From the Beginning to Plato

226 THE SOPHISTS
From this it may be seen that the two principles may be stated as follows: while
power should be in the hands of the people as a whole and not with a small
section of the citizen body, high offices carrying the right to advise and act for
the people should be entrusted to those best fitted and most able to carry out
these functions.
It should be clear that if a society was to be based on both of the above two
principles, this favoured the development of certain more or less specialized
skills, above all the ability to speak and argue in public. When it is remembered
that ordinary school education for male citizens at Athens was completed by the
age of 14 it should be clear that the competition for success in the newly
developed Periclean democracy created a real need for a type of further
education such as that supplied by the sophists. But it would be a mistake to
suppose that this need was something confined to Athens. Individual sophists
came from many parts of the Greek world and travelled extensively, teaching and
lecturing everywhere that they went. Thus Gorgias taught pupils in Argos and at
another period was apparently settled in Thessaly, and Antiphon, who was himself
an Athenian, was said to have set up a kind of citizen’s advice bureau offering
some sort of psychiatric service to those who needed it, in Corinth of all unlikely
places. Virtually every other sophist of whom we have knowledge is stated to
have spent much of his time travelling. What all this suggests is that throughout
the Greek world there was an emergent demand for the provision of secondary
education in the fifth century BC and that this demand was satisfied at least in part
by the development of the Sophistic Movement as a whole.
What I have found it convenient to call the Sophistic Movement, a term which
might be greeted with some criticism as suggesting that the movement as a
whole was somehow organized, was essentially a pattern or kind of thinking in
the period from about 460 to 380 BC, and it was the product above all of
individual sophists. We have the names of some twenty-six such individuals, and
ideally the history of philosophy should involve a consideration of each of these
separately, together with a discussion of how each reacted or responded to the
thought of his predecessors and contemporaries. But in the absence of surviving
works by individual sophists we simply do not have the evidence for the
reconstruction of their several views on an individual basis. Secondly, when we
do have evidence for the views of an individual sophist it is in many cases clear
that these views were held in common between several or indeed all of the
sophists in the period in question. Consequently it seems appropriate to begin
with an attempt to state what were at an early stage recognized as the distinctive
doctrines and methods of teaching and argument characterizing the movement as
a whole.
What may be called generically the sophistic method of argument requires an
understanding of three key technical terms: dialectic, antilogic and eristic. First
for the term ‘dialectic’: in its most general sense this meant in Greek ‘discussion’
involving two or more persons, and its most obvious application is to be found in
the written dialogues of Plato, although this was not exactly the way in which