Sophist School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts
The Sophists were itinerant teachers and intellectuals active in the second half of the 5th century BCE, above all in Athens. They arose to meet a practical demand: in the democratic city-states a man needed the arts of persuasive speech to succeed in the assembly and the law courts, and the traditional education of the aristocracy was widely felt to be inadequate to that task.
Their teaching marked a shift of attention from speculation about the cosmos to the study of human affairs, politics, conduct, and language. Central to it was ῥητορική, rhetoric, which they set on a systematic footing as the art of persuasive speech, on the ground that human discourse shapes our experience of the world.
Several Sophists pressed their independence of inherited belief into contested territory. Thrasymachus of Chalcedon defined justice as the advantage of the stronger, treating it as a reflection of power rather than of any divine or objective standard. Protagoras held that on every question there are two opposed accounts (δισσοὶ λόγοι) and made the orator's task the ability to argue either side persuasively; he and Diagoras of Melos gave voice to agnostic or atheistic positions. Gorgias defined rhetoric simply as the art of persuasion. Isocrates, who founded a school at Athens around 392 BCE, taught rhetorical education while taking care to distinguish his methods from those of the other Sophists.
Their method was training through debate and set speeches cast in the situations of courtroom and assembly, and their influence fed a wider cultural drift toward scepticism about traditional values and a high estimation of eloquence. A later movement, which Philostratus named the "Second Sophistic", arose in the late 1st century CE. Where the Sophists of the 5th century had engaged with the life of the city, the movement Philostratus named was little concerned with politics; it cultivated rhetorical display and literary interpretation, and it dominated higher education in the Greco-Roman world for centuries.