From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 241
or modern style Samaritan Service in a dwelling-place near the market in
Corinth. In a notice in front of the building he claimed that help could be
provided to those in distress by discussing matters with them, and, through
talking to them, finding out the causes of their illness (DK 87 A 6). If this
tradition is sound it seems more likely to be true of the sophist rather than the
orator, since the latter is less likely to have functioned away from Athens. A
further statement of psychiatric interest is that preserved by Stobaeus (DK 87 B
57), namely that ‘illness is a holiday for those who are cowards, for such people
do not go out into the world to undertake activities’.
Among other aspects of Antiphon’s interests should be mentioned the brief
references, which are all that survive, to discussions about the nature of time, the
functioning of the sun and the moon, the bitterness of the sea and the formation
of the surface of the earth, the behaviour of bile and other physiological
processes, and an attempt to solve the problem of the squaring of the circle by
continually doubling the number of sides in an inscribed regular polygon (DK 87
B 26–8, 29–32 and 13).
LESSER SOPHISTS
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon in Bithynia was well known as a sophist who
travelled from city to city and claimed fees for his teaching. A number of writings
are attributed to him, but we know virtually nothing of their contents. He
appeared as a character in a lost play by Aristophanes, the Daitaleis performed in
427 BC. But his fame springs for us from his confrontation with Socrates in the
first book of Plato’s Republic. There he puts forward the view that justice is the
interest of the stronger, and he infers from this that justice accordingly is
normally to be understood as consisting in seeking the interest of some one or
more persons other than oneself. Accordingly justice is folly, the only reasonable
course being always to pursue one’s own interest. Clearly Plato regarded this as
an important if wrong-headed sophistic contention, and in a sense the whole of
the rest of the Republic after the first book is concerned to give us Plato’s
refutation of Thrasymachus.
Three further characters who appear in Plato’s dialogues are Callicles in the
Gorgias, and Euthydemus and Dionysodorus in the Euthydemus. According to
Plato, Callicles came from the deme of Acharnae in Attica, and it is at his house
in Athens that his friend Gorgias is staying at the opening of the Gorgias. Like
Thrasymachus Callicles is presented as approving actions which the world calls
unjust, and he approves of them because they express for him a higher justice,
the justice of nature. Such justice he goes so far as to call the law of nature, in
what is apparently the first occurrence of the phrase which was to become of
such importance in the history of European thought. The importance of what
Callicles has to say in the dialogue can hardly be questioned. But it should be
mentioned that modern scholars have expressed doubts both as to whether he
was a real person and if so as to whether he should be classed as a sophist. 11