The Sophists and Socrates: The Turn to the Human

Where We Are

In Lesson 2, cosmology argued itself to a standstill: Parmenides seemed to prove change impossible, the atomists answered with atoms and void, and there was no agreed-upon way to decide between them. While the theorists deadlocked, a louder question was being asked in the streets and law courts of Athens: never mind what the cosmos is made of — how should a human being live, and who gets to say? Philosophy now turns from the heavens to the city, to language, and to the soul. It never turns back.

The Historical Moment

Twice in a generation, against absurd odds, the Greeks beat the Persian Empire — at Marathon in 490 BC and at Salamis in 480. Athens, whose navy won Salamis, converted glory into an empire of tribute-paying allies, and at home ran an unprecedented experiment: radical democracy. Citizens voted directly on war, taxes, and grain; juries of five hundred ordinary men decided lawsuits; and there were no professional lawyers — every citizen argued his own case, with property or life on the line. (Honesty requires the asterisk: "citizen" meant free adult males. Women, slaves, and resident foreigners — most of the population — had no vote.)

In such a city, persuasive speech was not an ornament but wealth, safety, and influence — and it could not be inherited the way land could. A market opened, and the era forced a new question: can excellence be taught? And when every speaker pleads his own case, what — if anything — happens to truth?

Wisdom for Sale: The Sophists

Into that market stepped the sophists — itinerant teachers who, for a fee, would train you to argue, persuade, and win. The word originally just meant "wisdom expert"; these men were the West's first professional intellectuals — paid simply for knowing things and teaching them. Their core product was rhetoric, the craft of persuasive speech — how to structure an argument, move a jury, sound confident on either side of a question. Aristocrats were scandalized — wisdom for money? — but the customers lined up.

The most famous was Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–420 BC), who commanded enormous fees and reportedly boasted he was worth them. One sentence of his — preserved because Plato could not stop arguing with it — became one of the most contested in philosophy:

Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.

— Protagoras, fragment DK 80B1, as reported in Plato, Theaetetus 152a (our close rendering)

Unpack it with Plato's own example. The same wind blows; you shiver, I don't. Is the wind cold? For you it is; for me it isn't — and there is no further fact, no thermometer of reality behind our experiences, that settles who is really right. Each person is the standard, the "measure," of how things are for them. Generalize that, and you get relativism: the view that truth is always truth for someone — relative to a person or a culture — never absolute. It suits a democracy (every citizen's judgment counts) and suits a rhetoric teacher even better: if no side of a dispute is objectively true, the winning side is simply the better argued — and Protagoras sells better arguments. Plato will pounce on the lurking trap — if every belief is true for the believer, what about my belief that Protagoras is wrong? — but the position has never stopped finding new defenders.

Nothing Exists, and Other Crowd-Pleasers

If Protagoras softened truth, Gorgias of Leontini cheerfully demolished it. Arriving in Athens as an ambassador in 427 BC, he dazzled audiences, and in a work called On What Is Not defended three theses, each more outrageous than the last: nothing exists; even if something existed, we could not know it; even if we could know it, we could not communicate it to anyone else (DK 82B3). Scholars still argue whether this was serious philosophy or a virtuoso parody of Parmenides. Probably both — and also an advertisement: if argument can prove that, imagine what it can do for your lawsuit. Gorgias's real creed was about the power of language itself, stated in his showpiece defense of Helen of Troy:

Speech is a powerful lord, who with the smallest and least visible body accomplishes the most godlike works.

— Gorgias, Encomium of Helen §8, DK 82B11 (our close rendering)

Words, he means, are a force — almost a drug, he says in the same speech — that can stop fear, create grief, swell pity; Helen, seduced by speech, was no guiltier than if she'd been dragged off by force. A thrilling, disturbing thought: persuasion as power over souls, detached from truth entirely.

