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Sophists in Athens : Fifth-Century Enlightenment

Sophists in Athens : Fifth-Century Enlightenment. “A teacher of this sort I believe myself to be, and above all other men help people attain what is noble and good; and I give my pupils their money’s worth and even more, as they themselves confess.”

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Sophists in Athens : Fifth-Century Enlightenment

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  1. Sophists in Athens:Fifth-Century Enlightenment “A teacher of this sort I believe myself to be, and above all other men help people attain what is noble and good; and I give my pupils their money’s worth and even more, as they themselves confess.” Plato, Protagoras, 328 b (Protagoras speaking)

  2. Thucydides (2.38) on Athens and Culture “When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits. There are various kinds of contests and sacrifices regularly throughout the year; in our own homes we find a beauty and a good taste which delight us every day and which drive away our cares. Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us, so that to us it seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products.”

  3. Empire and Culture • Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel • Societal complexity and Artistic and Intellectual Production • Athens and Imperial Infrastructure • Naval Empire and Its Industries • Shipwrights • Docks and Dock-workers • Pitch and Rope Manufactures • Training of Crews • Athens and Its Subjects • Service Industries as Metropole • Metropolitan Commercial Centers

  4. Sophists as Socio-Cultural Phenomenon • Sophia = “Wisdom” • Sophistes: “Wise Man” • Itinerant Professors • Teach for Pay • Attract Large Followings • Wide Range of Expertise • Astronomy, Geometry, Language, Rhetoric • Arete

  5. Fifth-Century Athens as the Hub of the Sophistic Movement • Second Half of Century: Sophists Gravitate to Athens • Culture as the Child of Empire? • Oratory and Athenian Democratic Politics (Market Forces of Democracy) • Gorgias of Leontini and the Rhetorical Education of the Public Speaker • The Metic Lysias and the Business of Speech-Writing • W.R. Connor’s “New Politicians” • The Patronage of Pericles (Damon, Anaxagoras, Protagoras)

  6. Sophistic RelativismDangers to the Established Order? • Nomos vs. Physis (Culture vs. Nature) • Thrasymachean Justice: Right of the Stronger (cf. Alcibiades) • Moral Ambiguity and the Dissoi Logoi • Form over Substance (Gorgianic simile and antithesis) • Tradition of Impiety Trials at Athens (Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Socrates, Aspasia, Protagoras) • Tool in Athenian factional politics? • Fabricated charge of intellectuals in response to condemnation and execution of Socrates?

  7. Plato, Republic, 338e-339a (Thrasymachus) “And each makes laws to his own advantage. Democracy makes democratic laws, tyranny makes tyrannical laws, and so on with the others. And they declare what they have made—what is to their own advantage—to be just for their subjects, and they punish anyone who goes against this as lawless and unjust. This, then, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage of the established rule. Since the established rule is surely stronger, anyone who reasons correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere, namely, the advantage of the stronger.”

  8. Compare Thucydides (5.89)Athenians to Melians (416 BCE) “You know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”

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