sophists were foreigners.

But this mode of instruction could be perceived to be profoundly untraditional: the young were expected to receive moral instruction from friends and kin among their fellow citizens, not from foreign strangers to whom they had to pay money. Further, the instruction offered by the sophists clearly suggested to some (whether or not a given sophist would have endorsed the notion) that the power of logos to induce belief - in Protagoras' formulation, "to make the weaker argument the stronger" - should be esteemed higher than truth itself. (Compare what Gorgias has to say about tragedy.) Further still, the paying of money to a sophist could suggest to the unsympathetic the paying of money to a prostitute or brown noser.

In short, the sophists could be associated . . .

• with the sort of training needed by a leadership-elite desirous of acquiring political virtue so as to be able to lead well (see especially Protagoras)
• with the subversion of traditional values

- sophistic, in other words, as simultaneously traditional, anti-traditional, hyper-democratic and crypto-oligarchic.

What would a sophist would tell you? Ask Protagoras, and he would tell you he educated his pupils in political virtue to make them better citizens. Ask Gorgias, and he might have told you (though I'm not sure we can really know this) that he showed his pupils how not to fall for tricky arguments. But you decide . . . .

Suggested Further Reading

From Thomas Martin's Overview of Classical Greek History at the Perseus website:

• For more on the sophists, click here and follow the "forward" links
• For the traditional education to which sophistic was felt to be a challenge, click here

You can additionally looNovember 1, 2009search/iep/" target="_top">The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Also these (on pysical reserve in the Library's Newcomb Reading room, just off the Library North coffee kiosk):

• Kennedy, George Alexander. 1963. The Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
• de Romilly, Jacqueline. 1992. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press
• Untersteiner, Mario. 1954. The Sophists. Oxford: B. Blackwell

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