History of greek philosophy guthrie volume 2 download pdf

Thus I have treated at considerable length the question of the development of the Platonic philosophy in its logical and ethical as well as in its metaphysical and theological aspects. And though I have not gone quite so far in other cases, I have not hesitated to introduce a comparatively full account of the theoretical and practical philosophy of Aristotle and of the Stoics.

It seemed to me quite impossible to show the real meaning of the theological speculations of these writers without tracing out their connexion with the other aspects of their philosophy. In the case of Plotinus I do not need to make any such statement; for theology is so obviously the centre of all his thought, that everything else has to be directly viewed in relation to it. In truth, however, this is only a matter of degree. A man's religion, if it is genuine, contains the summed-up and concentrated meaning of his whole life; and, indeed, it can have no value except in so far as it does so.

The work of preparing an Index has been kindly undertaken by Mr. Hayward Porter. He makes a case that this English-language translation by E. Haldane and Frances H. Needless to say, their conclusions, like those of their successors, were not unaffected by their personal political or philosophical beliefs.

Karl Joel in fiesch. More surprisingly at first sight, Joel adds on the same side 'Hegelian intellectualism', which hailed them as 'masters in reflective reasoning', and O u t of its philosophy of history understood all and pardoned all'. O n the other hand, it was inevitable that, history having taken the course it has, Plato should now be suffering from the lavish praise that was bestowed on him by some English commentators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Staunchly liberal as they might be in their personal beliefs, they could yet, under the influence of what Havelock has called 'the Oxford school of neo-idealism', see him in the image o f a Victorian liberal like themselves. Temper, 19 that in one at least of these writers 'exposition reads as if it were fervent apology', and 'the naturalists and the materialists, the Sophists and the democrats, are treated only as faint and futile voices protesting off-stage'.

In the following pages I hope to set forth the intellectual conflict of the fifth and fourth centuries B. W e need not fear that either its intrinsic interest or its continuing relevance will thereby be diminished. H a v e l o c k ' s description o f the Sophists' methods as essentially those o f democratic processes is anticipated b y G r o t e , especially in v n , 39, n. The present chapter will attempt an outline of the main causes and features o f this changing outlook, before we g o on to consider the meaning of Sophistic and investigate each separate topic in detail.

T o determine the causes of an intellectual revolution is always a rash undertaking, and when a great many things are happening together it is not always easy to distinguish cause from effect; but a few things may be mentioned as more likely to belong to the former category.

W e are bound to dismiss, on chronological grounds, the assumption that the ' P r e s o c r a t i c s a n d in particular the Ionians, could all have been influential in moulding the thought of the Sophists.

If there is any causal connexion between the ideas of Democritus and those of Protagoras or Gorgias, it is more likely to have been the other way round. One of the most powerful influences for humanism is to be found in the theories of the natural origins of life and society which were a feature o f Ionian thought from Anaximander onwards.

Life, including human life, was the product o f a kind of fermentation set up by the action of heat on damp or putrefying matter, and social and political groups were formed b y agreement as man's only effective form of defence against non-human nature.

The cosmogonies themselves assisted in banishing divine agents from the world, not because they were evolutionary rather than creative—the idea of divine creation was never prominent in Greek religion—but because they made more difficult the Greek habit of seeing divine or semi-divine beings every- 1 See v o l.

It was a blow to religion when even the stars and the sun were asserted to be ignited clouds, or rocks torn from the earth and put into orbit b y the cosmic vortex. It is, after all, the world of sensible experience and its impact on them with which men have to come to terms if they are to carry on a satisfying and happy life.

This is for most of us the 'real world', yet in their different ways philosophers as wide apart as Parmenides and D e m o - critus denied its reality and undermined the evidence of the senses. Either motion and change were illusion, and 'what i s ' an immovable plenum, or else the only real things were atoms which were expressly denied to have any sensible qualities at all.