The sophists also sharpened the era's deepest political question. Travel had taught the Greeks that customs vary wildly: what one people venerates, another forbids. This crystallized into the debate between nomos — law, custom, convention, the rules humans make — and physis — nature, the way things are regardless of what anyone decides. Is justice itself mere nomos, a local arrangement with no deeper standing? Some sophists drew radical conclusions: Antiphon suggested conventions bind only when someone's watching; Plato's Callicles argues that nature's justice is the strong taking what they can. The question — is morality natural or constructed? — is still open for business.

Before we meet their great enemy, a fair word for the sophists. They educated citizens for democratic life, democratized skills that had been an aristocratic birthright, founded the systematic study of language and argument, and asked genuinely hard questions about culture and nature. "Sophist" became a sneer largely because Plato wrote the history — and hearing about the sophists only from Plato is like hearing about a defendant only from the prosecutor.

The Barefoot Gadfly

Socrates of Athens (469–399 BC) looked, at first glance, like one more sophist — another man arguing in the marketplace. The differences mattered. He was no glamorous foreigner but a stonemason's son who had served bravely as an infantryman; famously ugly by Greek standards — snub nose, bulging eyes — he went barefoot, wore the same threadbare cloak year-round, took no fees, and claimed, maddeningly, to teach nothing at all. He compared himself to a gadfly — a biting horsefly — sent to sting a large, lazy horse called Athens awake.

The hinge of his life, as he tells it in Plato's Apology, was an oracle. His friend Chaerephon asked the god at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates; the priestess answered no. Socrates, baffled — he was sure he knew nothing important — set out to refute the god by finding someone wiser. He interrogated politicians, poets, craftsmen; each confidently claimed knowledge he did not have. Of one examination he concludes:

I am better off than he is — for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.

— Plato, Apology 21d (trans. Jowett)

This is Socratic ignorance, and it is not false modesty: human wisdom consists in knowing the limits of what you know. The oracle was right after all, and Socrates took it as a divine commission: examine yourself and others, and care for your soul before your money or reputation. The politicians he deflated did not enjoy it — remember that when we reach the trial.

The Question That Refutes You

Socrates' method has a name: the elenchus, a cross-examination by question and answer that tests whether a person's beliefs hang together. He never lectures. He asks what you mean, draws out the consequences, and lets you watch your own position collapse. He does it with irony — in Greek, eirōneia, feigned modesty: professing ignorance while quietly steering the demolition.

Watch it work. In Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates meets a young man on the courthouse steps prosecuting his own father for a laborer's death — serenely sure he's right, because he is an expert on piety (holiness, right conduct toward the gods). Splendid, says Socrates: then tell me, what is piety? Euthyphro answers: piety is what I'm doing now. That's an example, Socrates objects, not a definition — what makes all pious acts pious? Second try: piety is what is dear to the gods. But the gods notoriously quarrel; the same act might delight Zeus and enrage Hera, making it pious and impious at once. Third try: piety is what all the gods love. And now Socrates asks the question that has outlived every god on Olympus:

The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.

— Plato, Euthyphro 10a (trans. Jowett)

This is the Euthyphro dilemma, and twenty-four centuries later it remains the standing problem for divine-command ethics — the view that morality just is whatever God commands. First horn: the gods love piety because it is pious. Then goodness exists independently of the gods, who merely recognize it — reporters of morality, not its authors. Second horn: piety is pious because the gods love it. Then morality is arbitrary — had the gods loved cruelty, cruelty would be holy — and "God is good" shrinks to "God is whatever God happens to be." Euthyphro, dizzy, suddenly remembers an appointment. The dialogue ends in aporia — Greek for the impasse of honest puzzlement — which Socrates counted as success: a false certainty cleared away is progress.

The Trial of Philosophy

In 399 BC, three citizens — Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon — indicted Socrates on charges of not acknowledging the city's gods, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young. The real grievances ran deeper. Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War; the brutal junta of the Thirty Tyrants (404 BC) had been led in part by Critias, a former member of Socrates' circle, and the traitor Alcibiades had been another. A political amnesty barred prosecution for those crimes, so impiety served as the legal proxy for a city's resentment of the man who had spent decades publicly puncturing it.

