Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition Edited by Kyriakos N. Demetriou LEIDEN | BOSTON This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction 1 Kyriakos N. Demetriou 1 George Grote, The Philosophic Radical and Politician Bruce Kinzer 16 2 James Mill and George Grote: A Benthamite Defence of “Theoretic Reform” 47 Antis Loizides 3 George Grote and Natural Religion John R. Gibbins 85 4 Bentham, Mill, Grote, and An Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind Catherine Fuller † 117 5 A Regular Politician in Breeches: The Life and Work of Harriet Lewin Grote 134 Sarah Richardson 6 Grote’s Athens: The Character of Democracy James Kierstead 161 7 The Comparative Approach in Grote’s History of Greece Peter Liddel 8 Grote’s Sparta/Sparta’s Grote Paul Cartledge 211 255 9 Grote’s Plato 273 Catherine Zuckert 10 The Sophists in Context: George Grote’s Reappraisal Giovanni Giorgini 303 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV vi contents 329 11 Grote on Alexander the Great Pierre Briant 12 Grote on Aristotle’s Logic Robin Smith 366 13 Grote’s Moral Philosophy and its Context Jerome B. Schneewind 388 Appendix: George Grote on James Mill’s “Government” Transcribed and edited by Antis Loizides Index of Names and Subjects 413 405 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV chapter 10 The Sophists in Context: George Grote’s Reappraisal Giovanni Giorgini Enter the Sophists The sophists had a bad press from a very early stage on. When they first appeared on the scene at Athens (and in other important cities in mainland Greece and in Sicily), around the middle of the fifth century BCE, they presented themselves as masters of language and teachers of the art of persuasion and public speaking: George Grote himself already noticed that they thus filled a vacuum in “higher education” in the city as well as answer a request for experts able to teach affluent citizens how to be effective with speech in politics and in court: Athenian democracy had been since its inception a “government through speech”; and “equal possibility to speak” (isegoria) as well as the “possibility to speak up one’s mind” (parrhesia) had been two of its main ideological pillars, two catchwords almost synonymous of democracy. Other factors made ability to speak publicly a recommendable skill: a lawsuit was not an unlikely event in the life of an ordinary Athenian so it was prudent to be well prepared for the occasion; in democratic regimes trials were very frequent and citizens had to appear in court personally and therefore needed some ability to speak persuasively and argue effectively. With his amazing historical knowledge and sensibility Grote also noticed that after the Ionic revolt (500 BCE) and the Persian invasions of Greece (490–479) the relations between Greek cities became more frequent and more complicated and required more talent, and especially rhetorical skills, in the politicians who managed them.1 Training in speech then became as essential as training in arms for a Greek citizen and the sophists asserted to be able to provide exactly such an education. Although they evidently performed a useful service, the sophists acquired a bad reputation in a very short time: as early as 423 BCE, when Aristophanes’ Clouds was performed, the playwright could count on the fact that the public would understand his mocking picture of Socrates as a sophist because they could recognize a sophist when they encountered one. A number of factors contributed to this undeserved bad repute: social envy, for the sophists taught 1 George Grote, A History of Greece [1846–56] 12 vols. (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1899; reprinted from the second London edition of 1888 by J. Murray), vol. 7, chapter 67, 338. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�80496_��� This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 304 giorgini for money and therefore only rich people could afford to pay for their services; conservative attitude, for they employed their verbal skills to examine, if not question, the traditional beliefs of their contemporaries; political enmity, for many of them were attracted to Athens by Pericles’ patronage and democratic freedom and were therefore held in suspicion, or plainly hated, by political opponents;2 intellectual rivalry, as in the case of Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates, who for different reasons despised their teaching because had different intellectual and educational programmes. Plato, in particular, was keen to emphasize the difference between his former teacher, Socrates, and the sophists who, in his opinion, were pursuing two completely different line of activity: while Socrates used dialogue and dialectics to search for the truth about the most important matters in the belief that this pursuit could be done only “chorally,” the sophists used discourses and linguistic tricks in order to win the argument and increase their prestige (and consequent honorarium).3 If we add to this that what we know about the sophists has arrived down to us mostly from their critics whilst only fragments survive of their original works, it is not difficult to realize why it is still difficult to dispel the accusation of “sophistry” levelled at them. The Image of the Sophists in England before Grote With rash conciseness we may say that two main factors contributed to preventing a fair evaluation of the sophists and of their contribution to the history of philosophy: Plato’s judgement, inspired by his desire to differentiate them from Socrates and from his own intellectual activity; and their association with Athenian democracy, which prompted authors of anti-democratic leaning to regard them as a product as well as an effect of the “spirit of democracy.” In the most authoritative history of Greek philosophy of the nineteenth century, Eduard Zeller’s Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlische Entwicklung 2 This also explains the number of trials which involved sophists and other intellectuals and artists who belonged to the circle of Pericles: these were political trials which aimed at sapping Pericles’ hegemonic position in Athens by touching people around him when they could not get him. 3 This is evident in most Platonic dialogues, especially the Gorgias. Plato was aware that the two figures, the philosopher/dialectician and the sophist/rhetorician, were not easily distinguishable; however, just like the dog and the wolf, they looked similar but had in fact completely different natures: see his Sophist and the exercise of the “art of division” (diairesis) to arrive at a theoretical definition of the two figures. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 305 (1844–52), the sophists were still depicted as shallow thinkers who upheld relativism in morality as well as in the theory of knowledge.4 Zeller’s interpretation was strongly influenced by Hegel’s vision of the development of philosophy. Hegel had the merit to attribute an important role to the sophists, considered, together with Socrates, as a moment of subjective “antithesis” to the “objective” moment represented by the Ionians: they were thus reinstated in the history of philosophy albeit with a negative role.5 In England the situation was not much better: the philosopher F.D. Maurice, author of an influential history of philosophy, held a very negative view of Athenian democracy and gave a very critical account of the sophists in his work.6 As for the historians, they typically associated the sophists with the “commercial spirit” of democracy: they loved luxury and extravagance; they asked for payment for their teaching and bent their theories to please the hearers; they indulged in all sorts of material pleasures. It is significant in this respect, as Karen Whedbee has persuasively argued, that “historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made no pretence about their own objectivity. They engaged the history of Greece as an instrument for reinforcing enduring lessons about political and moral principles.”7 The role of the demagogues in manipulating popular opinion, the institution of ostracism in order to curb the best and most eminent citizens, the influence of the sophists in corrupting the young were typical topics in the indictment of Athenian democracy. It comes as no surprise, then, that the sophists offered to these historians an illustration of the dangers of populism and malicious intellectual inquiry. The most influential History of Greece of the late eighteenth century was undoubtedly that of William Mitford, published in 1784 and reprinted many times in the next 4 Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlische Entwicklung (Tübingen: Fues, 1844–52); the book was translated in many languages, including English: A History of Greek Philosophy, trans. S.F. Alleyne, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1881). 