by A. A. Long
Little has survived from the many books and speeches produced by sophists. On points of doctrine we are often left to draw speculative conclusions from slender evidence. Much of what we believe about the sophists is derived from Plato, who is critical of most of them for presenting themselves as teachers of subjects he did not think they properly understood. Plato’s work is historical fiction written fifty or more years after Protagoras made shock waves in Athens; his aim is philosophical rather than historical, and we must be careful not to be seduced by his vivid writing into taking it for an eyewitness account.
Part of Plato’s aim is evidently to distinguish Socrates from the sophists with whom he was associated in the popular imagination, and this aim helps to explain why Plato shows Socrates challenging various sophists to defend their claims as teachers, while vigorously denying for his part that he is a teacher at all. Although Plato treats Protagoras and Gorgias with respect, he has Socrates easily refute them, and he is harsh when he writes of sophists in general. In his view, sophists substitute appearance for reality and persuasion for truth; they use fallacies deliberately to mislead a dazzled audience; and they claim the ability to vanquish anyone by the power of rhetoric on subjects of which they – the sophists – are completely ignorant.
Plato’s portrayal of sophists has given us the term “sophistical” for devious argumentation. Following leads in Hegel, the nineteenth-century scholar George Grote gave a powerful defence of the sophists in his History of Greece, and most recent scholars of the new learning have attempted to separate their subject from the negative image it used to carry. The place of sophists in the history of Greek philosophy is now widely recognized.
The first and most successful self-proclaimed sophist was Protagoras. His profession, as he defined it, was to improve his students by imparting to them the virtue of good judgment (euboulia), which, he said, would make them highly capable or powerful in public life, as well as in managing their own households (Plato, Prot. 318e). He had broad interests in the use of language, especially for oratory. In the history of philosophy, he is best known for his teaching that “a human-being is measure of all things” (DK 80 B1), which in Plato’s interpretation is equivalent to the relativism of truth to individual perception and judgment. Only a handful of sentences have come down to us from Protagoras, along with a few words, titles, or catch phrases, so that the task of reconstructing his thinking on such points is largely speculative.
For Gorgias we have two complete speeches, a substantial fragment of a third, and two different summaries of a major philosophical text – still a tiny percentage of his output during a long and productive life. Roughly contemporary with Protagoras, he was a teacher of public speaking and according to Plato made no claim to improve his students in other ways. Why should he, when he believed in the overwhelming power of speech? He carried his method of argument from the public stage of oratory to the treatment of deep philosophical issues. While Protagoras relativized reality and affirmed individual knowledge, Gorgias denied reality and knowledge altogether. Both paradoxical doctrines are probably responses to developments in earlier philosophy, and both provoked responses from later philosophers.
Protagoras’ success as a teacher and Gorgias’ fame as a speaker paved the way for the next generation of sophists. Prodicus was known for attempting precise distinctions in the definitions of words. Hippias had the widest range of interests; he is said to have made an advance in science (the invention of the curve known as quadratrix) and also was known for his work in astronomy. We have evidence bearing on the teachings also of Antiphon, Critias, Evenus, Euthydemus, Thrasymachus, Alcidamas, and Lycophron. The Anonymus Iamblichi (an unknown writer quoted by Iamblichus) and the author of Dissoi logoi (Twofold arguments) are also considered sophists. Views related to those of the sophists appear in Plato’s Republic 358e-359b (on the social contract) and Gorgias 483a-484c (on the conflict between law and nature). The influence of sophists is also evident through Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, in his mastery of rhetoric, his realism about human motivation, and his reticence about religion and the gods.
Socrates appears as the teacher in Aristophanes’ Clouds (surviving version, 420 B.C.), giving lessons in natural science and the sort of public speaking taught by the sophists. Although false on most details, Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates must be true enough to have amused an audience who knew Socrates’ reputation. Aside from Antiphon and Thucydides, Socrates is the only prominent Athenian figure who engaged in the new learning, and his work has much in common with that of the sophists. He shared the sophists’ interests in ethics and adopted some of their ideas and methods. His theory of punishment as educational is close to what Plato attributes to Protagoras (Prot. 324b), and his method of questioning is a variation on a sophistic practice. His interest in defining concepts such as justice is related to sophists’ work on the correctness of words.
RHETORIC
Persuasion, says Gorgias, “has the same power, but not the same form, as compulsion,” and it has this power in virtue of the acquired skill (technê) of the speaker, whether or not what it says is true (Helen 13).1 He rests this claim on three examples: speculative astronomers are persuasive on unseen subjects by mere opinion; philosophers triumph by the quickness of their thought; and speakers in law courts win by virtue of the skill with which their speeches are written, rather than by virtue of being right.
That skill with words could trump the truth in a court of law does not in itself imply a sceptical or relativistic philosophy. The view could be held equally by one who respects the truth (as Gorgias claims he does in the Helen) or by one who rejects the possibility of speaking the truth altogether (as Gorgias appears to do in his On not being). Even Plato agrees to the power of speeches presented to large groups; that is why he presents Socrates at work in contexts in which truth has a better chance of being persuasive than it does in a court of law. Athenian courts consisted of panels of jurors too large to bribe, but who easily could be swayed by rhetoric. Socrates appeals, by contrast, to the deepest held convictions of his interlocutor alone, and to these convictions it is truth, not the skill of either party, that should matter.
