From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 243
be given as to what is x?’ above all when x is a moral or political concept. This
became famous as the Socratic method of Elenchos, and this alone would be
sufficient to justify us in considering him as an active member of the Sophistic
Movement, in fact as an unpaid sophist.
In addition to named sophists it is necessary to discuss a number of
anonymous sophistic writings, of which several survive, at least in summary
form. The first of these is known as the Dissoi Logoi, the title being taken from
the first two words of the opening paragraph, which are repeated in the next three
chapters. The text is found at the end of the main manuscripts of Sextus
Empiricus, and it is written in a dialect which is a form of literary Doric. This
has suggested to some that it may have originated in Sicily or southern Italy, but
there is no other positive evidence for this. It has commonly been supposed that
it was composed soon after 400 BC on the basis of the reference in I.8–10 (DK
90) where the victory which the Spartans won over the Athenians and their allies
is spoken as a most recent event. But this dating is quite uncertain and others
have argued for a much later date.
The pattern of arguments followed throughout the treatise is established in the
first chapter where we are told that ‘some say that good is one thing and bad is
another thing, while others say that they are the same, and that for the same
person it is on one occasion good and on another occasion bad.’ This formulation
is potentially ambiguous. On one view to say that good and bad are the same
thing might be taken to say that the two terms are identical in meaning, or it
might mean that any one thing will be both good and bad either simultaneously or
at different times and in different relationships. It is however the second
interpretation which should be preferred: the meanings of the two terms are
always different and it is the way in which they are to be applied as attributes to
particular things or situations which varies. What we are explicitly told is that as
the name or term used differs so does the thing. This is repeated three times in
subsequent sections, in one of which (II.1) ‘thing’ is expressed by sōma or
physical body. There seems no doubt that what we are being confronted with is
the familiar sophistic problem of varying predicates attached to physical objects
in the external world. The whole approach of the Dissoi Logoi amounts to an
application of the sophistic doctrine of relativism. After good and bad in the first
section the same treatment is applied to the terms for beautiful and ugly, then to
just and unjust, the truth and falsehood of propositions, and the question of the
teachability or otherwise of wisdom and virtue. After the discussion of these
terms the treatise concludes with arguments that election by lot is a bad method
of election in democracies, that the art of the man who is skilled in argument
(and so has been trained by a sophist) is the same as the art of the statesman, and
that a developed use of memory is essential for intellectual wisdom and its
application in the conduct of human affairs.
A second anonymous treatise is known as the Anonymus lamblichi. This was
identified in 1889 when Friedrich Blass showed that some ten pages of printed
Greek text in the Protrepticus of Iamblichus were taken apparently virtually