Moreover the speculative character o f their theories made them highly vulnerable, and the ingenuity o f a Gorgias was quite capable of using arguments of the Eleatic type to prove the direct contrary of the Eleatic conclusion: not 'what is, i s ' , but what is is not, and nothing exists pp. Besides their remoteness, the Presocratics were discredited b y their mutual contradictions. Each believed himself 4o be nearest to the truth, but were there any solid grounds for trusting one rather than another?

Gorgias attacked on tilts front too. For him they were simply, like orators, masters o f the 2 art of verbal persuasion. T h e rejection o f divine a g e n c y is confined to a section o f the educated and intellectual. See Strabo 8.

See p. These made it increasingly obvious that customs and standards of behaviour which had earlier been accepted as absolute and universal, and o f divine institution, 1 were in fact local and relative. Habits that to the Greeks were wicked and disgusting, like marriage between brother and sister, might among the Egyptians or elsewhere be regarded as normal and even enjoined by religion.

The history of Herodotus is typical of the mid fifth century in the enthusiasm with which he collects and describes the customs o f Scythians, Persians, Lydians, Egyptians and others and points out their divergence from Hellenic usage.

If all men, he says, were asked to name the best laws and customs, each would choose his o w n ; and he illustrates this b y the story of Darius, who summoned some Greeks and Indians to his court and first asked the Greeks for what consideration they would consent to eat their dead fathers.

When they replied that they would not do it for anything, he turned to the Indians of a tribe who normally ate the bodies of their parents and asked them if anything could persuade them to burn their fathers as the Greeks did , whereupon they cried aloud at 2 the mere mention of such impiety. Euripides too noted that incest is practised among non-Greek peoples, 'and no law forbids it' Andr. Law, Liberty and Morality, 68 mentions as a cause o f division and hesitation o v e r the issues o f sexual morality ' i n our o w n t i m e ' the free discussion o f it ' i n the light o f the discoveries o f a n t h r o p o l o g y and p s y c h o l o g y '.

The Ionian Greeks of the Anatolian coastal strip had been in close contact with Orientals for centuries, and their intellectual progress owed much to foreign sources. Trade and colonization took them to the Black Sea and Mesopotamia, and the Milesian colony Naucratis was 1 founded in Egypt in the seventh century. Sojourns among Egyptians and Chaldaeans are recorded of early philosophers and sages like Solon, and are perfectly credible.

The same may be said about the effect of the codification of laws. The unquestioning acceptance of law and custom, we are told, was no longer possible in a time of legislative activity. But the names which Burnet mentions are Zaleucus, Charondas and Solon, whose activity can hardly be held responsible for the emergence o f new theories denying the religious sanction of law in the period following the Persian Wars.

The Greeks had seen laws in the making long before that, yet they continued to attribute them to the instructions of Apollo, 2 advising the legislator through his oracle at Delphi. T h e y had been the leaders o f Greek 1 Sec v o l. C o o k In JUS, , ff. Sec o n this DUmmlcr, Akad. If asked b y what right they did this, they would reply as Thucydides shows them doing in the Melian Dialogue that it is a 'law of nature' that the stronger should do what is in their power and the weak give way pp.

This consciousness of power was being fostered from another direction b y a new emphasis on the triumphs o f human invention and technique. It is too easily assumed that the Greeks as a whole believed in an ideal of knowledge for its own sake, divorced from practical aims, and despised the useful arts, and there is some justice in recent claims that this generalization results from the academic habit of relying too heavily on Plato and Aristotle as representative of the Greek mind.

In the fifth century the practical achievements o f the human race were admired as much as their understanding of the universe. The stages of man's material progress were celebrated, for instance, by all the three great tragedians, as well as b y philosophers like Anaxagoras and Democritus and the Sophist Protagoras. T h e y might be associated with the name of Prometheus, patron saint of technology, or an unknown god as in Euripides's Supplices f. In the famous chorus of Sophocles's Antigone ff.

It is a list entirely in the spirit of Macaulay's catalogue of the fruits of Baconian science, in which his express purpose was to show up b y contrast the practical barrenness of Greek thought. A difference is that the Englishman, besides omitting the art of prophecy, includes new weapons of war among the blessings of progress. Perhaps the Greek also showed his wisdom b y adding at the end of the list of technical achievements that they may be used for evil ends as well as good.

