Fifth-century Athens, known as the Golden Age of Athens, oversaw the flourishing of Classical Greek Philosophy, dominated by the teacher-student duo of Plato and Socrates, two men dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom, who searched tirelessly for objective knowledge, who wanted to uncover the truth, who planted the seeds of knowledge that would influence ages to come. It was also during this period that a new breed of seekers came, whom Plato despised, whom we today connote with negativity: the Sophist. Nowadays, to call someone a sophist, or to say an argument is sophistic, is to call them deceitful, glib, and a fraud. However, while this figure is buried in stigma by history, there lies a greater story about this controversial lover of wisdom.
Before the word “sophist” acquired its negative connotations, it originally came from the Greek word for wisdom, σοφός, and was used to designate a wise man or sage, such as Thales, who was called one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, or even just a craftsman or artisan who was highly skilled at his trade. It was an honor, then, to be called a Sophist (σοφιστής), so teachers were quick to adopt the name, proud to bear its glory as they spread their knowledge throughout the lands. The Sophists were traveling teachers. They had no place they called home, and they went from city-state to city-state, looking for pupils, stopping at every public festival, where they could gather a crowd and amaze them with their impressive rhetoric, where they could present speeches designed to attract customers and get their name known. To Gomperz, the Sophist reminded him of a “half professor and half journalist,” for he wasted no time jumping upon new opportunities, seeking a new job, a new student in whom he could invest his knowledge.[1] The Sophist was, early in his career, regarded as a true sage, and he was bestowed great honors and respected by his peers for his vast areas of expertise. In public the Sophist spoke through epideixis (ἐπιδεικτικός), a form of oration in which the speaker is able to exhibit his skills or to praise some particular thing; and in private study the Sophist taught through dialectic (διαλεκτική), the same question-and-answer technique made famous by Socrates. Evidently, the Sophist was highly adaptable, and because he was always on the move, he was able to attract a large following and gain a reputation of the same magnitude. 
However, the Sophists taught by mouth alone, not pen, and none of their writings were written, as they were made with the intent of being performed in public, in front of an audience, not in private, for the delight of a reader. The fact that none of them established a school, too, contributes to a lack of primary sources regarding the Sophists’ ideas. Further, because no schools were made, and because their students were not permanent, there exist no student records. Other philosophers, like Socrates and Epictetus, despite not writing what they taught, have extant writings, because their students, Plato and Arrian, recorded them; the Sophists, contrarily, had no students to do so. Fortunately for the Sophist, he was able to prosper in a thriving intellectual climate, as Athens was, at the time, the center of philosophical thought, and it experienced a tremendous surge in intellectual pursuits brought forth by the leadership of Pericles. Education was therefore a major focus—perfect for the Sophists.
The targeted audience of the Sophists was select: their primary customers were young, eager-to-learn Athenian men, of whom there were plenty. Central to sophistic curriculum was political virtue, or areté (αρετέ). As Jaeger put it, “[T]he aim of the educational movement… was not to educate the people, but to educate the leaders of the people.”[2] Just as we in today’s education advertise school as a way of training our future leaders, so the Sophists in Athens’ education advertised their tutoring as a way of training their 
future leaders. Pericles was the paragon of democratic leadership, so it was important that youths were taught to emulate how he ruled. The best way to lead well, the Sophists believed, is through rhetoric, the art of speaking well (ευ λεγειν), of persuasion, of using language to the best of its abilities. Interestingly, the word “politician,” in Ancient Greece, was used interchangeably with “rhetor;” they were perfectly synonymous. Therefore, it was important that a good leader learn rhetoric, especially when he is young. So dedicated were they to their craft that the Sophists considered their teaching a techné (τέχνη), an art. For Sophist to refer to a trained craftsmen, and to have teaching be a craft, is to confirm that education, schooling, was first given its value in Ancient Athens, and for that we owe the Sophists. We find in Athens the idea that teaching is a delicate craft which requires perfecting and which is integral to a culture’s being. In addition to rhetoric, the Sophists tried to teach both practical and theoretical things, of the former day-to-day necessities, the latter liberal arts. So wide was their knowledge that they taught everything from natural science to metaphysics, grammar to poetry. For the most part, the Sophists accepted Pre-Socratic thinking, but they rejected Eleatic thought. Thus, cosmology was a popular subject, and students were taught the essentials, from Thales to Anaxagoras. Since grammar and rhetoric were taught, it was necessary that logic, too, was taught, meaning the Sophists were the inventors of the original trivium comprising grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Their lessons, for example, featured all kinds of logical problems and rules, and 