Socrates' defense, in Plato's Apology, is magnificently undefensive: if the jury acquitted him on condition that he stop philosophizing, he would refuse — he will obey the god rather than them. Convicted by a narrow margin, he was invited to propose his own penalty — the customary moment for tearful pleading. He proposed free meals at public expense, the honor given Olympic victors, before grudgingly offering a fine. To the suggestion that he might just live quietly, he answered:

Daily to discourse about virtue … is the greatest good of man, and … the unexamined life is not worth living.

— Plato, Apology 38a (trans. Jowett)

The most quoted line in philosophy is, in context, a defiance: a man telling his executioners that a silenced life would not be worth keeping. Behind it stands his strangest doctrine, Socratic intellectualism: no one does wrong willingly. Wrongdoing, he held, is ignorance — if you truly knew the good, you would do it, just as you don't knowingly eat spoiled food. He questioned rather than preached because fixing the knowing fixes the doing. (Aristotle will reopen that wound in Lesson 7.) The jury, voting again, chose death by a wider margin than it had chosen guilt. Socrates declined his friends' escape plan, arguing in the Crito that he could not spend seventy years accepting the city's laws and then dodge them when they bit. He drank the hemlock among friends, talking philosophy to the end.

One honest caveat: Socrates wrote nothing, and our three main witnesses disagree. Aristophanes' comedy Clouds (423 BC) lampoons him as a head-in-the-clouds nature-philosopher and sophist; Xenophon remembers an earnest, practical moralist; Plato gives us a genius — but Plato had his own philosophy, and the line between Socrates' views and Plato's is genuinely uncertain. Scholars call this the Socratic problem. We see Socrates only in mirrors, and the mirrors do not agree.

Legacy: Who Listened

Socrates is the figure to whom the entire tradition returns, the way music returns to its tonic note. Plato, who was still in his twenties at the trial, made Socrates the speaking voice of nearly his whole corpus — the next two lessons (Lessons 4–5) are, in a sense, Plato's lifelong answer to why Athens killed the best man in it. The Hellenistic schools all claimed Socrates as ancestor: the Cynics took his shabby cloak and shamelessness, and the Stoics took his calm at the hemlock as the portrait of the sage (Lesson 8). Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on Socratic irony and refashioned the gadfly for Christian Copenhagen (Lesson 32); John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism, thought it better to be "Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" (Lesson 34).

The trial founded a problem no state has solved: what does the individual conscience owe the city? That thread runs through Thoreau's night in jail (Lesson 36) to Rawls's theory of civil disobedience (Lesson 49). Protagoras has his own afterlife: his relativism returns, transfigured, in Nietzsche's perspectivism (Lesson 35) and in the postmodern debates around Foucault and Derrida (Lesson 48) — and every modern argument about whether truth is "socially constructed" is a rematch of Plato versus Protagoras: is man the measure, or not? And the Euthyphro dilemma never retired: it shadows the medieval voluntarists' claim that God's will alone makes right (Lesson 18) and still anchors the modern metaethical question of what morality stands on (Lesson 52). When Aquinas builds his grand synthesis (Lesson 17), he must still answer Euthyphro's ghost: is God bound by goodness, or goodness by God?

Reflection Questions

1. Protagoras' relativism has an appealingly democratic flavor: who are you to say another person's (or culture's) truth is wrong? Where, if anywhere, do you think relativism stops being tolerant and starts being incoherent?
2. Socrates refused to stop philosophizing even on pain of death, yet also refused to escape the city's lawful sentence. Are those two stances consistent? What do you think conscience owes the law?
3. Take the Euthyphro dilemma out of ancient Greece: if you believe morality comes from God, which horn would you grasp, and at what cost? If you don't, what does morality rest on instead?

Self-Check Quiz

Further Reading

• Primary: Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the death scene from Phaedo), translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by John M. Cooper (Hackett, 2000) — short, gripping, and the single best entry point to all of philosophy.
• Secondary (introductory): C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Deeper: Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cornell University Press, 1991) — the landmark modern study of the elenchus, irony, and the Socratic problem.
• Free online: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Socrates" and "The Sophists"; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Protagoras".