So too Theseus in the Hippolytus Eur. Social and political changes played their part, especially the growth of democracy at Athens. This was a gradual process, begun by Solon who first introduced the principle of appointing public officials by a combination of election and lot and continued by Cleisthenes after the Peisistratid tyranny.

It was already far advanced b y the time o f the Persian Wars, and completed by the reforms of Pericles and Ephialtes about These opened the archonship to the lowest classes and introduced pay for the archons, boule and people's courts, thereby making it not only legal but practically possible for the poorer citizens to give up their time to public affairs.

A t the same time they introduced the lot in its pure form for appointment to many offices, that is, without preliminary election of candidates; and of course any citizen could speak and vote in the Assembly, which passed laws, declared war and concluded treaties. This situation naturally encouraged the belief that one man's opinion was as good as another's, for, as Socrates complained, although in matters considered technical no one would be consulted unless he could give proof of his training and competence, where the art of government was concerned the Athenians would listen to anyone—smith or shoemaker, rich or poor.

After putting down a revolt there in , the Assembly under the influence o f Cleon sent a trireme with orders to kill every man in the city and enslave the women and children. Next day they repented of this atrocious cruelty, and after a second debate reversed the decision by a tiny majority and despatched a second trireme post-haste to cancel the order.

By eating at their oars and taking it in turns to sleep the rowers managed to arrive before it was put into effect. In this case the weakness of the democracy in the face of mob-oratory was just counterbalanced by its readiness to. The little island of Melos was less fortunate, and its inhabitants suffered the fate originally intended for Mytilene.

The road to political success was open to anyone, provided he had the wit and the training to outdo his competitors. In the absence of universities or colleges of adult education the gap was filled, to their profit, b y men like Protagoras, who gloried in the title of Sophist and proudly advertised his ability to teach a young man 'the proper care of his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the State's affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as speaker and man of action'.

That is a considerable exaggeration; the arete which Protagoras claimed to impart consisted of more than that. But one o f them, Gorgias, did indeed laugh at the professed teachers of civic virtue. It was the master-art, for the man with the gift of persuasion had all the other experts in his power. On this, however, see pp. I have spoken as if the political circumstances and public actions of the Greek states gave rise to the irreligious and utilitarian moral 1 T h u c.

T h e speeches o n this occasion are referred t o on p p. I imagine that this is the first and last time that w e can expect t o see the life o f tile Sophists described as ombratile e appartataX. Doubtless the Athenians did not need a Thrasymachus or a Callicles to teach them how to deal with a recalcitrant island, but the speeches which Thucydi- des puts into the mouths of the Athenian spokesmen, in what he represents as a set debate with the Melian assembly, bear unmistakable marks of Sophistic teaching.

Pericles was a friend of Protagoras, and when Gorgias appeared before the Athenians in the novel flowers of oratory with which he pleaded the cause of his Sicilian fatherland aroused their astonished admiration p. If the Sophists were a product o f their age, they also assisted in their turn in crystallizing its ideas. But at least their teaching fell on well- prepared ground.

In Plato's opinion it was not they who should be blamed for infecting the young with pernicious thoughts, for they were doing no more than mirror the lusts and passions of the existing democracy:. Every one of these individual professional teachers, whom the people call Sophists and regard as their rivals in the art of education, in fact teaches nothing but the beliefs of the people expressed by themselves in their 1 Msemblies.

This is what he claims as his wisdom. Turning so far as the two can be distinguished from causes to features of the change, the most fundamental is the antithesis between fhysis and nomos which was developed at this time among natural and humanistic philosophers alike.

Once the view had gained currency that laws, customs and conventions were not part of the immutable order of things, it was possible to adopt very different attitudes towards them. O n the one hand Protagoras could argue that accepted canons of good behaviour, including some restraint on selfish appetites and consideration for others, although not an original and essential part of human nature, were necessary for the preservation of society, and life in societies was necessary for actual survival.