The first known teachers of the art of words were Corax and Tisias in Sicily. They are usually not listed as sophists, however. The first such teacher to be called a sophist was Gorgias, who took Athens by storm on his visit from Leontini in 427 B.C. and who was the major influence on the next generation of orators. His was evidently the most popular subject offered by sophists. The advent of democracy in Athens and Sicily during the fifth century had given new powers to strong speakers in law courts and assemblies, but the art of words was not a recent invention. Greeks had been fascinated by displays of public speaking as early as Homer and had always honoured those who succeeded in contests of speeches. Statesmen such as Themistocles owed their success to oratory long before sophists came on the scene, and set speeches were a feature of the earliest Greek plays. In all Greek cities, but especially in democracies, fine oratory had an important place in entertainment, in deliberative bodies, and in law courts. Athens offered any adult male citizen the right to speak in assembly, and this gave unelected busybodies, known as demagogues, an opportunity to influence policy through public speaking alone. Meanwhile, democratic courts could ruin or save a man, depending (it appeared) on whether plaintiff or defender gave the better speech, but rhetoric did not always triumph in politics or provide security in law courts. Pericles, the best speaker of his day, was unsuccessful in his own legal defence, and Antiphon’s defence speech, though a success among intellectuals, did not save him from execution.
The tradition in philosophy of construing rhetoric as merely the art of persuasion is largely due to Plato, who represents Gorgias teaching rhetoric as an art of persuasion that is neutral regarding subject matter, can be mastered by itself, and is powerful enough to trump experts in any other field, even on the subjects of their expertise. Thinkers before Plato probabl
y did not consciously employ so narrow a concept of rhetoric; Plato’s account is tendentious, and most early teachers of public speaking went beyond the subject-neutral art of persuasion.2 We know that under the art of words sophists covered such topics as characteristics of speech acts (Aristotle, Poetics 19 1456b15), correct use of words, and methods of argument. The latter were designed not merely for persuasive purposes, but for use in serious inquiries of all kinds, from metaphysics to anthropology. Noticing that such methods cannot establish knowledge, Plato wrongly infers that they have no value but to persuade.
“Correctness of words”
This was the title for teachings by a number of sophists, but only in a few cases do we know what it meant. Protagoras argued that “wrath” in the first line of the Iliad (a feminine noun in conventional Greek) should properly have been treated as masculine in gender. He also sought to correct poets who appeared to contradict themselves in their verses.3 Prodicus argued for the precise use of words, making careful distinctions between such pairs as “pleasure” and “enjoyment.”4 Both evidently sought greater precision with words than conventional usage allowed. Gorgias too appeals to correctness of words (DK 82 B6), but his art laces public speeches with euphemism and metaphor (B 5 a, 15, and 16). The philosophical views of known sophists do not readily allow for a fixed standard of correctness; and some scholars have supposed that by “correctness” they meant an effective use of language,5 which would be compatible with relativism in that the same language affects different people differently. But there is no doubt that Protagoras’ standard was independent of public opinion, because it promoted natural over conventional genders for words.
Opposed speeches
The art of presenting opposed speeches – of giving arguments on both sides of an issue – was taught by Protagoras and other sophists (D.L. IX.51). Protagoras’ works are lost, but we have surviving examples in the Tetralogies of Antiphon and the Dissoi logoi, as well as in the History of Thucydides and the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. This art is related to “making the weaker argument stronger,”6 which, given the ambiguity of the Greek words, meant also “making the wrong argument right.” Gorgias’ surviving display speeches illustrate how clever argument can strengthen a weak case. This practice was held against many sophists and was part of the unspoken charge against Socrates (Plato Apol. 18b). Opposing arguments, like arguments in defence of a weak case, typically make use of the concept of eikos, which involves a kind of relativity.
Eikos and euboulia
Appeal to reasonable expectation (eikos, likely or probable) is the most common argument scheme taught by sophists. It was used widely in forensic and deliberative speeches, and it also had a useful function in what we today would call social science. Good examples are to be found in Gorgias’ surviving speeches and in the Defence and Tetralogies of Antiphon. A rich man accused of stealing a cloak, for example, could appeal to the expectation that a rich man would not bother to steal a cloak, having no need to expose himself to the risk of doing so when he could buy one. Antiphon was charged with being a leader of the oligarchic coup of 411 B.C.; the surviving fragment of his defence speech depends entirely on eikos, arguing that the expected motives for upsetting a government do not obtain in his case: it would not have been eikos for an orator to desire oligarchy, since there is a smaller market for speeches in that form of government.
