When the servile Athenians, feigning to share the emperor's displeasure with the sophist, pulled down a statue which they had erected to him, Favorinus remarked that if only Socrates also had had a statue at Athens, he might have been spared the hemlock.
Carneades, practically a 5th-century sophist, is the most important of the ancient sceptics.
This work is imitated by the third Philostratus (or by some later sophist) of whose descriptions of pictures 17 remain.
Another Aspasius, in the 3rd century A.D., was a Roman sophist and rhetorician, son or pupil of the rhetorician Demetrianus.
At the school of Libanius the sophist he gave early indications of his mental powers, and would have been the successor of his heathen master, had he not been stolen away, to use the expression of his teacher, to a life of piety (like Augustine, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Theodoret) by the influence of his pious mother Anthusa.
FAVORINUS (2nd century A.D.), Greek sophist and philosopher, flourished during the reign of Hadrian.
" Not at all," says a bourgeois sophist (let it be Pierson, Hume or Kant), " the working-man's opinion on this question is a personal view, a subjective view; he would have been quite as justified in thinking that the employer is his benefactor and that the sausage is hashed leather, for he is unable to know a thing as it is (Ding an Sick)."
PROCOPIUS OF GAZA (c. 465-528 A.D.), Christian sophist and rhetorician, one of the most important representatives of the famous school of his native place.
"The Eleatic school," says the Stranger in Plato's Sophist, 242 D, "beginning with Xenophanes, and even earlier, starts from the principle of the unity of all things."
The Platonic testimony, if it proved anything, would prove too much, namely, that the doctrine of the unity of Being originated, not with Xenophanes, but before him; and, in fact, the passage from the Sophist no more proves that Plato attributed to Xenophanes the philosophy of Parmenides than Theaetetus, 160 D, proves that Plato attributed to Homer the philosophy of Heraclitus.
Philo describes him in the Life of Moses as a great magician; elsewhere 8 he speaks of "the sophist Balaam, being," i.e.
Hence Plato in the Sophist describes the Megarians as "the friends of ideas."
As a pupil of the sophist Prodicus he acquired facility in public speaking.
DIAGORAS, of Melos, surnamed the Atheist, poet and sophist, flourished in the second half of the 5th century B.C. Religious in his youth and a writer of hymns and dithyrambs, he became an atheist because a great wrong done to him was left unpunished by the gods.
ALCIDAMAS, of Elaea, in Aeolis, Greek sophist and rhetorician, flourished in the 4th century B.C. He was the pupil and successor of Gorgias and taught at Athens at the same time as Isocrates, whose rival and opponent he was.
It remained for Spengel to entitle the work Anaximenis Ars Rhetorica in his edition of 1847, and thus substitute for the name of the philosopher Aristotle that of the sophist Anaximenes on his title-page.
The point of Aristotle was to draw a line between rational and other evidences, to insist on the former, and in fact to found a logic of rhetoric. But if in the Rhetoric to Alexander, not he, but Anaximenes, had already performed this great achievement, Aristotle would have been the meanest of mankind; for the logic of rhetoric would have been really the work of Anaximenes the sophist, but falsely claimed by Aristotle the philosopher.
He means that the logical analysis of demonstration in the Analytics would teach them beforehand that there cannot be demonstration, though there must be induction, of an axiom, or any other principle; whereas, if they are not logically prepared for metaphysics, they will expect a demonstration of the axiom, as Heraclitus, the Heraclitean Cratylus and the Sophist Protagoras actually did, - and in vain.
He means that a sophist like Protagoras will teach superficially anything as wisdom for money; and that even a dialectician like Plato will write a dialogue, such as the Republic, nominally about justice, but really about all things from the generality of the form of good, instead of from appropriate moral principles; but that a primary philosopher selects as a definite subject all things as such without interfering with the special sciences of different things each in its kind (Met.
The philosopher, as he says, investigates truth; the sophist embellishes it, and takes it for granted.
The chief difficulty is the reference to a certain sophist, Dionysius, but this is probably an interpolation.
Several years after the death of Socrates the sophist Polycrates composed a declamation against him, to which Lysias replied.
In this stage of sophistry then, the sophist, though not a specialist, trenched upon the provinces of specialists; and accordingly Plato (Prot.
The sophist of whom the Platonic Protagoras is here thinking was Hippias of Elis, who gave popular lectures, not only upon the four subjects just mentioned, but also upon grammar, mythology, family history, archaeology, Homerology and the education of youth.
Received with acclamation, he spent the rest of his long life in central Greece, winning applause by the display of his oratorical gifts and acquiring wealth by the teaching of rhetoric. There is no evidence to show that at any period of his life he called himself a sophist; and, as Plato (Gorg.
For, though that celebrated personage would have liked to be called, not " sophist " but " political philosopher," and tried to fasten the name of " sophist " upon his opponents the Socratics, it is clear from his own statement that he was commonly ranked with the sophists, and that he had no claim, except on the score of superior popularity and success, to be dissociated from the other teachers of political rhetoric. It is true that he was not a political sophist of the vulgar type, that as a theorist he was honest and patriotic, and that, in addition to his fame as a teacher, he had a distinct reputation as a man of letters; but he was a professor of political rhetoric, and, as such, in the phraseology of the day, a sophist.
