The New Sophists
In the fifth century before Christ, a new kind of professional appeared in Athens. The Greeks called him a sophist. Athens had become a city where every dispute was settled by speech in front of a crowd, which meant the man who could persuade the crowd could defeat the man who understood the subject.
Protagoras, the most famous among them, advertised that he could make the weaker argument beat the stronger. He also taught that “man is the measure of all things,” a doctrine with obvious commercial advantages: if truth exists, the paying customer might be wrong. If truth is whatever persuades, the customer is always one purchased speech away from being right.
The sophist Gorgias of Leontini, in his Encomium of Helen, a showpiece in which he argues that the most condemned woman in Greek mythology bore no blame for running off to Troy, compares speech to a drug. As different drugs act on the body, he writes, different words act on the soul: some end grief, some produce courage, some poison and bewitch. The Greek word he chose, pharmakon, means both medicine and toxin. The Helen speech wasn’t really about Helen. It was an advertisement: watch me take the guiltiest name in Greece and dissolve the guilt with nothing but language.
In Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias tells a story from his youth. He used to accompany his brother, a physician, on house calls, and when a patient refused surgery, it wasn’t the doctor who changed the man’s mind. It was Gorgias. Put a rhetorician and a doctor before any crowd, let them compete for a medical post, and the rhetorician wins every time. The man who knows nothing beats the man who knows everything, provided the audience knows nothing too.
The trade paid. Gorgias grew rich enough to erect a statue of himself at Delphi, in gold.
Socrates charged no fees, wrote no books, built no following. He worked the same agora with the same instrument, dialogue, pointed in the opposite direction. His method was to question a man who claimed to know something, expose the contradictions in his answers, and leave both of them staring at their shared ignorance. He lost arguments gladly, because losing removed an error, and a man who discovers he doesn’t understand justice is closer to justice than a man whose eloquence conceals that he never did.
Everything separating the two trades fits into two questions. The philosopher asks: what is true? The sophist asks: what can I make this audience believe?