Such appeals, frequently couched as rhetorical questions, are fundamental to the larger argumentative structures developed by sophists – opposed speeches (for which Protagoras was notorious) and exhaustive hierarchies of argument (developed by Gorgias). Eikos serves when eyewitness testimony is lacking, as it does for Thucydides in his reconstruction of early Greek history, guiding his extrapolations from the slender evidence available to him. The speakers in Thucydides frequently appeal to eikos to guide their predictions of the future, both in debate about strategy and in exhortation to battle.7
Plato wrongly treats eikos as a value offered by sophists in place of truth (Phaedrus 267a); in actual usage, eikos is an admittedly risky method for exploring truth when the available evidence will not support ascertainable conclusions. As such, the concept of eikos depends on that of truth; what is eikos, says Aristotle, is what obtains “for the most part,” and the more often we find a generalization to be so, the more eikos it is (Rhet. II.25.8-11). This is not quite right, however, for the sorts of issues treated by sophists. What typically threatens a judgment based on eikos is not a lack of instances for its general rule (which obviously holds for normal cases), but rather information that would exclude the case at hand from falling under the rule. If, for example, all we know is that the accused was rich and the theft was only a cloak, we would not reasonably expect the accused to have been the thief; but the addition of certain details (the coldness of the night, the absence of witnesses, the ruthlessness of the accused who happened to be outside without his cloak) makes the accusation more reasonable. Opposed speeches in the sophists and Thucydides show that these thinkers were well aware that differences in background information generate differences in eikos, which is therefore relative to background information. Change the background of a given case, and you change what it will be reasonable to believe about it. When little is known of the facts, opposing orators can adduce considerations in view of which contrary conclusions seem equally reasonable, as occurs in Antiphon’s first tetralogy: The plaintiff argues that the wealthy defendant was likely to have done the crime in order to protect his riches from the man he is accused of killing; the defendant counters that committing the crime would have put his wealth at even greater risk, and that therefore he was unlikely to have done so. The plaintiff in this case calls attention to a fact that the defendant plays down: that the defendant was at risk of a lawsuit from the victim. This fact defeats the normal expectation that wealthy men do not need to resort to crime.
Such appeals to normal expectation are what modern logicians call defeasible; they hold only for normal conditions and are defeated by unexpected abnormalities. Good use of such reasoning depends on a clear sense of what is normal for a given generalization, as well as on knowing what questions might lead to its defeat. Defeasible reasoning is often the best we can do (as in the case of most medical diagnosis). Its disadvantage, however, is that it depends heavily on the good judgment and experience of those who use it, who must be able to ask appropriate questions and identify relevant answers. All judgments of eikos are relative to selected background information. Aristotle overlooks this and wrongly supposes that an outcome could be eikos without qualification. In Aristotle’s view, when opposed outcomes seem equally eikos, only one of them would actually be so without qualification (Rhet. II.24). But if we could judge the outcome without qualification, we would have no need for eikos in the first place. Aristotle would have been right to say that only one of them could be true, but that is another matter. It is important to contrast eikos judgments against the probabilistic results found in modern science. Probabilities are based on inductions from cited observations and are not relative to subjective information, but for eikos the issue is not whether the generalization on which it depends is true – all parties agree to that – but whether the case falls under it. The virtue of good eikos judgment is not its empirical foundation, but the relevance of the information that frames it.
Aristotle says in the passage cited that Protagoras’ use of such reasoning incurred public wrath because it seemed to make the weaker argument stronger. Such a method aroused the fear that a good speaker could successfully defend a criminal or convict an innocent man. If there is no witness to settle the matter, and judgment cannot decide which piece of information is the more relevant to the case, a contest of speeches appealing to eikos can be merely a contest between the persuasive powers of the two speakers. In such a case one speaker can argue as well on one side of an issue as he can on the other, if he is trained to do so.
To Plato, the possibility of equally credible arguments on both si
des is fatal to the moral integrity of forensic oratory; serious people should concern themselves instead with otherworldly matters. But to those whose concerns are practical politics and law, such as Protagoras, the danger of reasoning by eikos would point to the enormous importance of euboulia (good judgment) – a virtue respected among Greeks other than Plato. Good judgment makes the all-important difference between tricky rhetoric and a serious inquiry into the human arena where firm knowledge is impossible.
Gorgias’ rhetoric
This calls for special treatment, not only because Gorgias is the foremost early Greek orator but also because two complete speeches of his have survived, Encomium of Helen and Defence of Palamedes (DK 82 B11), as well as a substantial fragment of a third, Funeral oration (B6). All are designed to display the art of public speech by using devices that could be easily transferred to other speeches. In style, organization, and argument they represent patterns that appear in later oratory as a result of Gorgias’ wide influence as a teacher. His Funeral oration echoes in many speeches, from Pericles’ to Lincoln’s, and his Defence of Palamedes is imitated in organization and argument by no less a figure than Plato in his Defence of Socrates (usually known as the Apology). Elements of Gorgias’ style appear in a number of other Platonic speeches, especially the Encomium of Love by Agathon in the Symposium. In real life Gorgias’ teaching was evidently a major influence on Hippias and, later, on Plato’s contemporary Isocrates.