It is certain that Socrates's contemporaries regarded him as a sophist; and it was only reasonable that they should so regard him, because in opposition to the physicists of the past and the artists of the present he asserted the claims of higher education.
Nor is it possible to accept the statements that " the splendid genius, the lasting influence, and the reiterated polemics of Plato have stamped the name sophist upon the men against whom he wrote as if it were their recognized, legitimate and peculiar designation," and that " Plato not only stole the name out of general circulation,.
Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman,.
In the Sophist criticism predominates over reconstruction, the Zenonian logic being turned against the Parmenides metaphysic in such a way as to show that both the one and the other need revision: see 241 D, 244 B seq., 257 B seq., 258 D.
ASTERIUS, of Cappadocia, sophist and teacher of rhetoric in Galatia, was converted to Christianity about the year 300, and became the disciple of Lucian, the founder of the school of Antioch.
That he should do so was only natural, since his position as a teacher of rhetoric was already secure when Protagoras made his first appearance in the character of a sophist; and, as Protagoras, Prodicus and the rest of the sophists of culture offered a comprehensive education, of which oratory formed only a part, whilst Gorgias made no pretence of teaching " civic excellence " (Plato, Meno, 95 C), and found a substitute for philosophy, not in literature generally, but in the professional study of rhetoric alone, it would have been convenient if the distinction between sophistry and rhetoric had been maintained.
But, though according to the phraseology of the time he was a sophist, he was not a typical sophist - his principle that, while scientific truth is unattainable by man, right opinion is the only basis of right action, clearly differentiating him from all the other professors of " virtue."
The sophist seemed to his youthful hearers to open a new field of intellectual activity and thereby to add a fresh zest to existence.
The lively enthusiasm and the furious opposition which greeted Protagoras had now burnt themselves out, and before long the sophist was treated by the man of the world as a harmless, necessary pedagogue.
That sophistry must be studied in its historical development was clearly seen by Plato, whose dialogue called the Sophist contains a formal review of the changing phases and aspects of sophistical teaching.
The subject which is discussed in that dialogue and its successor, the Statesman, being the question " Are sophist, statesman, and philosopher identical or different?
It is clear that the final definition is preferred, not because of any intrinsic superiority, but because it has a direct bearing upon the question " Are sophist, statesman and philosopher identical or different?
It may have been that the sophists' preference of seeming to reality, of success to truth, had a mischievous effect upon the morality of the time; but it is clear that they had no common theory of ethics, and there is no warrant for the assumption that a sophist, as such, specially interested himself in ethical questions.
Excellent as a statement of the aim and method of Isocrates, and tolerable as a statement of those of Gorgias, these phrases are inexact if applied to Protagoras, who, making " civic virtue " his aim, regarded statesmanship and administration as parts of " civic virtue ", and consequently assigned to oratory no more than a subordinate place in his programme, while to the eristics - whose existence is attested not only by Plato, but also by Isocrates and Aristotle - and to Socrates - whom Grote himself accounts a sophist - the description is plainly and palpably inappropriate.
Now this view is inconsistent with the evidence of Plato, who, in the Sophist, in his final and operative definition, gives prominence to the eristical element, and plainly accounts it the main characteristic not indeed of the sophistry of the 5th century, but of the sophistry of the 4th.
It must be presumed, then, that, in virtue of his general suspicions of the Platonic testimony, Grote in this matter leaves the Sophist out of account.
In particular he allows that " there was at any rate enough of charlatanism in Protagoras and Hippias to prevent any ardour for their historical reputation," that the sophists generally " had in their lifetime more success than they deserved," that it was " antagonism to their teaching which developed the genius of Socrates," and, above all, that, " in his anxiety to do justice to the Sophist, Grote laid more stress than is at all necessary on the partisanship of Plato."
APHTHONIUS, of Antioch, Greek sophist and rhetorician, flourished in the second half of the 4th century A.D., or even later.
The sophist Protagoras had distinguished various kinds of sentences, and Plato had divided the sentence into noun and verb, signifying a thing and the action of a thing.
50o), Bentley sufficiently proved that the letters were written by a sophist or rhetorician (possibly Adrianus of Tyre, died c. A.D.
Distinguished humanists might sneer at him as "a garrulous sophist"; but from this time his ambition was not only to be the greatest scientific authority in Germany but also the champion of the papacy and of the traditional church order.
(a) The first of these characters is described by anticipation in Plato's Sophist (246 C seq.), where, arguing with those " who drag everything down to the corporeal " (vcnµa), the Eleatic stranger would fain prove to them the existence of something incorporeal, as follows.
GORGIAS (c. 483-375 B.C.), Greek sophist and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily.
He attached himself first to a brahmin sophist named Alara, and afterwards to another named Udraka, from whom he learnt all that Indian philosophy had then to teach.
90) tells us how the Buddha, rapt with the idea of his great mission, meets an acquaintance, one Upaka, a wandering sophist, on the way.
Thompson, "On Plato's Sophist," in the Journal of Philology viii.
The wandering sophist and rhetorician would find a hearing no less than the musical artist.