Nomos and physis were enemies, and right was on the side of physis. In the idea that laws are a matter of human agreement, 'covenants made b y the citizens' as Hippias called them p.

In the eyes of Callicles it condemned them, whereas Critias, through the mouth of Sisyphus in his play o f that name, represented the invention of law as an important step on the road from men's originally 'disorderly and brutish' life to civilization. A n unequivocal statement of the contractual theory of law is ascribed by Aristotle to Lycophron, a pupil of Gorgias, and in its historical form, as a theory of the origin of law, it is clearly stated by Glaucon in the Republic as a current view which he would like to see refuted.

However, with the spread o f democratic ideas the phrase took on a new and more sinister meaning. The codification of law came to be seen as a necessary protection for the people. O n the one hand we have Rousseau writing:. To these three kinds of law [political, civil, criminal] a fourth should be added, and it is the most important of them all. It is to be found not graven on pillars of marble or plates of bronze but in the heart of the citizens. I refer to manners, customs, and, above all, opinion.

Beside the classic utterance of Protagoras, that he could not say whether gods existed or not, one may set the curious and thought-provoking words of Euripides's Hecuba in her plea for mercy Hec.

For Critias the gods were the invention o f an ingenious legislator to prevent men from breaking the laws when not under nupervision. Both passages may conveniently be found in the W o r l d ' s Classics v o l u m e Social Contract, ed. Darker, and 1 1 5. This has been called an ancient example of the theory of the advance from 1 fetishism to anthropomorphism. A n attractive aspect of the nomos-physis antithesis is that it sponsored the first steps towards cosmopolitanism and the idea of the unity of mankind.

Here nomos plays the part of die Mode in Schiller's hymn, which divides those who are naturally brothers. Antiphon went further as Hippias may also have done , and after censuring distinctions based on high or low birth proceeded to declare that there is no difference in nature between barbarians and Greeks. The only witness in the fifth century to the existence of a belief that slavery is unnatural is Euripides, whose characters utter such sentiments as ' Only the name brings shame to a slave: in all else slave is no worse than free, if he be a good man'.

This is not necessarily the dramatist's own opinion, for others in his plays will damn all slaves alike as a worthless and greedy lot. Not many years after him, however, Alcidamas is quoted as having written that God set all men free and nature has made no man a slave; and by Aristotle's time there were certainly some who maintained that slavery was unnatural.

The subject is treated in ch. W e may recognize the virtues of seeing both sides of a question, and the democratic quality of a willingness to give them both a hearing, and yet be alive to the dangers of such doctrine unless it is kept in very scrupulous hands.

In fact it was being imparted, for high fees, to headstrong and ambi- 1 T h e evidence for ascribing the t w o - s t a g e theory to P r o d i c u s is not absolutely conclusive. It is discussed on p p. Reading the remains of Gorgias's writings, one is not inclined to accuse Plato of unfairness when he makes him disclaim any responsibility for the use to which his teaching may be put by others.

It was subversive stuff, both morally and epistemologically, for the conviction that men could be persuaded of anything went naturally with the relativity of Protagoras's ' man the measure' doctrine and the nihilism of Gorgias's treatise On Nature or the Non-existent. Finally, one of the most hotly debated questions of the day, which because it was taken up b y Socrates continued to be discussed b y Plato and even Aristotle, sprang directly from the Sophists' appearance in the new role of paid educators.

They claimed to teach arete, but was this something that could be instilled by teaching? Arete when used without qualification denoted those qualities of human excellence which made a man a natural leader in his community, and hitherto it had been believed to depend on certain natural or even divine gifts which were the mark of good birth and breeding.

They were definitely a matter of physis, cultivated, as a boy grew up, by the experience o f living with and following the example of his father and elder relations. Hence the urgency to a young man like Meno—high-born and wealthy yet a pupil and admirer of Gorgias—of the question which he springs on Socrates at the beginning of the dialogue that bears his name: ' C a n you tell me, Socrates, whether arete can be taught? Or is it a matter of practice, or natural aptitude, or what?

