As we have repeatedly verified, competition with other ‘intellectuals’ was crucial for the sophists: while poets and philosophers were their primary targets, they engaged in an equally staunch polemic against the representatives of other forms of knowledge (the so-called technai), such as medicine, music, agriculture, and mathematics. The sophists affirmed the superiority of their teaching against such people as well. As far as we can tell, this claim was advanced in two different ways. In the case of Hippias (a famous polymath), and probably of Prodicus and Antiphon too, the sophists claimed to be as competent as specialists in a wide range of subjects: this explains the interest of sophists such as Hippias and Antiphon in geometrical problems (86B21 = 36D36L.-M.; 87B13 D.-K. = 37D 36a–b and R14–16 L.-M.), and Prodicus’ focus on agriculture.Footnote 1
In other cases, especially those of Protagoras and Gorgias, the competition with specialist forms of knowledge takes a far more heated form. While these sophists do not claim to have mastered specialist fields, they argue that their knowledge – the new knowledge of the sophists – allows them to prevail even over such fields. The techne ton logon – that is, the art of speeches taught by the sophists – allows them to take on the other technai in their own fields and even to gain the upper hand. Thus, in the Gorgias, Gorgias relates that, when he accompanied his brother, a physician, on his visits, he was often more successful than him – a specialist – in persuading patients to undergo treatment. From this he concludes that, in the presence of a public audience, rhetoric is capable of conquering specialist forms of knowledge: in the case of conflict, a layman will choose to be treated by a rhetor rather than a doctor (Gorgias, 456a–c). In Protagoras’ case, too, we have sources attesting to a polemical engagement with the technai:
Not even this is true, that mensuration deals with perceptible and perishable magnitudes; for then it would have perished, when they perished. And astronomy also cannot be dealing with perceptible magnitudes nor with this heaven above us. For neither are perceptible lines such lines as the geometer speaks of (for no perceptible thing is straight or curved in this way; for a hoop touches a straight edge not at a point, but as Protagoras said it did, in his refutation of the geometers [that is along a line]).
(80B7 D.-K. partly reproduced by L.-M. as 31D33)Footnote 2
Alongside geodesics, astronomy, and geometry, we cannot rule out medicine as a polemical target. One treatise from the Hippocratic Corpus, significantly entitled The Art (peri technes), polemically alludes to some unspecified ‘professional slanderers’, and it is tempting to see this as a reference to Protagoras (and possibly Gorgias as wellFootnote 3). Plato, too, reports this attitude in the Sophist, alluding to treatises by Protagoras on wrestling and other arts (232d–e = 80B8 D.-K. = 31D2 L.-M.). In all likelihood, the reference here is not to wrestling but to the capacity that Protagoras claimed to possess: the ability to ‘contradict each individual expert in a given subject’ – be it cosmology, theology, politics, or philosophy. As insightfully noted by Paolo Fait, these testimonies can also help clarify the meaning of what was probably Protagoras’ most famous work, the Kataballontes logoi (The Overthrower Arguments or, better, The Knockdown Arguments), which contains the ‘man-measure’ thesis.Footnote 4 In this respect, it is worth quoting the following testimony on Pericles:
There is on record also a certain saying of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, touching the clever persuasiveness of Pericles, a saying uttered in jest. Thucydides belonged to the party of the ‘Good and True’, and was for a very long time a political antagonist of Pericles. When Archidamus, the king of the Lacedaemonians, asked him whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler, he replied: ‘Whenever I throw him in wrestling (katabalo palaion), he, disputing the fall (antilegon), carries the point, and persuades the very men who saw him fall.’
(Plutarch, Life of Pericles, 8.3–4)
The presence of two key terms, the verbs kataballo and antilego, clearly suggests a Protagorean context. The Kataballontes logoi, therefore, are those speeches or arguments that have the power to defeat one's opponent; and putting pupils in the condition to compete against anyone was the aim of antilogies.
An analysis of testimonies about the sophists’ engagement with specialist forms of knowledge once again confirms their agonistic approach: through such polemics, they sought to present their teaching as superior to that of other specialists, be they poets, scientists, or philosophers.Footnote 5 This ‘architectural’ vocation – to quote an Aristotelian expression – of sophistic knowledge vis-à-vis all other forms of knowledge finds an exemplary expression in a statement attributed to Gorgias: ‘Gorgias the orator said that those who neglect philosophyFootnote 6 but dedicate themselves to the ordinary disciplines (ta enkuklia mathemata) are similar to the suitors, who desired Penelope but slept with the maidservants’ (82B29 D.-K. = 32P22 L.-M.) If we consider the ideological value that technai possessed in fifth-century democratic Athens, we once again realize just how provocative the sophists’ activity was.
A reaction from the sophists’ opponents, however, was not long in coming. The Hippocratic treatise The Art has already been mentioned; see for instance Chapter 1:
Some there are who have made an art of vilifying the arts, though they consider, not that they are accomplishing the object I mention, but that they are making a display of their own knowledge. …To be eager to bring shame through the art of abuse upon the discoveries of others, improving nothing but disparaging before those who do not know the discoveries of those who do, seems to me to be not the ambition and work of intelligence, but the sign of a nasty nature, or of want of art.
To this one may add other texts from the Corpus hippocraticum (e.g. On the Nature of Man, 1–8) or certain passages from Plato (from the Sophist and Euthydemus) and Aristotle (especially from the Sophistical Refutations). Indeed, the specious nature of these polemics contributed to fuel the suspicion that the sophists were incompetent and merely eristic (from the Greek eris, ‘discord’) debaters: they were incompetent because they did not really grasp the things they were talking about, and merely eristic because they were only interested in winning debates. In certain cases, at least, it is difficult to dismiss these charges.