they also taught about different fallacies and how to avoid them in reasoning. Of theoretical knowledge there were two types the Sophists taught: factual and formal knowledge. Factual knowledge was just as it sounds, consisting of general, wide-ranging facts, encyclopedic in extent; formal knowledge was specific, and its intent was not so much on learning but training, specifically how to use knowledge to think critically and practically. According to the Sophists, who viewed teaching as a craft, virtue was teachable. Political virtue, areté, as well as virtues like temperance and courage, were able to be taught and were not acquired specially. The Appeal to Nature is commonly associated with the Sophists, the argument that whatever is natural is good, whatever is unnatural is bad. While this does not apply to every Sophist, it does capture the essence of their conflicting views regarding Nature. The disagreement was between convention (νομος) and nature herself (φύση), man-made law and natural law. Thrasymachus thought self-interest was morally right and that the stronger is better than the weaker; Callicles thought our self-conscious is what is right; and Iamblichus chose convention, stating that we ought to do whatever state laws tell us.
After the fifth-century, Sophism all but died out, but it was revived again in Rome during the Second Sophistic period, which ranges from approximately 60-230 A.D. The traveling teacher was brought back, and he became a sensation in a Roman-influenced Greece, where philosophy was going strong. However, the importance was shifted from philosophy to rhetoric, and as Will Durant writes, “It [philosophy] had been swallowed up in an ocean of rhetoric, and had ceased to think when it learned to speak.”[3] No longer was philosophy based on systematic thinking and the art of living; it had been replaced by rhetoric, and speech was valued above action, signaling the beginning of the decline of philosophy in the Western world. It was not all bad, though, and some good did come of the Second Sophistic; from it comes, like the value of education, arguably the first advocation of individualism. It was at this time that we saw men, without true homes, without anything to show for their work, traveling land to land, living off of that at which they were good, teaching whoever could pay them; we see true individualism—independent individuals making their way doing what they love, as though it were some kind of ancient American Dream. The Pre-Socratic philosophers philosophized about nature, the cosmos, and produced theories regarding that which was external to them; the Sophists, on the other hand, turned inwards, philosophizing about their fellow men. Consequently, there was a move from the theoretical to the practical, the cosmological to the humanistic, nature to man. The Sophists were “empirico-inductive” in their methods, examining what was before them and producing their theories from there, not from looking up at the stars, but at the society that surrounded them—humanity.[4]
So far, the Sophist seems a respectable figure responsible for the beginnings of higher education, humanism, and rhetoric; however, there is another side of the story, one that paints them in another, more sinister light. Probably the most distinctive thing about the Sophists was how they made money. As a pretty much homeless, traveling teacher, the Sophist had to make easy money, so he placed a fee on his lessons. While some Sophists were fair in their prices, most of them were not, pricing their lessons up to 10,000 Drachmas, equivalent to about $10,000 in today’s money. Because the prices were so high, only rich Athenians could afford lessons, a disadvantage to the poor and underprivileged. To exacerbate these conditions, Athens was the city-state with the most lawsuits, and since only rich men could get lessons in logic and rhetoric, it meant they could easily win. This is not to mention, of course, that it was considered dishonorable, ignoble, in Ancient Greece, to pay for another man’s knowledge. Many also thought professionalism boring and made fun of the Sophists for conducting their lessons accordingly, rebuking them for their private lessons taught in the privacy of one’s house. To say one’s argument is sophistic is an insult, for it means they have used cunning, deceitful, devious, and specious reasoning. This makes sense, because some Sophists could manipulate logic, easily able to win either side of an argument. Commonly, to show off, Sophists and later Skeptics would propose one side of an argument, present their case, then immediately switch to the other side and present an equally balanced argument. For this reason, the issue of lawsuits was even worse, for litigators could be taught unfair logical devices to beat their opponents.