5 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1840) (Lincoln-London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 1, 352–72. On Hegel’s reception of the sophists see John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). 6 Frederick Denison Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. Ancient Philosophy (1840) (London-Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1854). This essay was part of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana devised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Nadia Urbinati comments that “for Maurice, Athenian democracy was corrupt and intolerant because it was based on doxa and exalted the vita activa”: Mill on Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 7 Karen E. Whedbee, “Making the Worse Case Appear the Better: British Reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 603–30; see also her very interesting “Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy: George Grote’s Defense of Cleon and the Athenian Demagogues,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 4, (2004): 71–95. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 306 giorgini half century.8 Mitford was a rabid anti-Jacobin and Tory, who had been especially impressed by the Athenian democracy’s failure to protect individual rights, notably of the richest and most eminent citizens. In his description, the Athenian government had already become “a tyranny in the hands of the people” by the time of Solon; as for the sophists, they had been instrumental in debasing the morality of young Athenians through their moral relativism and by their ability to “make the worse appear the better cause.” Mitford’s anti-democratic bias was so obvious that it may seem strange today that his account of classical Greece was so popular. But, as Whedbee notices, “Mitford’s description of the sophists was influential precisely because it reflected the political and intellectual orthodoxies of his age.”9 It is interesting to note that even James Mill, who rejected the view of Athenian democracy depicted by conservative historians such a Mitford and who sharply criticised the neoPlatonic reading of Plato propounded by Thomas Taylor “The Platonist,” considered the sophists shallow thinkers who “filled the minds of the youth with a spirit of mere logomachy.”10 Furthermore, it was typical in the literature of the age to contrast Socrates’ pursuit of truth in morality with the sophists’ ability to teach whatever value was most expedient, in a battle of the “just” against the “useful”; conversely, Socrates and Plato were compared to Christianity and often considered its forerunners if not pre-Christian saints altogether.11 In the early nineteenth century a few voices of dissent started to be heard and the stature of the sophists’ intellectual accomplishment and the quality of their morality were re-evaluated and sometimes even commended. An important figure in questioning the received view of the sophists was the Whig historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay,12 who published a very detailed and critical review of Mitford’s History in the Knight’s Quarterly, 8 9 10 11 12 William Mitford, The History of Greece, 8 vols. (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1784–1810). See the very critical review by George Grote, “Institutions of Ancient Greece,” Westminster Review 5 (1826): 269–331. Whedbee, “British Reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850,” 607. James Mill, “Taylor’s Plato,” Edinburgh Review 14 (1809): 199. Antis Loizides argues for a more nuanced appreciation of James Mill’s position on the sophists, for in an early entry of his Commonplace Books (1804) he described them as “ordinary philosophers” who taught appropriate virtues to their audience: see Antis Loizides, John Stuart Mill’s Platonic Heritage (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 57 fn 16. Loizides, Mill’s Platonic Heritage, 29–37. T.B. Macaulay’s contributions to Knight’s Quarterly magazine are reprinted in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 307 with the explicit intent to “reduce an overpraised writer to his proper level.”13 Macaulay connected his rehabilitation of the sophists with a reassessment of the experience of Athenian democracy, which he considered a successful experiment: democratic government was suited to the Athenian people;14 its commercial inclination produced economic wealth which, in turn, provided leisure to the citizens who could devote time to art and philosophy. Another important contribution to this reappraisal was given by the eccentric and eclectic intellectual G.H. Lewes, the author of a Biographical History of Philosophy (1845) where the sophists were the subject of a thorough rehabilitation: Lewes questioned the authority of Plato, a biased witness in his opinion, and advocated a re-reading of the sophists against the Platonic tradition of condemnation; he argued that the sophists, especially Protagoras, were practically-minded people who exhibited good sense and trained young Athenians how to attain effective practical results.15 Finally, Grote himself had contributed to an early reassessment of the sophists in his critical review of Mitford’s History published in the Westminster Review (1826). Grote’s History of Greece: The Sophist as a Free-thinker It is interesting to notice that in his History of Greece Grote examined the role of the sophists, together with the rest of the intellectual development of the fifth century, as a way to explain what he considered an “event of paramount interest,” namely the trial and condemnation of Socrates. He was interested in both the intellectual and the political context of this fateful event. Grote argued that from the year 450 BCE downwards there had appeared two important classes of men in Greece unknown to Solon or even to Pericles, which he termed the Rhetoricians and the Dialecticians, for whom “the ground had been gradually prepared by the politics, the poetry, and the speculation, of the preceding period.”16 Following in Plato’s wake, Grote sharply distinguished the two groups: the Rhetoricians catered to the needs of men of action whereas the Dialecticians had no direct link to public life; they opened new 13 14 15 16 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On Mitford’s History of Greece” [1824], in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, vol. 1, 154. “A good government, like a good coat,—he remarked shrewdly—is that which fits the body for which it is designed,” Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, 160. George Henry Lewes, The Biographical History of Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Charles Knight, 1845). Grote, History of Greece, vol. 8, chapter 67, 346. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 308 giorgini lines of intellectual pursuit and appealed to men interested in abstract speculation. Grote provided an interesting evaluation also of the role of the Old Comedy, and especially of Aristophanes. He commented that it was a sign of the strength of democracy and its men and institutions that they could “tolerate unfriendly tongues either in earnest or in jest.”17 He went on to argue for the importance of freedom of speech in society in all ages: It was the blessing and the glory of Athens, that every man could speak out his sentiments and his criticisms with a freedom unparalleled in the ancient world, and hardly paralleled even in the modern, in which a vast body of dissent both is, and always has been, condemned to absolute silence.18 However, Grote observed, this freedom of speech gave voice also to a distinct democratic sentiment of antipathy to new ideas and intellectual achievements: this appeared very clearly in the case of the “retrograde spirit” of Aristophanes who attacked philosophy, literature and eloquence “in the name of those good old times of ignorance”; Grote hence lamented the “unfavourable and degrading influence of comedy on the Athenian mind.”19 And, especially in the Clouds, the “misapplied wit and genius of Aristophanes” concurred to give a biased portrait of Socrates (and consequently, we may add, of the sophists). In preparing the ground for his interpretation of the sophists Grote argued for the necessity to examine critically our sources, especially in the case of biased witnesses: If ever there was need to invoke this rare sentiment of candour, it is when we come to discuss the history of the persons called sophists, who now for the first time appear as of note; the practical teachers of Athens and of Greece, misconceived as well as misesteemed.20 Grote recalled that the musical teacher Damon was called a sophist and so had been called also Solon and Pythagoras. In his description, therefore, “a sophist, in the genuine sense of the word, was a wise man, a clever man; one who stood prominently before the public as distinguished for intellect or talent of 17 18 19 20 History, 330. History, 348. History, 331. History, 349. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 309 some kind.”21 A definition followed by a long list of well-known people which included Solon and Pythagoras, Aristippus and Antisthenes, Isocrates and Plato himself. He then went on to argue that In this large and comprehensive sense the word was originally used, and always continued to be so understood among the general public. But along with this idea, the title sophist also carried with it or connoted a certain invidious feeling. The natural temper of people generally ignorant towards superior intellect—the same temper which led to those charges of magic so frequent in the Middle Ages- appears to be a union of admiration with something of an unfavourable sentiment; [. . .] Timon, who hated the philosophers, thus found the word sophist exactly suitable, in sentiment as well as in meaning, to his purpose in addressing them.22 Another characteristic could be added to this envy: the sophists taught for pay, and people like Plato had repugnance against receiving pay for teaching. Following Plato, one could contrast this attitude with that of the Platonic Socrates, who assimilated the relation between teacher and pupil to that between two lovers or two intimate friends. However, Grote very persuasively argued that “if, in the middle of the Peloponnesian war, any Athenian had been asked ‘Who are the principal sophists in your city?’ he would have named Sokrates among the first.”23 Indeed, “these men—whom modern writers set down as the sophists, and denounce as the moral pestilence of their age— were not distinguished in any marked or generic way from their predecessors.”24 Sophists like Protagoras or Gorgias supplied the demand for higher education in Athens with an unparalleled ability and success and hence “gained a distinction such as none of their predecessors had attained, were prized all over Greece, travelled from city to city with general admiration, and obtained considerable pay.”25 They incurred in increasing jealousy from “inferior teachers and lovers of ignorance generally.” As for Plato, his hostility “may be explained without at all supposing in them that corruption which modern writers have been so ready not only to admit but to magnify. It arose from the radical difference between his point of view and theirs”: Plato was a radical reformer and 21 22 23 24 25 History, 350. History, 352. History, 353. History, 355. History, 356. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 310 giorgini found all political regimes of his age defective and was very critical of Athenian democracy; the Sophists’ business, on the contrary, was to teach young people, and especially Athenians, how to speak and act in their cities. Grote could thus conclude that Plato’s “reforming, as well as his theorizing tendencies, brought him into polemical controversy with all the leading agents by whom the business of practical life at Athens was carried on.”26 The business of the sophists was with ethical precepts, not ethical theory, because “it ought never to be forgotten, that those who taught for active life were bound, by the very conditions of their profession, to adapt themselves to the place and the society as it stood.”27 The difference, for Grote, is thus between the theoretical and the practical approach to politics: Plato heralded in the former while the sophists championed the latter. From this Grote went on to point out that we know the sophists chiefly from the evidence of Plato, their pronounced enemy; Aristotle, on his part, followed the example of his master in giving a negative definition of the term.28 After this long preparatory discussion, Grote described the biased image of the sophists current in his age thus: The sophists are spoken of as a new class of men, or sometimes in language which implies a new doctrinal sect, or school, as if they then sprang up in Greece for the first time; ostentatious imposters, flattering and duping the rich youth for their own personal gain; undermining the morality of Athens, public and private, and encouraging their pupils to the unscrupulous prosecution of ambition and cupidity.29 He then commented: “I know few characters in history who have been so hardly dealt with as these so-called sophists.”30 In his view they should rather be called professors or public teachers. In fact, when Plato embarks on the project to define a sophist, the definition he comes up with suits Socrates better than anyone else. In a footnote Grote very appropriately observed that 26 27 28 29 30 History, 356–7. History, 358. On this Grote agreed with John Stuart Mill’s view that the sophists were “worldly-minded men” who taught arts conducive to worldly success; they could not therefore be revolutionary thinkers. See John Stuart Mill, “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–91), 33 vols, vol. 11. Grote refers to Aristotle, Rhetoric I, 1, 4. History, 355. History, 360. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 311 certain German interpreters (he singled out Ritter and Brandis in this case)31 use Aristophanes’ Clouds as evidence that the sophists taught corrupting doctrines, with the paradoxical result that they do not use this author against Socrates, whom he attacks, and they quote him against the sophists, whom he does not attack!32 Another puzzling element which shows the unfair treatment of the sophists in the contemporary literature was the condemnation of Protagoras as an atheist by most commentators. This fact betrayed a patent contradiction for—Grote observed—the people who consider pagan religion a repugnant fiction good for feeble, uncouth minds are the same who denounce Protagoras for his alleged atheism: a disconcerting inconsistency.33 Grote went on to point out another topic about which he disagreed with the general opinion, especially that of German philologists: “It has been common with recent German historians of philosophy to translate from Plato and dress up a fiend called ‘Die Sophistik’ (Sophistic,) whom they assert to have poisoned and demoralized, by corrupt teaching, the Athenian moral character, so that it became degenerate at the end of the Peloponnesian war, compared with what it had been in the time of Miltiades and Aristeides.” But the “Sophistic” is an abstraction because the actual sophists did not share any common doctrines, principles or method: “they had nothing in common except their profession, as paid teachers, qualifying young men ‘to think, speak and act,’ these are the words of Isokrates [. . .].”34 Grote rightly observed that there is no reason to believe that Gorgias would have subscribed to Protagoras’ view that “man is the measure of all things” and, conversely, Protagoras would have objected to the doctrines put forth by Thrasymachus in book 1 of Plato’s Republic. “It is impossible therefore to predicate anything concerning doctrines, methods, or tendencies, common and peculiar to all the sophists.” Grote also compared the teaching of Hippias with that of Protagoras to show that the former prompted his pupils to study all sorts of disciplines whereas the latter reproached him for making them learn too many subjects. The abstract word “Die Sophistik” has therefore no real meaning—Grote concluded.35 Grote went on to examine the doctrines of the sophists one by one, performing in this a double task: he showed the differences in their thought and 31 32 33 34 35 Grote refers the reader to Heinrich Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, 12 vols. (Hamburg: F. Berthes, 1829–1853); Christian August Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der GriechischRömischen Philosophie (Berlin: Reimer, 1835–1860). History, 363, fn 1. History, 366. History, 370. History, 371. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 312 giorgini at the same time revealed the importance of their doctrines. One sophist who received an utter rehabilitation as a serious thinker was Gorgias. Grote maintained that in order to understand Gorgias one must take into account the intellectual context, and especially Parmenides and the Eleatics, who were looking for something existing behind and beyond the senses, a “noumenon” in the Kantian sense. Seen on this background, Gorgias’ doctrine on Not-being makes sense and it is not a matter of pure scepticism. Grote added that one could venture to say that the purpose of his treatise on Not-being was to discourage fruitless theoretical speculations in his students and to recommend rhetorical exercises useful to fulfil the duties of an active citizen.36 One of Grote’s most refined treatments is devoted to the Platonic dialogue Gorgias and its characters. He observed how Gorgias himself is treated with great respect by Socrates and how the tone of the dialogue changes when his pupil Polus and then Kallikles get to speak. Polus is insolent and Socrates deals with him in a harsher way; as for Kallikles, he maintains what Grote describes as “doctrines openly and avowedly anti-social.”37 His distinction between a law of nature and the law of society is the prelude to his statement that the great man, the strong man, is by nature entitled to act as he pleases while the laws of the city, enacted by the weak many, are designed to imprison and tame him. Justice by nature is thus the opposite of justice in society. Grote’s original and strong point consists in denying firmly that this anti-social position may be ascribed to “the sophists.” His argument is solid and refined and is the result of the careful and unbiased reading of Plato’s text. First of all, “Kallikles himself is not a sophist, nor represented by Plato as such. He is a young Athenian citizen, of rank and station, [. . .] he disparages philosophy, and speaks with utter contempt about the sophists.” Secondly, it is evident that such a bold anti-social doctrine could not be propounded publicly by anyone because it would have been considered revolting by the hearers. The sophists were public teachers and therefore had to conform to the moral standards of the place where they taught. Especially in the case of Athens such an anti-democratic teaching, which included an exaltation of the tyranny of the strongest, would have been considered utterly rebarbative by any audience. Even if a sophist dared to think anything of the sort, he would have kept it for himself, as Polus did. Grote could therefore conclude that the very point that Socrates and Plato wished to establish in this dialogue was that sophists and rhetoricians cater indulgently to the taste of the Athenian dêmos: 36 37 History, 369–70. History, 383. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 313 they courted, flattered, and truckled to the sentiment of the Athenian people, with degrading subservience; that they looked to the immediate gratification simply, and not to permanent moral improvement of the people; that they had no courage to address to them any unpalatable truths, however salutary, but would shift and modify opinions in every way, so as to escape giving offence; that no man who put himself prominently forward at Athens had any chance of success, unless he became moulded and assimilated, from the core, to the people and their type of sentiment. Granting such charges to be true, how is it conceivable that any sophist, or any rhetor, could venture to enforce upon an Athenian public audience the doctrine laid down by Kallikles.38 It is therefore absurd to imagine that such skilled rhetoricians would insult their very audience, knowing very well the democratic sentiment prevalent at Athens and wishing to please their public. Grote made a similar reasoning with respect to Thrasymachus, whose portrait depicted by Plato in the Republic he found unlikely. If there was something that the sophists had in common it was that, far from being agents of revolution, they contributed to maintain the intellectual and moral status quo because it was the basis of their teaching and success. Grote could thus conclude that if there was a moral degeneration in Athens and in Greece in the interval after 480 and the end of the Peloponnesian war this fact should be attributed to some other cause than “this imaginary abstraction called sophistic.” Moreover, if one looked at the facts candidly, Athens was not more corrupt at the end of the Peloponnesian war than in the times of Miltiades; “the matter of fact here alleged is as untrue, as the cause alleged is unreal”—Grote commented.39 He went on to give ample evidence of this, starting with the condemnation of Miltiades and the ostracism of Aristeides to arrive to the favour the pious Nicias had with the Athenian people regardless of his flaws as a general. He concluded that if “we survey the eighty-seven years of Athenian history, between the battle of Marathon and the renovation of the democracy after the Thirty, we shall see no ground for the assertion, so often made, of increased and increasing moral and political corruption. It is my belief that the people had become morally and politically better, and that their democracy had worked to their improvement.”40 Grote went on to state: “Yet such is the prejudice with which the history of the sophists has been written, that the commentators on Plato accuse the sophists of 38 39 40 History, 387–8. History, 371. History, 374. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 314 giorgini having originated what they ignorantly term, ‘the base theory of utility,’ here propounded by Sokrates himself.”41 Grote considered Plato an unreliable witness when it comes to the criticism of his society. For Plato believed that his society was totally corrupt, that all the political regimes of his day were bad and not conducive to the creation of good citizens, and that all the sophists, rhetoricians, musicians, poets, statesmen provided a corrupting influence on the citizens. But in fact there was a huge difference, say, between a competent statesman like Pericles and a pious but incompetent one like Nicias, and Protagoras would have considered it an honour and a great achievement if he had been able to inspire a student to become like Pericles. These statements sound less impressive today, when we are accustomed to think that democracy is evidently the best form of government devised by human beings; however, they were groundbreaking and revolutionary in Victorian England, when especially the elites looked with fearful apprehension to the rise of masses and their entrance into the political arena. The Final Rehabilitation: Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates When Grote devoted himself to an examination of the theories of the first philosophers, as an introduction to his study of Plato so that the context of his thought could scatter light on Plato’s great achievements, he remarked that any contemporary reader would be astonished that such far-fetched theories could ever be propounded in earnest and believed. From this he went on to argue that the self-assuredness with which certain contemporary philosophers proclaimed their “first truths or first principles as universal, intuitive, self-evident” was similarly unfounded.42 “Philosophy is, or aims at becoming, reasoned truth”—Grote maintained;43 it “aspires to deliver not merely truth, but reasoned truth.”44 He quoted approvingly Ferrier (The Institutes of Metaphysics) according to whom “philosophy, in its ideal perfection, is a body of reasoned truth.” Therefore philosophy is by necessity polemical because individual reasoners who seek the truth through their reason inevitably “dissent from the unreasoning belief which reigns authoritative in the social 41 42 43 44 History, 379. George Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1865), vol. 1, 87. Plato, vol. 1, v. Plato, vol. 3, 473; cf. 478. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 315 atmosphere around them.”45 It also follows that these independent reasoners are always rare everywhere. It is very interesting that Grote transposed this persuasion into his reconstruction of ancient philosophy. The general picture he depicted of early Greek philosophy is one of variety of belief, since each philosopher followed his own reason and arrived at different conclusion from all others; and of essential dissent, in that in so doing each thinker departed from the established creeds of his society and incurred in its reproach: “There is no established philosophical orthodoxy, but a collection of Dissenters”—he commented.46 He then went on to depict again the general view of the sophists current in his age: The received supposition that there were at Athens a class of men called Sophists who made money and reputation by obvious fallacies employed to bring about contradictions in dialogue—appears to me to pervert the representations given of ancient philosophy. To this view Grote opposed first of all a commonsense argument drawn from observation: Of individuals, the varieties are innumerable: but no professional body of men ever acquired gain or celebrity by maintaining theses, and employing arguments, which every one could easily detect as false.47 With a striking revisionist approach, Grote depicts the celebrated Protagoras, the target of accusations to teach relativism of values and impiety, thus: “The Platonic Protagoras, spokesman of King Nomos, represents common sense, sentiment, sympathies and antipathies, written laws, and traditional customs known to all as well as revered by the majority.”48 This is, however, only half of Grote’s contribution to a re-evaluation of the sophists: having shown that it was unwarranted as well as counterintuitive to attribute a revolutionary teaching, corrosive of established mores, to the sophists, Grote went on to argue that it was in fact Socrates, and his pupil Plato, 45 46 47 48 Plato, vol. 1, vii. Cf. James Frederick Ferrier, The Institutes of Metaphysics (EdinburghLondon: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1854). Plato, vol. 1, 87–8. Plato, vol. 1, 542–3. Plato, vol. 2, 492. “King Nomos” was a very effective expression coined by Grote (after Herodotus) to describe the power of custom, of a set of uncritically accepted traditional beliefs. It tends to produce “the orthodox citizen.” This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 316 giorgini who had an eristic character and “threw out more startling novelties in ethical doctrine, than either Hippias or Protagoras, or any of the other persons denounced as Sophists.”49 Consequently, we can better appreciate the value and innovativeness of Grote’s general depiction of the sophists when we contrast it with his portrait of Socrates, which is similarly well-balanced and innovative. In general, Socrates and the sophists are the champions of what Grote called “the dialectic age.”50 In this definition he followed a hint from Aristotle, who observed that the earlier philosophers had no part in dialectics: “dialectical force did not yet exist.”51 Interestingly, in dating the beginning of dialectics in the fifth century Grote attributed its start to “the Athenian drama and dikastery,” namely to the tragic poets and to the practices of courts, where diverging opinions confronted each other in a battle for the truth.52 Grote started his examination of Socrates by saying that he was the first thinker who “brought into conscious review the method of philosophising.”53 Socrates introduced a complete revolution in method because he did not try to impart a positive doctrine: Grote emphasized the “negative” aspect of Socratic dialectic, namely the fact that Socrates questioned the basic assumptions of his society concerning morality and politics: “A person more thoroughly Eristic than Sokrates never lived”—he commented in his Plato.54 This is not Socrates’ only claim to greatness: for Grote, he was also the first thinker to “conceive the idea of an ethical science with its appropriate end, and with precepts capable of being tested and improved.”55 However, he saw in Socrates’ deliberate attempt at questioning and shaking common-sense truths and commonplaces his most original and important contribution.56 It is at this stage that the tone of Grote’s 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Plato, vol. 1, 395. Plato, vol. 1, viii. Aristotle, Metaphysics A 987b32. Cf. Grote, Plato, vol. 1, 96. Plato, vol. 1, p. 256: “Both the drama and the dikastery recognise two or more different ways of looking at a question, and require that no conclusion shall be pronounced until opposing disputants have been heard and compared.” Plato, vol. 1, 95. Plato, vol. 3, 479. Elsewhere in this work Grote says that “the Elenchus is the grand and sovereign purification” and the “great Sokratic accomplishment and mission”: vol. 2, 409. History, 67, 447. At the time of writing his Plato, in his examination of the Republic, Grote will provide a more complex portrait of Socrates, or rather of Plato, which can be epitomized by the following quote: “While his spokesman Sokrates was leader of the opposition, Plato delighted to arm him with the maximum of negative cross-examining acuteness: but here Sokrates has passed over to the ministerial benches [. . .]” (vol. 3, 165). And further on we read: “He [Socrates] is no longer a dissenter amidst a community of fixed, inherited, This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 317 prose rises and the horizon of his analysis broadens while his attention focuses on his contemporary society: The phenomenon here adverted to is too obvious, even at the present day, to need further elucidation as matter of fact. In morals, in politics, in political economy, on all subjects relating to man and society, the like confident persuasion of knowledge without the reality is sufficiently prevalent: the like generation and propagation, by authority and example, of unverified convictions, resting upon strong sentiment, without consciousness of the steps or conditions of their growth; the like enlistment of reason as the one-sided advocate of a pre-established sentiment; the like illusion, because every man is familiar with the language, that therefore every man is master of the complex facts, judgments, and tendencies, involved in its signification, and competent both to apply comprehensive words and to assume the truth or falsehood of large propositions, without any special analysis or study.57 It is at this level that Grote makes his analysis of the ancient thinkers bear on the contemporary situation by introducing the timeless notion of the “orthodox citizen” who, in any epoch, “does not feel himself in need of philosophers to tell him what is truth or what is virtue, nor what is the difference between real and fancied knowledge.” This orthodox citizen belongs to any society of any age, and is not characterized by any specific social, political or economic condition but rather by his uncritical acceptance of the beliefs and values of his society: Such feeling of disapprobation and antipathy against speculative philosophy and dialectic—against the libertas philosophandi—counts as a branch of virtue among practical and orthodox citizens, rich or poor, oligarchical or democratical, military or civil, ancient or modern.58 Grote’s treatment of certain Platonic dialogues goes in the same direction and serves the same purpose, namely to show the importance of the Socratic negative method. In this perspective, Grote interpreted the Euthyphro as Plato’s 57 58 convictions. He is himself in the throne of King Nomos: the infallible authority, temporal as well as spiritual, from whom all public sentiment emanates, and by whom orthodoxy is determined” (vol. 3, 240). History, 438. Plato, vol. 1, 263. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 318 giorgini subtle attempt at showing how the pretence of knowledge about divine things may prompt a believer to commit terrible acts like indicting one’s own father. Examining the two Hippias, he commented—on the authority of Aristotlethat the search for definitions was a valuable novelty introduced by Socrates to which his contemporaries, including the sophists, were not accustomed to. The result is that Hippias is derided in the two dialogues because unable to grasp a general definition instead of providing examples. On a more general level, Grote found that Socrates’ way to purge the mind of its presumption to knowledge and to search for the truth was a “genuine inductive method” and was therefore similar to that of Bacon. In support of this necessity of intellectual purification preached by Socrates as a precondition to genuine knowledge, Grote quoted many passages from the Novum Organon and even from the contemporary astronomer John Herschel. Consequently, he saw in Plato’s depiction of Socrates in his dialogues—arguing and counter-arguing often without reaching an apparent positive result—a confirmation of the mostly didactic value Plato attributed to them: the dialogues were designed to illustrate the genuine Socratic spirit and his “negative” dialectic. And Grote very reasonably added that if Plato had wished to communicate a positive doctrine to his readers, he would have plainly done so, without leaving his “purpose thus in the dark, visible only by the microscope of a critic.”59 As a result, Grote consistently interpreted the many Platonic dialogues which end with an apparently negative result “as being really negative and nothing beyond.”60 The great merit of the dialogues of search, he will say further on, is to be suggestive of the process of trial and error by which the human mind dispels mistakes and searches for the truth.61 By comparing the method and respective target of Socrates and the sophists, Grote concluded that it was wrong to suppose that, because they were at variance and Socrates was obviously a good person and philosopher, the latter were corrupt teachers. For “as they aimed at qualifying young men for active life, they accepted the current ethical and political sentiment, with its unexamined commonplaces and inconsistencies, merely seeking to shape it into what was accounted a meritorious character at Athens.”62 Conversely, the method and mission of Socrates “could not but prove eminently unpopular and obnoxious.”63 For he showed people who were convinced of their 59 60 61 62 63 History, 453. Plato, vol. 1, 9. Plato, vol. 1, 402. History, 456. History, 466. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 319 knowledge that they were in fact profoundly ignorant; this painful realization made some of these people his fiercest enemies. Grote states this very clearly in his Plato: “Nothing can be more repugnant to an ordinary mind than the thorough sifting of deep-seated, long familiarised, notions.”64 In depicting such unconventional portraits of Socrates and the sophists Grote succeeded in showing their theoretical differences while emphasizing their similar practical impact on their contemporaries: they were almost undistinguishable by the ordinary Athenian who found them subversive thinkers, critics of the customs and mores. Grote then attacked the contemporary historians of philosophy who accused the sophists of being corruptors of the Greek youth and drew a sharp distinction between them and Socrates by remarking that the charges they press on the sophists are exactly the same which were urged against Socrates by his contemporaries. This unfair treatment is evident if one looks at dialogues such as the Parmenides, with its contradictory hypotheses about the one and the many, which would be considered empty sophistry if attributed to an author other than Plato. In addition, by looking at the evidence fairly, it appeared evident that the sophists had no reason to question the beliefs and values of the cities they visited and where they thrived whereas Socrates used his dialectical tools exactly for this purpose: “the negative analysis was the weapon of Sokrates, and not of Protagoras, Prodikus, Hippias, &c.”65 This conviction is reinforced by his examination of the Apology of Socrates, which in his opinion substantially reproduces the real defence pronounced by Socrates before the jury and the people of Athens. This work shows that Socrates thought his general mission to be to question the established beliefs passing for knowledge “whereby King Nomos governs.”66 The Crito is interpreted as both a sequel to and a correction of the Apology, for in it Plato shows Socrates’ constitutional allegiance as well as his individuality as a free thinker. Indeed, in Socrates’ statement that there can be no common deliberation between those who uphold an opinion like his and those who do not, Grote found an example of the “Protagorean dogma,” namely the doctrine of the homo mensura: “my reason and conscience is the measure for me.”67 It is in his examination of the Platonic dialogues devoted to the two greatest sophists, Protagoras and Gorgias, that Grote gave his best in his novel interpretation of the sophists. When he came to examine the Protagoras he found in it a contrast between Socrates “the analytical enquirer and cross-examiner” and 64 65 66 67 Plato, vol. 2, 12. Plato, vol. 1, 260, fn k. Plato, vol. 1, 296. Plato, vol. 1, 305. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 320 giorgini the famous sophist portrayed as an “eloquent popular lecturer,” who adopts a showy method in order to teach the same morality upheld by all citizens: far from questioning or overthrowing the values of the city, Protagoras gives them for granted and “fixed in the public sentiments.”68 And when it comes to the content of Protagoras’ doctrines, Grote finds them not only in conformity with the common opinion of the age but also quite true. He can then conclude that Plato’s intention in this dialogue does not seem to be to prove Protagoras wrong and to deride his ideas but rather to work through the dialogue his idea that virtue is knowledge and consists in a right measurement and choice of pleasures and pain, obtained through an art (or science) of measurement. Again, in the examination of the Gorgias Grote’s sound reasoning, based on textual evidence as well as on matter-of-fact observation of everyday life, issues in a solid argument in defence of the sophists. It was (and still is) typical to argue that the character of Callicles propounds theories taught by the sophists at Athens, such as the superiority by nature of the strongest. But—Grote observed- besides being unlikely if not altogether impossible that the sophists taught such a doctrine in a democratic city, it must be noted that Plato introduces Callicles as a rhetorician who aspires at becoming an influential politician: he is not presented as a sophist; indeed, Callicles despises sophists and philosophers alike. We may then refer to the Theaetetus for further illumination. This dialogue presents and deals with Protagoras’ most famous doctrine, according to which “man is the measure of all things.” Grote maintained that this celebrated statement should not be construed as implying that every opinion is true but rather that “every opinion delivered by any man is true, to that man himself.”69 Plato omits this all-important qualification in his discussion with the result of making Protagoras’ doctrine self-refuting: a consequence which is easily avoided if the doctrine is correctly interpreted as meaning that each truth is relative to the person who maintains it. What Protagoras meant to argue was that there is no object without a subject; in modern, Kantian language we could say that he wanted to deny the existence of “the Thing in itself,” of something existing beyond our perceptions. Furthermore, Protagoras did not maintain that all measures are equal in value for some are better than others: “How far any person is a measure of truth to others, depends upon the estimation in which he is held by others.” The Protagorean doctrine is thus perfectly consistent with great diversity in knowledge and other capacities between one human being and the other.70 68 69 70 Plato, vol. 2, 73–5. Plato, vol. 2, 347–8. Plato, vol. 2, 351. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 321 It is at this level that the tone of Grote’s prose rises again, when he states his profound dissent with Socrates’ criticism of Protagoras: for he believes that the logic of the homo mensura formula is not only inescapable in philosophical argument, where each speaker is taken as the measure of truth for oneself; but it is also the foundation of any liberal society which does not silence discussion. In fact, dialectical discussion, philosophical argument, the very Socratic method stand on the premise that each man’s beliefs are true relatively to him; but this does not imply that he is omniscient or infallible. The significance Grote attributes to this point is signalled by his entering the discussion using the first person: “I for my part admit this distinction to be real and important. Most other persons admit the same.”71 By denying the truth of the Protagorean assumption, “the basis of all free discussion and scrutiny is withdrawn: philosophy, or what is properly called reasoned truth, disappears.” The foundation of philosophy, interpreted as the search for truth, implying the questioning and replacement of opinion, is exactly the Protagorean formula, because the philosopher as free thinker, as opposed to the dogmatist, wants to examine even the most revered opinions (and allows others to do the same with his): indeed, “no one demands more emphatically to be a measure for himself, even when all authority is opposed to him, than Sokrates in the Platonic Gorgias.”72 Grote maintains that the alternative to the Protagorean position is to pronounce someone unfit to be the measure of truth for himself and then substitute oneself for him or her; or some other authority, like “the King, the Pope, the Priest, the Judges or Censors, the author of some book, or the promulgator of such and such doctrine.”73 Such a view is despotic in character and contradicted by evidence, because observation shows that this natural intolerance prevalent among mankind is coupled with diversity of opinion about truth: “that which governs the mind as infallible authority in one part of the globe, is treated with indifference or contempt elsewhere”—he judiciously observed.74 Since “no infallible objective mark, no common measure, no canon of evidence, recognised by all, has yet been found” a consistent philosopher (and a liberal thinker) must rest content to be a measure for himself and for those 71 72 73 74 Plato, vol. 2, 355. Plato, vol. 2, 363. In his examination of Plato’s Sophist Grote points out that the conclusion urged there—that the intelligible world is also relative—amounts to a defence of Protagoras’ dictum, which denied the existence of an Absolute: vol. 2, 440. Plato, vol. 2, 359. Plato, vol. 2, 360. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 322 giorgini who are persuaded by his arguments; again, the alternative is intolerance and despotism.75 Quite naturally, the rehabilitation of the sophists from the accusation of immorality and impiety went hand in hand with Grote’s re-evaluation of Athenian democracy. Far from attacking the democratic government which condemned Socrates, Grote observed that he was allowed to continue his mission of cross-examining his fellow-citizens for over twenty-five years, a feat impossible in any other Greek city: It was this established liberality of the democratical sentiment at Athens which so long protected the noble eccentricity of Sokrates from being disturbed by the numerous enemies which he provoked.76 Grote’s Legacy It is hard to underestimate the daring novelty of Grote’s interpretation of the sophists: the combination of subtle philosophical analysis, background historical knowledge, sheer good sense in dealing with different interpretations, complete familiarity with the contemporary literature and the evident presence of a political agenda (which gave to his account a vibrant twist) made his image of the sophists almost revolutionary for the age.77 Grote succeeded in rescuing the sophists from their bad fame, in demonstrating—both with reasoning and with textual evidence- that they were serious thinkers undeserving of the name 75 76 77 It is very interesting, and noteworthy, that Grote’s friend and liberal theorist John Stuart Mill completely disagreed with him on this point. For Mill “the truth of a belief does not consist in its being believed, but in its being in accordance with fact”: John Stuart Mill, “Grote’s Aristotle” in Collected Works, vol. 11, 500–1 fn. See also his “Grote’s Plato” in Collected Works, vol. 11, 427. Among the reception of Grote’s portrait of Protagoras especially interesting is E.M. Cope’s, “Plato’s ‘Theaetetus’ and Mr. Grote’s Criticisms” in Kyriakos N. Demetriou, ed., Classics in the Nineteenth Century: Responses to George Grote (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004), vol. 1, xliv, xlv. History, 467. Grote reiterated this idea in his Plato: “Nowhere else except at Athens could Sokrates have gone on until seventy years of age talking freely in the market-place against the received political and religious orthodoxy” (vol. 2, 493). This is not to deny that there were, or had been, other dissonant voices in the interpretation of the sophists. See Whedbee, “British Reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850,” 614 ff. Grote, however, accomplished something unprecedented because of the unique refinement and completeness of his account, which had an unparalleled influence on the readers. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 323 of corruptors of the Greek mores. His portrait was at once accurate in using the historical sources and unprecedented in its final results. In addition, he presented the readers with a novel image of the relationship between Socrates (and Plato) and the sophists, where the former was shown to be the real “dissenter” who questioned the traditional beliefs and the authority of convention (King Nomos); whilst the latter more readily accepted the values of the city where they worked and thrived as teachers of virtue and the art of speech: they taught the traditional morality of the city and the rules of speaking in a specific context and political arrangement. However, Plato’s influence and old philosophical and political prejudices proved hard to dispel and Grote’s image of the sophists remained far from mainstream. If his close friend and fellow Radical philosopher John Stuart Mill shared almost completely his portrait of the sophists,78 it is fair to say that Grote’s line of interpretation remained a minority position. It was likely a combination of philosophical and political reasons which continued to keep the sophists in a minor role in the history of Greek, and more generally, Western philosophy. Grote was successful in dispelling the accusation of their being mere quibblers and corruptors of the youth; but he was not able to credit them with being original and important thinkers, their importance being almost always completely overshadowed by Plato. However, Grote’s refined and comprehensive account provided for the first time a powerful counterinterpretation of the thought and role of the sophists in Greek civilization and Western thought, an alternative to the dominant, nay hegemonic, view current at the age (and for centuries before). An interesting contemporary case is represented by the book of Théophile Funck-Brentano, Les sophistes grecs et les sophistes contemporaines, where thinkers such as Comte, J.S. Mill and Spencer are portrayed as maintaining similar philosophical outlooks as the ancient sophists: they are persuaded that there is no truth and that a battle of interpretations rages in all fields.79 On the other hand, two great British classicists, Benjamin Jowett and Alexander Grant, acknowledged the many merits of Grote’s assessment of the sophists but maintained that philosophically they were second-rate thinkers and that the moral accusations levelled at them was not an invention of Plato since they had incurred ill repute at Athens before his 78 79 For their differences see Giovanni Giorgini, “Radical Plato: John Stuart Mill, George Grote and the Revival of Plato in Nineteenth-Century England,” History of Political Thought 30 (2009): 617–46. See Théophile Funck-Brentano, Les sophistes grecs et les sophistes contemporaines (Paris: Plon, 1879). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 324 giorgini appearance.80 However, Grote’s reassessment of the sophists received harsh criticism but found also some admirers, such as the Cambridge utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who hailed it as a “historical discovery of the highest order.”81 Among the few authors who completely accepted Grote’s account of the sophists in the late nineteenth century there was the Austrian ancient philosopher Theodor Gomperz, author of a monumental and influential work on “the Greek Thinkers.” Gomperz, himself a liberal thinker and translator and editor of John Stuart Mill in German, spoke of “The age of Enlightenment” to describe fifth century Greek philosophy and especially the impact of the sophists and the atomistic philosophers on Greek society.82 In the twentieth century the reception of the sophists began to change in the 1930s when Plato became associated with Fascism and Nazism. A dramatic turn occurred after World War Two or, more precisely, after the publication of Karl Popper’s The Open Society an Its Enemies (1945), where Plato was indicted of being a “totalitarian” philosopher and the first systematic defender of a “holistic” view of the State.83 Regardless of its philosophical shortcomings and factual philological mistakes, the book had a huge impact on Plato’s scholarship and, more generally, on the interpretation of Greek philosophy. As a fairly predictable consequence, the sophists were rehabilitated as champions of free thinking, an interpretation which would find its peak in E. Havelock’s The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, where the sophists appeared as Plato’s counterpart and as proto-liberal thinkers.84 A more balanced assessment was 80 81 82 83 84 See Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to Plato’s Sophist in The Dialogues of Plato, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), vol. 3, 325 ff.; Alexander Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1866), vol. 1, 104–55. See Henry Sidgwick, “The Sophists,” Journal of Philology 4 (1872): 288–307. Theodor Gomperz, Griechische Denker (Leipzig: Velt, 1896–1909); English translation: The Greek Thinkers (London: J. Murray, 1901–12). Gomperz was the translator and editor of John Stuart Mill’s works in German and became Mill’s friend and the promulgator of his philosophy in the German-speaking world. See Adelaide Weinberg, Theodor Gomperz and John Stuart Mill (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1963). Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945),vol. 1: The Spell of Plato. The book sparkled a huge controversy over Plato’s “totalitarianism,” with accusers and defenders. For a good assessment see Renfort Bambrough, ed., Plato, Popper and Politics (Cambridge: Heffer, 1967); Kyriakos N. Demetriou, “A ‘Legend’ in Crisis: The Debate over Plato’s Politics, 1930–1960,” Polis 19 (2002): 61–91. Eric Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (London: Methuen, 1957). The book was the target of a scathing review by Leo Strauss, who opposed solid philosophical and historical reasons to the alleged existence of a Greek Enlightenment and of an ancient Liberalism: “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” [1959], reprinted in Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 26–64. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 325 put forth by the Cambridge classicist W.K.C. Guthrie, author of a very influential History of Greek Philosophy, who in 1969 could still write: “Until comparatively recently the prevailing view, the view in which a scholar of my own generation was brought up, was that in his quarrel with the Sophists Plato was right. He was what he claimed to be, the real philosopher or lover of wisdom, and the Sophists were superficial, destructive, and at worst deliberate deceivers, purveyors of sophistry in the modern sense of the term.”85 After Guthrie another English author has been instrumental in reviving the thought of the sophists and in reassessing their value: G.B. Kerferd. In his The Sophistic Movement (1981), Kerferd described the traditional position of the sophists in these terms: “Condemned to a kind of half-life between Presocratics to the one hand and Plato and Aristotle on the other, they seem to wander for ever as lost souls.”86 Kerferd attributed their sad fate to a combination of factors: the fact that none of their works survived to allow an independent exploration and Plato’s hostility, made worse by his literary and philosophical genius. In France a powerful reassessment strongly influenced by Grote’s main ideas was given by the Thucydides scholar Jacqueline de Romilly in Les grands sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès: she depicted them, and especially Protagoras and Gorgias, as champions of free thought and masters of the art of reasoning who exercised considerable influence on the development of Western civilization.87 A generation of ancient scholars, led by Barbara Cassin, followed in her footsteps.88 Finally, in Italy an echo of Grote’s lesson can be found in the works of the ancient philosopher Mario Untersteiner, author of a ground-breaking, dense volume on the sophists (translated in many languages) and of an edition of their fragments characterized by immense erudition coupled with very original interpretations.89 Differently from Grote, Untersteiner believed that “la Sofistica” was a school characterized by free thinking and criticism of the Parmenidean 85 86 87 88 89 W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 3, 10. George B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1. Jacqueline de Romilly, Les grands sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988); English edition: The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). De Romilly describes the sophists as “maitres à penser” and “maitres à parler” who produced a “real intellectual and moral revolution” (29). Barbara Cassin, ed., Positions de la sophistique (Paris: Vrin, 1986); L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Mario Untersteiner, I Sofisti (Turin: Einaudi, 1949); I Sofisti. Testimonianze e frammenti 4 vols. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1949–62). There exists an English translation by Kathleen Freeman: The Sophists (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954). Very interesting, also as a testimony of This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV 326 giorgini substance; he credited the sophists, together with the poet Aeschylus, to have discovered the “tragedy of being” because, as Protagoras put it, “about every thing (pragma) there are two contrasting discourses”;90 the sophists and the dramatic poets pointed out the existence of tragic moral dilemmas characterized by dike against dike: the possibility of having two contrasting logoi about everything meant, in Untersteiner’s interpretation, acknowledging the relativity of all values and the tragic impossibility to overcome the contradictions of reality; hence Protagoras’ grand view of man as the measure of all things in a world devoid of gods. Bibliography Bambrough, Renfort, ed. Plato, Popper and Politics. Cambridge: Heffer, 1967. Brandis, Christian August. Handbuch der Geschichte der Griechisch-Römischen Philosophie. Berlin: Reimer, 1835–1860. Cassin, Barbara, ed. Positions de la sophistique. Paris: Vrin, 1986. ——— ed. L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Demetriou, Kyriakos N. “A ‘Legend’ in Crisis: The Debate over Plato’s Politics, 1930– 1960.” Polis 19 (2002): 61–91. ——— ed. Classics in the Nineteenth Century: responses to George Grote. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004. de Romilly, Jacqueline. Les grands sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988; English edition: The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Ferrier, James Frederick. The Institutes of Metaphysics. Edinburgh-London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1854. Funck-Brentano, Théophile. Les sophistes grecs et les sophistes contemporaines. Paris: Plon, 1879. Giorgini, Giovanni. “Radical Plato: John Stuart Mill, George Grote and the Revival of Plato in Nineteenth-Century England.” History of Political Thought 30 (2009): 90 the spirit of the age, is Untersteiner’s other great work, La fisiologia del mito [1946] (2nd edition Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972). DK 80 A 1 = Diog. Laert. IX, 51. It is characteristic of Untersteiner’s interpretation that he translated pragma as “experience”; very interpretative and peculiar is also his rendering of Protagoras’ homo mensura as “man is the dominator of all experiences.” Untersteiner went on to argue that Protagoras’ “kreitton logos” was an anticipation of the concept. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV the sophists in context: george grote ’ s reappraisal 327 617–46. Gomperz, Theodor. Griechische Denker. Leipzig: Velt, 1896–1909; English edition: The Greek Thinkers. London: J. Murray, 1901–12. Grant, Alexander. The Ethics of Aristotle, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1866. Grote, George. “Institutions of Ancient Greece.” Westminster Review 5 (1926): 269–331. ———. A History of Greece, 12 vols. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1899; reprinted from the second London edition of 1888 by J. Murray. ———. Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3 vols. London: J. Murray, 1865. Guthrie, William Keith Chambers. A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Havelock, Eric. The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. London: Methuen, 1957. Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1840). Lincoln-London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Jowett, Benjamin, ed. The Dialogues of Plato 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1871. Kerferd, George B. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lewes, George Henry. The Biographical History of Philosophy, 2 vols. London: Charles Knight, 1845. Loizides, Antis. John Stuart Mill’s Platonic Heritage. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013. 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Whedbee, Karen E. “Reclaiming Rhetorical Democracy: George Grote’s Defense of Cleon and the Athenian Demagogues.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 71–95. ———. “Making the Worse Case Appear the Better: British Reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11: 603–30, 2008. Zeller, Eduard. Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlische Entwicklung. Tübingen: Fues, 1844–52; English edition: A History of Greek Philosophy, trans. S.F. Alleyne, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1881. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV