Sophists and New Ideas

Thucydides 3.38

‘professional lecturers’

Plato, Hippias Major

Sophists earn a lot of money through teaching

Plato, Cratyulus

Prodicus charges 50 drachma for a course on names

Xenophon, Memorabilia

Socrates said that sophists are intellectual prostitutes

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Protagoras taught ‘making the worse appear the better argument’

Plato, Euthydemus

Prodicus says that you need to learn the correctness of names

Plato, Protagoras 337

Prodicus contrasts words e.g. enjoyment, not pleasure and argue, not wrangle

Thucydides 2.62

‘not with confidence alone but confident in your superiority’

Marcellinus, Life of Thucydides

Anaxagoras, Gorgias and Prodicus had an effect on Thucydides

Diodorus, Siculus

Gorgias was ‘the first person to make a science of rhetoric’

Aristophanes’ Clouds 865-1114

The Wrong Argument wins in a debate against the Right Argument

Plutarch, Pericles 36

Pericles’ son, Xanthippus, ridicules his father for talking with sophists

Plato, Apology

Suggests that the Clouds led to Socrates’ eventual downfall

Aristophanes’ Clouds 130-290

Strepsiades goes to Socrates’ Thinkery

Aristophanes’ Clouds Final Scene

Strepsiades get beaten by Pheidippides and burns down the Thinkery

Euripides’ Hippolytus

The Nurse manipulates Phaedra to confess her secret to Theseus using rhetoric

Euripides’ Hippolytus 902-1101

Argument between Theseus and Hippolytus, who uses tricks taught to aspiring public speakers like appealing to sympathy