Of the critics of the Sophists, Plato is the worst, evidenced by multiple of his dialogues, which make fun of the Sophists and poke holes in their reasoning. One thing Plato disapproved of was the fact that Sophists discounted objective knowledge, looking instead for relative knowledge, for according to the Sophists, only relative knowledge was possible. What is true for one person may not be true to another. Similarly, he scoffed at them for their phenomenalism. Plato believed in a higher realm, the world of Forms, in which all perfect entities exist, in which object knowledge resides; for the Sophists to claim that the phenomenal, or natural, world was the only existent thing, was, to Plato, distasteful and worthy of contempt. To believe that this imperfect world was the sole reality, thought Plato, is insane and an insult to objectivity. Regarding the lesson fees, Plato joked that if the fees were too low, it meant the lesson was just as worthless; and if they were too high, it meant it was outrageously expensive. One of the reasons Plato was repulsed by the Sophists was because they gave a bad name to Socrates. Socrates was considered a Sophist in its positive sense, and he used the dialectic properly in the search for truth; 
but to compare him to the Sophists of Plato’s time was like comparing God to Satan—unthinkable, a downright insult. Plato blamed the Sophists, in part, for Socrates’ death, seeing as they gave him a bad name, tainting his reputation forever. Plato called the Sophists “anti-logical” and eristic, since they sought not actual knowledge, but argumentation. Like teacher like student, Aristotle, too, following in the footsteps of Plato, turned his pen against the Sophists. He wrote that the Sophists practiced “wisdom which exists only in semblance” and “what appears to be philosophy but is not.”[5] In his Sophistical Refutations, he adds, “[T]he sophist is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom.”[6] For a long time Aristotle waged a philosophical war against the Megarian School (also known as the Eristics), infamous for its paradoxes and logic problems, at one point calling them “sophists,” thus creating the first official usage of the word as a negative one. From that point on, even throughout Imperial times, philosophers began accusing each other of being “sophists.”
The Sophist is a polarizing figure, on one side an educational hero, on the other an anti-logical fraud. Whether he is one or the other cannot be solved by history, as there are always two sides. In the end, while we can frown upon them, laughing at their professional ways, exposing their deceiving logic, we must also be grateful for all that they have done, for making education as important as it is today in our culture, for creating the trivium to which we are dedicated in English, for living the true American Dream, and most of all, for angering Plato and Socrates.
[1] Gomperz, The Greek Thinkers, Vol. 1, p. 414
[2] Jaeger, Paideia, Vol. 1, p. 290
[3] Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 3, p. 489
[4] Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 83
[5] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1004b20-27
[6] Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 165a22-24
For further reading:
The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization by Simon Hornblower (1998)
A History of Ancient Western Philosophy by Joseph Owens (1959)
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. 7 by Paul Edwards (1967)
A History of Philosophy Vol. 1 by Frederick Copleston (1993)
A Short History of Philosophy by Robert C. Solomon (1996)
The Greek Thinkers Vol 1. by Theodor Gomperz (1964)
The Story of Civilization Vol. 2 by Will Durant (1966)
The Story of Civilization Vol. 3 by Will Durant (1972)
Paideia Vol. 1 by Werner Jaeger (1945)
In book 8 section 47 of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes,
William Penn (1644-1718), founder of Pennsylvania, opens his book Some Fruits of Solitude with the following line:
Edwards was born in 1703, and it was evident he was destined for great things; at the age of 13, he was admitted to Yale. The young Edwards was always curious, nearly as bright and prolific as any professional writer, for he wrote numerous essays before going to college, his interests ranging from biology to philosophy, from spiders to metaphysics. Edwards was introduced to Newton and Locke a year after coming to Yale, diving head first into the most recent groundbreaking thought, committing himself to both men’s ideas. 
