Sophists. The Greek word sophistēs (from sophos = 'skilled,' 'wise') meant originally any one of acknowledged or professed skill; thus, the term was applied to the seven sages (whether philosophers, like Thales, or statesmen, like Solon), to poets, musicians, &c. In the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. it came to be applied specially to those who made a profession of teaching all or any of the higher branches of learning. The great intellectual awakening of Athens after the Persian war, and the growth of democracy in Sicily and elsewhere, as well as at Athens, which gave skill in public speaking a new importance, led to the demand for an education which should go beyond the old training in 'gymnastic' and 'music' (i.e. reading, writing, singing, and reciting from the poets). To meet this demand there arose a class of professional teachers, wandering scholars, who undertook to provide what we should call 'higher education.' This new movement presents certain resemblances to the rise of the universities in the 13th century, to the popularising of learning and science in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the 'University Extension' movement of to-day. Some of these 'Sophists' were more specially teachers of rhetoric—i.e. they gave particular attention to the form of public speaking, and as such they are the beginners of Greek prose style. Originally artistic expression takes the form of verse. The poet is the 'maker,' the artist in language: prose is simply 'ordinary speech.' But from the time of the rhetoricians, such as Gorgias (q.v.) of Leontini, prose also becomes an art. The first effect of the deliberate pursuit of artistic form in prose was to produce a pedantic and artificial style. (We can trace the evil influence of Gorgias in the 'speeches' in Thucydides.) But this attention to language was the preparatory training for the simple beauty of the best Attic prose. Other Sophists gave more attention to the matter of public speech—the questions of right and wrong which come before law-courts and political assemblies—and in this way they were the beginners of moral and political philosophy. The earlier Greek philosophers, with the partial exception of the Pythagoreans, had hardly treated of human matters: they had been ontologists and cosmologists. Protagoras (q.v.) of Abdera and Prodicus of Ceos may be taken as famous and favourable examples of the professors of 'virtue.' It must be remembered that the teacher of conduct and the moral philosopher were not distinguished even by Plato and Aristotle. Other Sophists, like Hippias of Elis, professed to teach universal knowledge—what we call 'general culture.' Others again, like Euthydemos and Dionysiodorus (who appear in Plato's dialogue named after the first of them), devoted themselves specially to the art of disputation, and thus prepared the way for the science of logic.
The ambitious youth of Athens flocked to a fashionable Sophist from intellectual interest in the new learning and in order to acquire an education which would fit them to obtain success in the law-courts and in the popular assembly, or to acquit themselves with distinction in a discussion on any subject whatever. The various Sophists naturally differed much from each other in ability, in character, and in the degree of seriousness with which they regarded their function as teachers; and some may very well have deserved the censure expressed in Aristotle's definition of the Sophist as 'a man who makes money by sham wisdom' (in Soph. Elench. i). In the eyes of old-fashioned persons the whole class was regarded with suspicion: the skill of the clever orator or disputant seemed to have something immoral about it, because it might enable the worse cause to appear the better. And to discuss the nature of right and wrong, or to theorise about the foundations of society, was then, as in other ages, regarded as dangerous. In the eyes of such persons Socrates and Plato were 'Sophists' just as much as the rest, although
Socrates and Plato, conscious of their own intellectual honesty and earnestness, and not teaching for 'pay,' disowned the title. When the various branches of the new learning came to be differentiated, we find the rhetorician Isocrates (q.v.), to whom the term would certainly be applied by the average Athenian and by Plato, applying the term to Plato, but not to himself. Again, whereas Plato applies it to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, &c., we find that Aristotle in a passage (Eth. Nic. ix. 1) where he speaks disparagingly of the Sophists contrasts Protagoras with them. The word had come to acquire an evil connotation, such as survives in our use of the term 'sophistry.' But it is quite a delusion, as was conclusively shown by Grote (History of Greece, pt. ii. chap. 67), to suppose that the Sophists were a sect of philosophers, with pernicious principles, who systematically undermined the morality of the Hellenic world. They were not a sect, but a profession: and on the whole they were neither better nor worse than their age. Like the journalist or littérateur of our own time, they succeeded by supplying what the public wanted. The Platonic Socrates, their adversary, himself says, 'Our youth are corrupted, not by the individual Sophists, but by the public, which is the great Sophist, against whose influence any private teacher wages an unequal contest' (Republic, vi. 492).
