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How the Sophists Forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Rethink Truth

A sophist addresses a crowd in Ancient Athens
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.

But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.

The Need for Sophists

By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.

This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.

The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.

Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’

What the Sophists Taught

The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.

This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’

No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.

Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.

Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.

Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.

The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?

Why Socrates Objected

Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.

The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.

For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.

Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.

This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?

Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?

Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.

The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.

If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.

Plato’s Response

If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.

The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.

Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.

Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.

Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.

Aristotle’s Response

Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.

Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.

Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.

The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.

Rehabilitating the Sophists

After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.

Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.

Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.

The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.

They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.

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If You Love Words, Read On

The sophist Gorgias speaking before an audience and casting his spell.
Gorgias mesmerising his audience.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.

Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.

If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.

Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.

In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”

Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helen and the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.

Words as Magic

In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.

In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’

A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.

Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’

As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.

The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

Nothing Exists

In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.

Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.

In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:

…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…

Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.

Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.

Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.

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Exploring the Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece

The Embassy to Achilles. Phoenix and Odysseus seek to persuade Achilles to return to battle. Attic red-figure hydria by the Kleophrades Painter, c. 490 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.
The Embassy to Achilles. Phoenix and Odysseus seek to persuade Achilles to return to battle. Attic red-figure hydria by the Kleophrades Painter, c. 490 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We often think of rhetoric as a dark art: the ability to make weak arguments appear strong, manipulate emotions, and persuade people of things that aren’t true.

The ancient Greeks saw things differently. They did not invent rhetoric because they wanted a bag of tricks for getting their way. Rather, they invented it because their new political order created a need for it.

When people must decide together, they must first learn how to persuade one another.

In democratic Athens, citizens had to argue in assemblies, defend themselves in courts, and persuade their peers on matters of war, law, and public policy. Words, then as now, had become a form of power capable of rivalling shields and spears.

The study of rhetoric would grow into one of the foundations of Western education—and raise one of the deepest questions in philosophy:

Is persuasion a path to truth, or merely a way of gaining influence?

Speech Before Rhetoric

From the earliest times, the Greeks had known about the power of persuasive speech. In Homer’s Iliad, Phoenix teaches the young Achilles to be both ‘a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’. In the heroic world, the ability to speak was inseparable from the ability to act. A great leader needed not only courage but the words—almost incantations or spells—to counsel, deliberate, and inspire.

For this reason, Homer describes his hero Odysseus as polymetis (‘man of many devices’) and polytropos (‘man of many twists and turns). Unlike his other hero, Achilles, who triumphed through brute force, Odysseus succeeded through cunning, guile, and an ability, in every situation, to find the right words—to cast the right spell.

In Homer’s largely oral world, stirring speech was often imagined as something breathed into the speaker by the gods (this is the origin of our word, ‘inspire’). Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, was also the god of cunning, exchange, and communication. His wife, Peitho, personified persuasion itself. Even the ability to seize the right moment for speech had its own god: Kairos.

But eloquence was not simply a gift of the gods—or Phoenix would not have troubled to teach Achilles. Already in Homer, an art of persuasion was beginning to emerge.

Democracy and the Birth of Rhetoric

The formal study of rhetoric arose in fifth-century BCE Greece, especially in Athens. This was no coincidence.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and voted on matters of war and peace. For the first time, political influence depended not only on birth or wealth, but on the ability to persuade.

A citizen who could not speak effectively risked being ignored. A defendant who could not argue his case risked conviction—and, in the gravest cases, exile or even death.

Unlike today, Athens had no professional politicians or lawyers. Citizens had to represent themselves. Citizens had to represent themselves.

This created an urgent demand:

Could the power of speech be taught?

The first professional teachers to answer that question were the Sophists.

Gorgias and the Discovery of Rhetoric’s Power

Among the Sophists, none made the case for rhetoric more dramatically than Gorgias. 

Born in Leontini in Sicily, Gorgias became famous throughout Greece for his extraordinary abilities as a speaker. He was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity.

