Download The Fifth-Century Enlightenment

Sophists in Athens:
Fifth-Century Enlightenment
“A teacher of this sort I believe myself to be, and above all
other men help people attain what is noble and good; and I
give my pupils their money’s worth and even more, as they
themselves confess.”
Plato, Protagoras, 328 b (Protagoras speaking)
Thucydides (2.38) on Athens and Culture
“When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all
kinds of recreation for our spirits. There are various kinds
of contests and sacrifices regularly throughout the year; in
our own homes we find a beauty and a good taste which
delight us every day and which drive away our cares. Then
the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good
things from all over the world flow in to us, so that to us it
seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own
local products.”
Empire and Culture
 Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel
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Societal complexity and Artistic and Intellectual Production
 Athens and Imperial Infrastructure
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Naval Empire and Its Industries
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Shipwrights
Docks and Dock-workers
Pitch and Rope Manufactures
Training of Crews
Athens and Its Subjects
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Service Industries as Metropole
Metropolitan Commercial Centers
Sophists as Socio-Cultural Phenomenon
 Sophia = “Wisdom”
 Sophistes: “Wise Man”
 Itinerant Professors
 Teach for Pay
 Attract Large Followings
 Wide Range of Expertise
 Astronomy, Geometry, Language, Rhetoric
 Arete
Fifth-Century Athens as the Hub of the
Sophistic Movement
 Second Half of Century: Sophists Gravitate to Athens
 Culture as the Child of Empire?
 Oratory and Athenian Democratic Politics (Market
Forces of Democracy)
 Gorgias of Leontini and the Rhetorical Education of
the Public Speaker
 The Metic Lysias and the Business of Speech-Writing
 W.R. Connor’s “New Politicians”
 The Patronage of Pericles (Damon, Anaxagoras,
Protagoras)
Sophistic Relativism
Dangers to the Established Order?
 Nomos vs. Physis (Culture vs. Nature)
 Thrasymachean Justice: Right of the Stronger (cf.
Alcibiades)
 Moral Ambiguity and the Dissoi Logoi
 Form over Substance (Gorgianic simile and antithesis)
 Tradition of Impiety Trials at Athens (Anaxagoras,
Diagoras, Socrates, Aspasia, Protagoras)
 Tool in Athenian factional politics?
 Fabricated charge of intellectuals in response to
condemnation and execution of Socrates?
Plato, Republic, 338e-339a (Thrasymachus)
“And each makes laws to his own advantage.
Democracy makes democratic laws, tyranny makes
tyrannical laws, and so on with the others. And they
declare what they have made—what is to their own
advantage—to be just for their subjects, and they
punish anyone who goes against this as lawless and
unjust. This, then, is what I say justice is, the same in all
cities, the advantage of the established rule. Since the
established rule is surely stronger, anyone who reasons
correctly will conclude that the just is the same
everywhere, namely, the advantage of the stronger.”
Compare Thucydides (5.89)
Athenians to Melians (416 BCE)
“You know as well as we do that, when these matters are
discussed by practical people, the standard of justice
depends on the equality of power to compel and that in
fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the
weak accept what they have to accept.”