There is no common 'Sophistic' doctrine. Different Sophists were influenced by different schools of philosophy. They were the popularisers of older doctrines. Thus, Protagoras was influenced by Heraclitus (q.v.), whose doctrine of universal flux gives a basis for Protagoras' assertion of the absolute relativity of knowledge ('man is the measure of all things;') nothing is true but the sensation of the moment). The alleged influence of his fellow-townsmen, Democritus (q.v.), seems less likely; for Democritus was about twenty years younger. Still the Atomist resolution of all things into mere arrangements of the only real existences (the atoms and the void) very likely helped to supply a basis for the distinction between 'convention' and 'nature,' which was much used by some Sophists and became a commonplace of the period. Gorgias is said to have been a disciple of Empedocles (q.v.), and was certainly influenced by the Eleatics (q.v.). His paradoxical treatise on 'Nature or the non-existent' is clearly a sceptical working out of the Eleatic principle of the unreality of the manifold. We have no sufficient knowledge to justify the attempts made by some German scholars to classify the Sophists according to different philosophical schools; and it is, moreover, unlikely that popular philosophers should admit of any very precise affiliation. We can only group them in a very rough way, such as has been attempted above. Some historians of philosophy (e.g. Zeller and Ueberweg) lay stress on the distinction between the earlier and later Sophists, considering the 'later Sophists' (such as Polus of Agrigentum, a pupil of Gorgias, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Euthydemus, &c.) to represent a distinct degeneracy in the class. This, however, seems doubtful, except in the sense that, as time went on, 'rhetoricians' and 'philosophers' came to be more clearly differentiated from among the mass of the profession; and the name Sophist degenerated as we have seen. Professor Sidgwick has argued that the 'Eristic' or disputatious Sophists are really a degenerate offshoot of the Socratic school; but against this hypothesis there are many objections.
While Grote is perfectly correct in holding that the Sophists are not a sect and have no common doctrine, he errs in ignoring the fact that they represent a common tendency, the new spirit of the age. The awakening of reflection on political and social institutions, on morals and religion, and the wider diffusion of enlightenment produced in Hellas the same spirit of 'freethinking,' individualism, and sceptical criticism which we find among the 'Humanists' of the Renaissance, and still more among the English 'Deists' and French 'Encyclopædists' of the 18th century. Of this intellectual movement the Sophists were at once the outcome and the leaders. The differences between the Sophists might be paralleled by the differences between Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, &c., and yet all these writers share a common tendency. The very opinions maintained by certain Sophists reappear in more fully developed forms among English and French writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, Thrasymachus, in Plato's Republic, bases right simply on the command of the stronger, by which he means the sovereign power in the state—the theory of Hobbes, developed afterwards in its legal aspects by Bentham and Austin. From the second book of Plato's Republic it appears that the Social Contract theory had already been propounded, almost certainly by some Sophist. Aristotle (Politics, iii. 9) quotes Lycophon the Sophist as holding that government was only concerned with the protection of individual rights. Alcidamas, the rhetorician, maintained that 'God made all men free; Nature has made none a slave.' This and similar sentiments, which we may call 'Sophistic,' in the sense that they belong to the new Rationalism, are to be found frequently expressed in the extant plays and fragments of Euripides. Even Herodotus, though his style is unaffected by the rhetorical schools, has also imbibed a certain tolerant scepticism, which appears in his treatment of the diversity of customs and religious beliefs; and the debate about the best form of government (iii. 80-82), which he unhistorically puts into the mouth of Persians, is probably due to a 'Sophistic' source, and may indeed be called the earliest piece of Greek political philosophy that has come down to us. Much of the teaching of the Sophists was undoubtedly destructive of the old fabric of Greek belief and of Greek society, which rested on the narrow basis of an exclusive citizen caste with a substructure of slavery. The modern student will not necessarily think the worse of the Sophists on that account; though the majority of them were probably by no means conscious of the significance of the critical weapons they handled. By raising problems in almost every department of thought, for which they could find no satisfactory answers, they prepared the way for the great period of Athenian philosophy (see SOCRATES). In later times the term 'Sophist' came into reputation again; and some of the Greek professors of rhetoric under the Roman empire were described as Sophists on their tombs.
Besides the histories of Greek philosophy referred to under PLATO, and Grote's chapter mentioned above, may be named two articles by Professor Henry Sidgwick, defending Grote's view, in the Journal of Philology, vols. iv. and v. In A. W. Benn's Greek Philosophers (2 vols. Lond. 1883) chap. ii. deals with the Sophists, and is entitled 'The Greek Humanists.' The significance of the Sophists in the development of Greek thought was first put in a true light by Hegel in his History of Philosophy.