According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: “Come, propose me a theme.” He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

His Encomium of Helen is one of the most famous demonstrations of the power of rhetoric. Seeking to defend Helen of Troy for leaving her husband Menelaus and sparking the Trojan War, Gorgias argues that she would have been compelled to do so by one of four forces: the gods, physical necessity, love, or the power of speech. Whichever it was, she could not be blamed.

Gorgias compared the effect of words on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body:

Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.

Speech was not merely a vehicle for thought. It was a force capable of changing it.

But if words could be so powerful, who should police them—and for what purpose?

Plato’s Challenge: Persuasion Without Wisdom

The power of rhetoric fascinated and troubled Plato, who had seen his teacher, Socrates, put to death by words. In the Gorgias, Plato presents Socrates questioning Gorgias about the nature of his art.

Plato’s concern was not that rhetoric could be powerful, but that it could be, and was, so easily abused. A speaker such as Gorgias might persuade an audience without being right—or even understanding the subject.

Plato compares rhetoric without philosophy to pastry-baking without medicine, or cosmetics without gymnastics: something designed to please rather than to improve.

Even so, Plato did not outright reject rhetoric. In the Phaedrus, he concedes that truth is more persuasive when allied with rhetoric, and that dialectic and rhetoric ought to go hand in hand, since ‘he who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must exactly know the real likenesses and differences of things.’

The challenge, then, was not to abandon rhetoric, but to place it in the service of truth. It fell to Aristotle to show how this might be done.

Aristotle Makes Rhetoric an Art

It was Aristotle who transformed rhetoric into a systematic art. Rather than dismissing rhetoric as manipulation, Aristotle sought to understand how persuasion actually works.

In his Rhetoric, he defines rhetoric as the ability to discover the available means of persuasion in any situation.

He identifies three fundamental modes of persuasion:

  • Ethos — the character and credibility of the speaker
  • Pathos — the emotions of the audience
  • Logos — the argument itself

For Aristotle, persuasion was not opposed to reason. Human beings are rational creatures, but they are not purely rational ones. We are also influenced by trust, emotion, experience, and judgement.

Aristotle also identified three main branches of rhetoric:

  • Deliberative rhetoric — speeches about future actions, such as political decisions
  • Judicial rhetoric — speeches concerning accusation and defence in courts
  • Epideictic rhetoric — speeches of praise or blame, such as funeral orations

With Aristotle, rhetoric became not merely a collection of techniques, but a philosophical discipline. Although the earlier Sicilian rhetoricians Corax and Tisias had begun the tradition of rhetorical handbooks, it was Aristotle who gave the subject its philosophical foundation.

As he remarks in the Rhetoric:

It is not his ability that makes a man a sophist, but his moral purpose.

Rhetoric itself was morally neutral. Whether it served truth or deception depended upon the character of the speaker.

From Greece to Rome

The Romans inherited and expanded the Greek tradition of rhetoric.

For Cicero, the ideal orator was not simply someone who could speak beautifully. A true statesman needed both eloquence and wisdom: the ability to persuade, but also the judgement to know what he ought to be arguing for.

As he writes in De Oratore:

Wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of states, but eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous, and is never of any benefit.

This ideal—the union of thought and speech—became one of the defining ambitions of a classical education.

Why Ancient Rhetoric Still Matters

More than two thousand years later, the questions the Greeks explored remain with us. We still debate political questions. We still have it out in courts. We still try to sway colleagues, customers, friends, and strangers.

And the same timeless principles continue to apply. People are persuaded not only by what is said (logos), but by who says it (ethos), what emotions it awakens (pathos), and whether it is said at the right moment (kairos).

The ancient Greeks understood something that modern communication often forgets:

Words do not merely express thoughts. They shape them.

Used wisely, rhetoric is not the enemy of truth but one of its greatest allies.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this introduction to the origins of rhetoric, you’ll find a much fuller exploration of the art of persuasion in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero. The book examines the techniques of the great Greek and Roman orators, from ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos to the practical principles of clear thinking, compelling argument, and effective public speaking.

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