But first something about the class of men who are usually named as the chief propagators of the new humanism and rationalism. What was a Sophist, and what do we know of the individuals who posed these questions that have exercised thoughtful minds ever since? The Greek words sophos, sophia, usually translated ' w i s e ' and 'wisdom', were in common use from the earliest times, and, standing as they do for an intellectual or spiritual quality, naturally acquired lome delicate shades o f meaning which can only be crudely illustrated here.

A t first they connoted primarily skill in a particular craft. A ihipwright in Homer is 'skilled in all sophia', a charioteer, a steersman, an augur, a sculptor are sophoi each in his occupation, Apollo is tophos with the lyre, Thersites a contemptible character but sophos with his tongue; there is a law in Hades for comic purposes that whoever excels his fellow-craftsmen in ' one of the great and clever arts' shall have special privileges until someone else comes along who 2 is 'more sophos in his art'.

This sense merges easily into that of generally knowing or prudent, b y way of a line like that of Theognis ff. Here tophos might still mean an expert there are experts in testing coinage, but alas none in testing humanity , though more probably it is going over to the meaning of knowledgeable in general.

In a similar doubtful position is Hesiod's description of Linus, the mythical linger and musician, as 'versed in all kinds of sophia' fr. In this way it was used o f the seven Sophoi, Wise Men or Sages, whose wisdom consisted chiefly of practical statesmanship and was enshrined in brief gnomic sayings, or of anyone o f good sense Eur.

Frogs ff. Along with generalization, a term of value like this, implying positive approval, inevitably suffers division into a 'true' and a 'false' meaning according to the user's point of view.

The sophia of charioteer, shipwright or musician must have been to a large extent acquired by learning, but Pindar no doubt pleased his royal patron when he wrote that he who knows much b y nature is wise sophos , in contrast to the chattering crows who have gained their knowledge b y learning.

Not the man who knows many things is sophos, said Aeschylus, but he whose knowledge is useful. A t the same time there creeps in an ironic note, a hint that the sophos is too clever and may overreach himself. Taxed b y the wily Odysseus whom he has earlier described as a sophos wrestler with acting in a way that is not sophon, Neoptolemus replies that what is right and just is better than what is sophon. So we get the oxymoron of a chorus in Euripides: when men set themselves up against the gods, their sophia is not sophon, they are clever but not wise.

The word sophistes, 'sophist', is a noun of the agent derived from 2 the verb. A s Diogenes Laertius remarked 1. This appears especially in Herodotus, who applies the name 'sophist' to Pythagoras, Solon and the founders of the Dionysiac cult, and says that all the sophists of Greece visited Croesus's Lydian capital, including Solon.

That the Seven Sages were called sophists we know from a fragment o f Aristotle and from Isocrates, who says that they were given this name ' which is now held in dishonour among y o u '. Isocrates dwells on the change which has come over the word, which he equates with his conception of philosophy: 1 References for this p a r a g r a p h : Pind.

They admired those who were called sophists and envied their associates The best evidence of this is that they chose Solon, the first Athenian citizen who 1 bore that title, to rule the state.

This accords with the fact that the name was often applied to poets, for in Greek eyes practical instruction and moral advice constituted the main function of the poet. Solon himself was a poet, and J. Morrison has suggested that it was in this capacity that he first attracted attention and came to be entrusted with the preservation of political harmony.

Theognis is full of ethical maxims, some of general import and some in support of the threatened supremacy of the upper class. Parmenides and Empedocles were poets, and the great dramatists of the fifth century, both tragic and comic, certainly regarded themselves as having an educational mission.

Euripides himself, challenged to state the grounds on which a poet deserves admiration, replies: ' F o r his wit and good advice, and because he makes men better citizens. His article contains m u c h o f the evidence that as Jaeger also maintained in PaiJeia 1, the Sophists were the heirs o f the educational tradition uf lie poets. N o t that this w a s their sole inheritance. S o also in effect Morrison, loc. So we find that at its earliest known occurrence, in an ode of Pindar, the word sophistes clearly means poet.

With poetry went music, for the lyric poet was his own accompanist. Athenaeus quotes a line of Aeschylus about a sophistes playing the lyre to illustrate his statement that 'all who practise the art of mousike used to be called sophists', and the reference to the singer and musician Thamyris as sophistes in Euripides's Rhesus is quoted as another example. Here however the Muse is speaking of him with hatred and disgust, and the word probably carries something of the unfavourable tone which it acquired early in the fifth century.

Some of the Seven Sages, in their capacity as sophistai or teachers, uttered in prose the kind of maxims which Theognis or Simonides uttered in verse, and this may have sown the seeds of the distinction. A m o n g the latter would be a man like Anaxagoras, whose book w e know to have been on general sale, and whom Aeschines of Sphettus may have bracketed as a sophistes with Prodicus, one o f the recognized 'Sophists '. His sophia is practical, whether in the fields of conduct and politics or in the technical arts.

If anyone could make the products of every separate craft, and in addition all the things in the natural world, he would indeed be a wondrous sophistes, says Glaucon in the Republic c! T h i s w o u l d be g o o d contemporary evidence for the appellation, but the passage in question does not guarantee m o r e than that it w a s used o f the t w o men b y Athenaeus. It runs as follows Ath. Hence the sense of expert, pundit, for instance in mathematics.

Socrates in the Meno 85 b , having b y means of diagrams got Meno's slave to recognize the diagonal of a square, tells him ' the name the sophistai give it is " d i a g o n a l " ' , and Xenophon Mem. In the same vein Socrates says of the wise Diotima, with a touch of humour, that she answered his question ' like a real 1 sophistes'.

When Socrates in the Lysis a says of a certain Miccus that he is 'no common man, but a very competent sophistes', the compliment to his gifts as a teacher is genuine. A n even more striking use of the word in a complimentary sense is in Xenophon Cyrop. His father put the man to death, in the belief that he was corrupting Tigranes, but so noble was his character that before his execution he sent for Tigranes and told him not to hold it against his father, because he had acted out of ignorance.

That such a term should be applied to the natural philosophers is only to be expected, and Ieocrates includes Alcmaeon, Empedocles, Ion of Chios, Parmenides and Melissus along with Gorgias among 'the sophistai of past days' Antid. In the other few instances recorded one seems to detect a hint of that disparaging note of which we shall have to speak next. Diogenes of Apollonia called his predecessors sophistai in the course of writing against them vol.

What is a Sophist? Their qualities were summed up in a word difficult to translate: demotes, with the adjective deinos. Derived from a noun meaning 'fear', it stands for anything terrible or dreadful, as for instance in Homer weapons, the glare of a foe, the whirlpool Charybdis, thunder, lions.

O f a goddess, it is coupled with 'reverend', and may have conveyed an idea more like 'the fear of the Lord'. This sense o f ' a w f u l ' persists, often with a suggestion of the strange, incomprehensible, uncanny; and so used the word contributes to some of the most moving, and untranslatable, lines of Greek tragedy.

Hephaestus cannot bring himself to chain Prometheus to the rock because 'kinship is something deinon'. Degenerating, as words do, in popular use, it became coupled with sophos to mean clever or skilful: the Egyptians are deinoi terrible fellows for devising stratagems, Prometheus is deinos at wriggling out of difficulties, a good driver is deinos at his art. It also, and particularly, meant clever in speech or 1 argument.

Anyone who had this quality was a natural object of suspicion to his less clever fellows, as Antiphon the orator, says Thucydides 8. Here we have deinos expressly coupled with sophistes as an insult to be resented, and, though Demosthenes is a fourth-century figure, the idea of the sophistes as a man who claims superior knowledge, and can have the claim ironically flung back at him, occurs as early as Aeschylus.

His Prometheus, the bringer of fire to men, who taught them all crafts and raised them from savagery to civilization, is roughly addressed b y Hermes as ' y o u , the sophist, who have sinned against the gods', and is mocked 1 A e s c h.

It is amusingly illustrated in P l a t o , Prot. Deinos, said Prodicus, properly applies to evils like disease, war, p o v e r t y. Aristophanes too was well aware of their existence when he satirized sophists in the Clouds, but still used the word in a more general sense, in which it could include for those who disapproved of him Socrates, although he took no fees and is constantly represented b y Plato as the Sophists' inveterate opponent. A t Socrates and Prodicus are mentioned together as ' meteorosophists' or experts in celestial phenomena.

Compare the judgment o f Socrates on the professional Miccus. If we remember the educational vocation of Greek poets, we may say that the word which comes nearest to it in English is teacher or professor. From early in the fifth century it could be pronounced with a depreciatory inflexion, as may the words pundit or intellectual today.

Promc-tlieus w o u l d not deny the title. Hut already it can be thrown back at him w i t h irony. What existed already was more than a 'vague sentiment of dislike', nor is it true that ' what was new was the peculiar use of an old word which Plato took out of its usual meaning, and fastened upon the 1 eminent paid teachers of the Sokratic a g e '. Apart from the evidence of Xenophon, it would have been quite impossible for Plato to have referred, in the manner and the contexts in which he does so refer, to the paid teachers as Sophists if that had not been their recognized title.

A view like Grote's can only be upheld by the uncritical practice which will not be followed here of accepting as fact all references to the Sophists in Plato which are either neutral or sympathetic 'Even Plato is forced to a d m i t. When Protagoras in Plato's Protagoras avows himself a Sophist and an educator in spite of the odium which attaches to the term, an odium which he explains as due to the fact that they enter the great cities of Greece as foreigners and attract their most promising young men away from their relations and friends by claiming that their own teaching is better, there is no reason to doubt the reality of the state of affairs which he describes.

His boast has an element of bravado: it needs courage to declare oneself a Sophist. Equally true to the character of the Athenians is the remark of Socrates in the Euthyphro 3 c that it does not matter if they think somebody deinos provided he keeps it to himself, but if he starts imparting his superior cleverness to others by teaching they get angry, whether from jealousy or some other cause.

Here Socrates has his own plight in mind, but plainly the observation applies to the professional Sophists t o o ; indeed he shared their reputation, as the Clouds makes plain. M y italics. H e cannot forget, perhaps, the burlesques staged in his y o u t h w h i c h he had either read or seen. It w a s in the same speech that Aeschines called D e m o s t h e n e s a sophist. T h o u g h the lapse o f centuries makes it o f doubtful relevance to the present discussion, it is interesting that Lucian could refer to C h r i s t as 'that crucified sophist' Peregrinus They recognized their descent from the earlier tradition of education by the poets; indeed Protagoras, in the somewhat self-satisfied speech which Plato puts into his mouth Prot.

The anachronistic confusion is in keeping with the light-hearted tone which Plato adopts in the dramatic parts of this dialogue, for needless to say no professional stigma attached to the name in earlier days, and in any case, as we have seen, it was in fact applied to the poets.

In the Meno 91 ea Plato speaks of 'many others' besides Protagoras who have practised the Sophists' profession,' some before his time and others still alive '. Plato may have been thinking o f a man like the Athenian Mnesiphilus, w h o is mentioned by Herodotus 8. In the Republic b, 4 2 4 c Plato makes it clear that his interest in musical modes w a s b o u n d up w i t h w i d e r questions o f their moral and nocial effects.

Morrison in CO, , ; H. He was neither an orator nor one of those called philosophers of nature. Rather he made a practice of what was called sophia but was in reality political shrewdness demotes and practical sagacity, and so perpetuated what one might call a school which had come down in succession from Solon. His successors combined it with the art of forensic eloquence, and, 1 transferring their training from action to speech, were called Sophists. References to the Sophists as paid for their work are frequent in 2 Plato, and occur also in Xenophon, Isocrates and Aristotle.

The character of the Sophists may have changed, but they remained professionals from Protagoras to the time of Isocrates at least. In the Meno 91c if. Isocrates in his old age3 defended the profession, which he equated with his own philosophical ideal, an ideal much closer to Protagoras than to Plato. The best and greatest reward o f a Sophist, he says, is to see some of his pupils become wise and respected citizens.

Admittedly there are some bad Sophists, but those who make a right use of philosophy ought not to be blamed for the few black sheep. In conformity with this he defends them from the charge of profiteering. None of them, he says, made a great fortune or lived other than modestly, not even Gorgias who earned more than any other and was a bachelor with no family ties.

Aristotle describes a Sophist as one who makes money out of an apparent but unreal 1 O n Mnesiphilus see further Morrison, Durham U. Harrison in Phoenix, , 1 9 1 , n. W h a t is k n o w n about the practice o f individuals will be noted b e l o w in the sections devoted to them pp. F o r the Protagorean standpoint o f Isocrates see Morrison's comparison o f Platonic and Isocratean philosophia in CQ, 1 9 5 8 , 2 1 6 - 1 8.

In the Protagoras c Socrates describes a Sophist as ' a seller o f the goods b y which a soul [or mind] is nourished', and suggests reasons w h y a young man should hesitate before entrusting himself to such a o n e : like retailers o f bodily foods, they praise their wares indiscriminately without a dietitian's knowledge of their wholesomeness; unlike foods, their products enter the mind directly, and cannot be kept in jars until we find out which to consume and how and in what quantities. By the time Plato wrote the Sophist where Socrates takes no part in the main argument they had simply become along with other undesirable characteristics 'paid hunters of rich young men'.

Plato himself, though he disagreed with the Sophists, was much gentler in his handling of the best of them like Protagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus. A disparaging remark about Sophists, in connexion with Prodicus, is put into the mouth of Laches, not Socrates Laches d. Xenophon, in a moral epilogue to his treatise on hunting ch.

O t h e r s have maintained that the passage is influenced b y Plato's Sophist Grant, Ethics 1, 1 1 1 and have pointed o u t that both were written after the brilliant first generation o f Sophists were dead. S o , o n e m a y presume, were the Protagoras and Meno, y e t it is Protagoras, G o r g i a s , llippias and Prodicus w h o are still l o r Plato the representative Sophists.

The attitude of the Athenian public was ambivalent, reflecting the transitional situation of Athenian social and intellectual life. Yet some among the older 1 and more conservative strongly disapproved of them. W h y should this be?

Socrates was the son of a stonemason and probably followed the same trade, but unpopular as he was in many quarters this was never held against him. Poets had been paid for their work, artists and doctors were expected to charge fees both for the practice of their art and for teaching it to 2 others. The trouble seems to have lain first of all in the kind of subjects the Sophists professed to teach, especially arete.

Protagoras, when asked what Hippocrates will learn from him, replies Prot. Though some of them taught many other things as well, all included political advancement in their curriculum, and the key to this, in democratic Athens, was the power of persuasive speech. T h e division b e t w e e n democrat and anti-democrat cut across that between h i g h - b o r n and plebeian.

This volume investigates relationships between forces of nature and human culture in a multidisciplinary context bridging science and the humanities. Forces of nature and cultural responses is divided into four sections: 1 ball lightnings, 2 earthquakes and tsunamis, 3 volcanic eruptions and plagues, and 4 hurricanes and floodings.

Specifically, Section 1 investigates theories and case studies of ball lightning phenomena. Section 2 includes a psychological study on the impact of earthquakes on academic performance, a study on tsunami vulnerability and recovery strategies in Thailand and a study on the social and economic aftermaths of a tsunami and a hurricane in Hawaii.

Section 3 consists of a chapter on volcanic eruptions and plagues as well as cultural responses in Ancient Times and a study on contemporary vulnerability and resilience under chronic volcanic eruptions.

Section 4 investigates the impact of hurricane Katrina on the current jazz scene in New Orleans and cultural responses to floodings in The Netherlands in Early Modern Times. G First B. Author : J. This book translates the surviving evidence for one of the most important intellectual figures of the Graeco-Roman world, whose interests spread widely over philosophy, history and the sciences.

The translations are accompanied by contextual introductions and explanatory notes, and a general introduction assesses the importance of Posidonius and his contribution. The order of fragments follows exactly that of the ancient texts collected and edited by L.

Edelstein and I. Kidd in Posidonius Vol.