restricted church membership to saints and saint alone, reserving communion only for the elects. Edwards was a notorious speaker. His sermons were not traditional, insofar as he ruled through fear. H.W. Brands writes, “[H]is auditors shrieked and moaned, their horror exceeded only by the exquisiteness of their agony…. At least one listener was so moved that he decided to end his life rather than continue his torment.”[1]
This raises the question of how resistance comes to be, how resistance can exist outside the mind. According to Edwards, resistance is God’s doing, and if resistance is not resisting anything, which, he thinks, is irrational, then it is simply resistance. Therefore, if resistance is external to men’s minds, and if resistance is the work of God, then it must follow that this world in which we live is God’s creation—his mental creation, that is. Like Berkeley, Edwards conceived of a unique subjective idealism, since he saw reality as the mental creation of God. 
In his essay 
intransitive rather than transitive; in essence, Edwards thinks of benevolence not as directed toward a person, nor even as being directed, but as openness to everything. Instead of being benevolent 
Saints were predestined to achieve salvation, and they had access to benevolence. Edwards then tackled the Problem of Free Will in his essay 
The first battle was fought at White Mountain on November 8, 1620, between the Catholic League and the Protestant Union, shortly after the deposition of Ferdinand II. Leading the Catholics was the Count of Tilly (1559-1632), a Catholic at birth who at one point considered becoming a Jesuit. With an army of 20,000 men, he went to White Castle to confront Protestant commander Christian of Anhalt, who had an army of 24,000. Tilly easily defeated the Protestants, banishing anything that was not Catholicism—a major setback to the Protestants. 
So far, the Catholics looked as though they were going to win, having devastated the Protestants in two major battles without breaking a sweat. This changed, however, on May 20, 1626. Imperial forces were launching a full-on siege at the town of Magdeburg, and for months they hammered at it in vain with their cannons. Eventually they brought down the walls, and the soldiers, drunk, rushed in, brandishing their weapons, slaying every innocent civilian, setting fire to the houses, raping women, killing children, stealing everything they could find, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. The massacre was horrendous, and it painted a bad picture of the Catholics. Tilly, who was on duty at the time, was blamed for the massacre, the event permanently tainting his reputation, labeling him a monster. Deaths are estimated to be between 20,000-25,000. It appeared the tides had changed.
Pappenheim at Breitenfeld on September 15, 1631, Gustav set up two lines of soldiers, his Saxon ally John George preparing alongside him. Tilly commenced a slow yet steady barrage of artillery strikes in order, he hoped, to inflict heavy damage upon the Swedish. His cannons were too far to be effective. Tilly used the Spanish formation of the 
defeating the seemingly unstoppable Gustav, but, come winter, he decided to retreat, 6,000 cavalry on the left, 13,000 footmen on the right. Gustav took advantage of this movement and followed them with his 12,800 men and 6,200 horses. Thick fog had enveloped the area, blinding both forces; Gustav attacked anyway, diving into the battle. About halfway through, Gustav, who always enjoyed leading his cavalry without armor, charged the Imperial forces. The king was wounded during the charge and died, his fellow commander Bernard of Weimar taking over. John Forbes, a soldier who partook in the battle, wrote, 
Demoralized from the last battle, the Swedish lost again at Nördlingen in 1634. The date was September 6, and the Imperial Spanish had already set up their forces, half of them in front of the town, half of them situated on a hill. Their 20,000 men and 13,000 cavalry were to face off against the Swedes’ 16,000 men and 9,000 cavalry. The Swedish forces found themselves held up on a series of lower hills, and their plan was this: at daybreak, the forces would split up and attack through the valley and the town. Not to their aid was a wooded region through which they would have to traverse first. As they went through the woods, the army got confused, leading to friendly fire, the Swedish killing some of their own soldiers in the mix-up. Disoriented and weakened, the Swedish were like fish in a barrel, surrounded and taken out with ease by the Spanish. Friedrich Schiller said in his 
The Battle of Rocroi occurred on May 19, 1643, between French commander Duc d’Enghien (1621-1686) and Spanish commander Francisco de Melo. De Melo attacked the left flank and succeeded, while d’Enghien did the same to de Melo’s right. The French then struck the center, but the Spanish regrouped, resisting all further attacks. Determined to break their defenses, d’Enghien charged the Spanish four times, consecutively, until he finally broke them. Now surrounded the Spanish had no choice but to surrender. As the Spaniards were letting down their weapons, though, a stray gun fired, and the French, startled, slaughtered half of the Spanish soldiers on the spot. The Spanish had 8,000 men and 19,000 horses, of which 8,000 died and 7,000 were held captive; the French had 15,000 men and 7,000 horses. Rocroi proved d’Enghien’s battle skills—it should be noted, too, that he was only 22 at the time when he won the battle. He fought after the Thirty Years’ War, participating in the war against Louis XIV but was then recruited by him. 
country was divided, and riots and wars broke out between the provinces. Eventually, in 
Matthias chose Ferdinand II to be his successor. Several emissaries went to Hradschin castle in Prague for Matthias, hoping to negotiate with the Protestants. The Protestants were suspicious of the messengers, whom they knew were not visiting in their favor, and so seized and threw them out the third-story window, although they survived. This “Defenestration of Prague” (another occurred in the 15
On November 8, 1620, the first battle of the Thirty Years’ War was fought at White Mountain. The Catholic League easily beat the Protestant army. Ferdinand, now having control over Bohemia, completely outlawed Protestantism, imposing Catholicism on everyone. From 1618 to 1625 the war was limited to Germany, where the two leagues were fighting. Sensing that the Protestants were losing, having ended his previous war with Spain, Christian IV of Denmark joined the war, mostly out of commercial and political reasons, not for religious ones. At the same time, Albrecht von Wallenstein was recruited by Ferdinand to lead the Catholics. Albrecht was unbelievably wealthy, so he was able to acquire a large, able army that was loyal to him alone. Despite winning several battles, Wallenstein was dismissed by the Emperor in 1630, for he feared that Wallenstein would turn against him. The end of the Danish phase was 1619, also when the Edict of Restitutions was released. All property of the Church since 1555 had to be paid for by the Protestants, and the Holy Roman Empire got to re-appropriate the land. It appeared as though the Protestants were going to lose—that is, until 1630, when the Swedish phase began. Before Wallenstein was removed, he and his troops had marched on Baltic soil. 
Gustavus “the Lion of the North” Adolphus II, King of Sweden, took much offense to this, afraid that the Catholics might advance into his homeland. In 1631 he won the Battle of Breitenfeld with his superior army, equipped with modern weaponry and disciplined with brilliant stratagems. He went on to conquer Denmark, Poland, and Finland, destroying any hopes of German unity. The desperate Ferdinand called Wallenstein back to repel Gustav. During the Battle of Lützen in 1632, though, Gus was killed in a courageous feat, yet his army, in the end, won, notwithstanding the tragic loss. Thereafter, the Swedes experienced a stroke of bad luck, losing miserably at Nördlingen in 1634. Wallenstein, who was now conspiring behind Ferdinand’s back, was assassinated when the latter found out. The Peace of Prague was signed in 1635, when Ferdinand offered to repeal the Edict of Restitutions, only if the Germanic princes agreed to help expel the Swedes. Over in France, Cardinal Richelieu disapproved of the Peace, as he wanted to continue the war, hoping to overthrow the Habsburg dynasty and establish France as a superpower; as a result, he decided enough was enough and declared war, both on the Holy Roman Empire and on Spain, initiating the French phase (1635-1648). Also known as the international phase, this period saw the involvement not only of the French but the Scottish and Finnish. The Thirty Years’ War was truly international: Germany, Spain, Sweden, France, Denmark, and Scotland were the main forces. French commander Duc d’Enghien beat the Spanish at Rocroi in 1643; thenceforth, the Spain’s military splendor began to decline. Talk of peace began in 1644. For the first time in 200 hundred years, all the international nations met in one place to discuss peace terms. Negotiations continued for another four years, each nation changing its terms as the war progressed. Finally, in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, concluding the Thirty Years’ War.
In the end, Germany got it worst, while the international forces got it best. The Habsburg dynasty lost tremendous land and lost just as much influence in Germany, surrendering most of their power to the local princes; therefore, all central power was lost, along with it the idea of unity, the nation more divided than ever. Calvinism was finally accepted as a legitimate religion, though not too many princes chose it. The decline of the Church became apparent, the war being only the beginning of its fall. Church and state were no longer one, but separate entities, neither influencing the other. It is estimated that about seven million German lives alone were lost. Edward Calamy reported in 1641, “Germany… is a place of dead men’s skulls… and a field of blood.”[1]
who invaded and ravaged their land. After the Thirty Years’ War, Germany despised France, understandably. Spain was weakened alongside Germany, and it lost its position as a superpower. France, however, became not quite as strong as England, but perhaps the strongest nation in Central Europe. The warring between France and Spain was perpetuated after the war and continued for several more years during the 
Epictetus said in 
Psychology and medicine, finding their beginnings in Greek culture, have come a long way; and since their speculative foundations, their influence has become larger, more pertinent, and more accurate than ever before, with the invention of prosthetics in the field of medicine and cognitive studies in psychology, for example. It seems as though anything is possible, as though nothing cannot be achieved. One may wonder, then, from where psychology came, from whom modern medicine developed. Small questions, like why, when someone is in a bad mood, we say they are in bad humor; or why, when someone is angry, we say they are hot-blooded, or short-tempered, never fail to come up regarding the origins of either discipline. A glance through history, to the invention of psychology, can show us the foundations of both psychology and medicine—the ancient system of 
Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BC), who is most renown for the Hippocratic Oath, which is still used today. Despite the countless contributions he has made to medicine, there is difficulty when it comes to pinpointing which works he actually wrote and which works were written by either his student Polybus or perhaps even rival doctors of his. Some of his works, furthermore, seem to diverge in content, contradicting earlier theories. Central to Hippocrates’ method was a holistic approach to the body. “Hippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the body can only be understood as a whole,”
generation, “And thus they [the Ancients] arrived at their four humors, of which the pituita [phlegm] is held to be cold and moist; the black bile cold and dry; the yellow bile hot and dry; and the blood hot and moist.”[4]
While one should strive for an ideal balance, eucrasia, one should stay as far away as possible from dyscrasia (
temperaments arising from the four humors. (Temperament, interestingly, translates to mixture!) In fact, “Before the invention of the clinical thermometer and even for some time afterwards, bodily ‘temperature’ was only a synonym for ‘temperament.’”[9] His theory of the four temperaments is so influential that their adjectives have carried over today: too much blood creates a 
psychologists of personality. The infamous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI (1943), can be seen as a derivative. It utilizes different traits to arrive at a certain personality. Those who wish to know their personality have to decide if they are introvert or extrovert, if they intuit or sense, think or feel, and perceive or judge. Another option, the Big Five, or Big Three (1949), identifies people based on their levels of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Big Three limits the scales to neuroticism, extraversion, and openness. Lastly, the direct descendant is psychologist Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997), whose method of deducing personality was influenced entirely by Galen. Eysenck created a dichotomy between extraversion and introversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, recognizing several character traits reminiscent of Galen.
Neologikon 