CHAPTER IV
The Political Theory of the Sophists
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THE RISE OF ETHICAL AND POLITICAL SPECULATION
The natural tendency of early Greek thought was one which accepted the order of the State and the rules which it enforced without murmur and without question. Men were born, and lived, and died, under ancient customs, whose origin no man knew. It was dimly felt that they were divine: it was certainly recognized that they were rigid and fundamental. No enacted law (νόμоς) had yet come: an unchanging custom (δίκη or Right) guided the lives of men. The sense of an inevitable order of human life was so powerful, that by comparison the life of the earth, with all its flux and change, with its lightning and tempest, might well seem incalculable and indeterminate. In human life all was appointed. You did this, and that followed. It was not so in Nature. ‘Man lived in a charmed circle of law and custom, and all around the world was lawless.’1 It was possible, as we have seen, for a thinker like Anaximander to attempt to import order into the physical world, by showing that there was a principle of ‘justice’ in all its changes, and by arguing from the undoubted fact of man’s law to the probability of a law in the world. On the other hand, when thinkers had detected a law in the world, it was natural that they should use this law to illustrate and to defend the similar and equally valid law of man. But the process of history was none the less slowly undermining the stability of human order. Colonization, which led to the formation, by human hands, of new States with new laws, was tearing men loose from the old vesture of custom, and unsettling traditional stability. A new religious movement came: a fresh ritual, a system of ‘mysteries’, appeared, resulting sometimes in the growth of new religious societies independent of the State, sometimes, as at Athens, in an alteration of the State religion which admitted the new ritual into its pale. Legislators became active in many States: a Solon or a Charondas gave laws to Athens or to Catana. Here was an obvious making of law by man: was all law of a similar institution? Had legislators everywhere laid down laws (
): had peoples everywhere adopted laws (
)? If SO, the conclusion was natural that the State and its law was either the creation (θέσις) of an enacting legislator, or the convention (συνθήκη) of an adopting people. In any case it was obvious that enacted law varied from city to city; and men were naturally driven to ask whether there was any single substratum or ϕύσις beneath all its changes. The problem of matter which had occupied the Ionians had now become a problem of man. We stand face to face with an antithesis between ϕύσις, or permanent identity, and νόμоς, or conventional variety, in the world of human things, which corresponds to the distinction drawn by the Ionian philosophers between the single and permanent physical basis, and the many and variable physical ‘appearances’, of the visible universe.
While the process of history was leading to such results, the growth of human knowledge was tending in the same direction. New data had been collected by travellers and recorded by logographers. Much was known of the customs of different peoples and tribes, and considerable attention was devoted to anthropology in the Athens of the fifth century.1 The idyllic usages of Nature’s children, the uncontaminated Hyperboreans or the unspoiled Libyans, might serve social reformers as arguments in favour of communism or promiscuity. If a study of anthropology led to any scientific conclusion, it must have driven men, contemplating the infinite variety of savage customs, to doubt the existence of any natural or universal law. The laws of Nature are the same today and yesterday, in Greece and in Persia: fire burns everywhere, and at all times. But here were ten or a hundred customs of marriage, or burial;2 nor was there any one thing, it might well be thought, which was ‘common and identical’ everywhere. There could be nothing here which was the product of Nature: it must all be the product of man. Law was a convention: the State itself was based on a contract.3 Thus, while the study of physics had tended towards the conception of a single underlying substratum of all matter, the anthropological study of the human world worked towards the conception of an infinite diversity of institutions. The old relation was inverted: Nature abode by one law, and men hovered between many. Physics and anthropology stood opposed to one another; and their opposition issued in the antithesis of natural law and of human custom. It is partly, perhaps, in this way that an antithesis came to be made between two terms, one of which comes from the study of natural science, and the other from that of human institutions.1
The movement of history in the fifth century, rapid and vigorous as it was, made change inevitable. A great effort of national defence, like the Persian wars, must in any case have given an impulse to freedom of thought, by increasing both national and individual self-consciousness. ‘Proud of their achievements,’ Aristotle says, ‘men pushed further afield after the Persian wars: they took all knowledge to be their province, making no distinction, but seeking wider and wider studies.’2 In Athens this awakening, comparable to that of Elizabethan England, was still more vigorous than elsewhere. Political change followed close on the war of independence. The hegemony of the Delian League intensified Athenian pride; and the political changes which took place within Athens itself opened a free field for popular discussion in the Assembly and the courts of law, and attached a practical value to ability to think, and capacity to express one’s thoughts. It was the work of the Sophists at once to express this new self-consciousness, and to satisfy the practical demand both for new ideas and for words in which to clothe them.
THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOPHISTS
Broad and general as was the new movement, so broad and so general was the work of the Sophists who sought to be its teachers in the Athens of the later fifth century. Some are grammarians; and they raise the fundamental question of the origin of language: ‘Is it of human creation, or a natural thing?’ Some are logicians, eager to discuss conceptions like ‘the Same’ or ‘the Different’, or to argue upon the nature of predication. Most of them, and preeminently Gorgias, are rhetoricians, for rhetoric is what the young politician desires; and most of them, again, have views about morals and politics, for everybody is interested in such things. But these views vary from hedonism to a defence of traditional morality, and from an apology for tyranny to a defence of the reign of law. The Sophists are versatile: ‘they are the historical romancers, the theosophists, the sceptics, the physiologists of their day’.1 The acme of sophistic versatility was Hippias of Elis, who once appeared at the Olympic games dressed in garments altogether made by his own hands, and who was both poet and mathematician, mythologist and moralist, student of music and connoisseur in art, historian and politician, and a voluble writer in every capacity. It was not what the Sophists taught (for they were far from forming a school, or from holding one set of opinions: they were free lances, one and all) – it was the fact that they taught at all, that they were the first professional teachers of Greece, and that their teaching was meant to give practical help in politics, which gave them their importance. To go to the Sophists was to go to the university – a university which prepared men for their after-life, and, since that life was to be one of politics, prepared them to be politicians, exactly as Plato hoped that the plan of education sketched in the Republic would prepare his guardians. The Sophists have been called half professors, half journalists;2 they were half teachers and thinkers, half disseminators of things new and strange, paradoxical and astonishing, which would catch the ear. With something of the charlatan they combined also something of the philosopher.
It follows, therefore, in the first place that the Sophists were not a school, with a single set of tenets; and, in the next, that they were not confined to any single subject, but were rather the professors and teachers of several. It remains to advance two other negative propositions. First of all, they were not ‘Sophists’, as a modern reader might tend to think, in the sense that they loved to play with sophisms, or to make the better cause appear the worse. They were rather the professional practitioners of σоϕία, as the artist is the professional practitioner of art; and though they were professional they were not necessarily paid. The receipt of pay was indeed a reproach directed by Plato and Aristotle against the Sophists, but it was directed against the Sophists of the fourth (and not those of the fifth) century, from whom Plato and Aristotle, like Isocrates, sought to distinguish themselves on the ground that they taught liberally the liberal arts, while the Sophists taught professionally a professional technique. It is true that the Sophists of the fifth century did take pay, though they often left it to their pupils to fix the amount; but it is also true that they taught the humanities, and that it was not, primarily at any rate, for the sake of pay that they did so. In the second place, the Sophists were not generally radicals, nor is the age of the Sophists the parallel to the age of Voltaire and Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists. We must not be misled by some of the references to the Sophists in Plato into treating all the Sophists as dangerous ‘Levellers’ in politics, or precursors of Nietzsche1 in ethics, or agnostics in matter of religion after the manner of Voltaire. The tone which Plato himself adopts towards Protagoras, in the dialogue which bears his name, conveys a sufficient warning to the contrary. The real novelty of the Sophists is that they represent the first phase of that reaction against Ionian philosophy of which we have already spoken, and which also appears, if in a different form, in the Eleatics. Negatively they seek, as Gorgias and Protagoras sought, to prove the futility of such philosophy; positively they attempt to turn inquiry towards things human, and in that attempt they are at one with Socrates. The bent of the new inquiry in their hands was entirely practical. Like all Greek thinkers, they aim at communicating something of a practical aid to right living. They offered instruction in goodness or practical wisdom: they promised to impart knowledge of the art of managing States and families rightly.1 It was, in a word, a Lehre des Rechts rather than a Lehre des Unrechts which they professed.
On the other hand, their own origin, and the political conditions of the Athens in which they taught, combined to create difficulties and to twist their teaching awry. They were, for the most part, foreigners who resided in Athens as metics, admitted, like all other metics, to a large measure of social equality, but deprived of political privilege. Gorgias came from Leontini in Sicily; Protagoras from Abdera, and Thrasymachus from Chalcedon, in the Thracian part of the Athenian Empire; Hippias was connected with Elis, and Prodicus came from the island of Ceos. They came to Athens because it had become, thanks to the Athenian Empire, the intellectual centre of Greece; but the pupils they found at Athens were naturally the rich, and the rich were naturally out of sympathy with the democratic institutions which Pericles had installed in Athens. The Sophists professed to teach eloquence and practical ability (ἀρετή) in general. The rich were anxious to learn; but they were anxious to learn for their own ends. They wished to learn eloquence, in order to escape with immunity from accusations before the popular courts: they wished to learn practical ability in order to control elections, to gain what they regarded as their due influence in the State, and ultimately to modify the constitution in an oligarchical direction. To democratic eyes the eloquence taught by the Sophists might well appear the art of making the worse cause appear the better, and ‘goodness in the art of managing States’ might well seem ‘little more than skill in the arts of party intrigue’.2 Out of the ranks of their pupils came oligarchical leaders. The real contriver of the attempted revolution of 411, says Thucydides, was the orator Antiphon,
‘a man second to no Athenian of his day in practical ability (ἀρετή): a proved master of device and of expression; who did not come forward in the Assembly, nor, by choice, in any scene of debate, since he lay under the suspicion of the people through a reputation of cleverness; but who was better able than any other individual to assist, when consulted, those who were fighting a cause in a law-court or in the Assembly’.3
When we reflect that the Sophists, however involuntarily, might exercise a practical influence of this character, and when we remember that they were foreigners, insecurely settled in Athens, we can realize at once the difficulties of their position and the odium into which they might fall. But we shall do them injustice, nevertheless, unless we remember that there were among their number many who were sound conservatives. Prodicus, who wrote the apologue of the choice of Hercules, was a preacher of ethics, famous in antiquity for his discharge of his civic duties. Protagoras, who, like Plato, wrote a Republic, and who was the greatest of all the Sophists, was equally conservative. It is true that he is said to have been banished from Athens for a work denying the gods; but his work probably denied only the possibility of knowing the gods, and it is quite possible that the moral he drew from that impossibility was the duty of worshipping ‘the gods whom the city worshipped’ and showing due piety in accordance with the law. Nor would a revolutionary have been employed, as Protagoras was by Pericles, to help in the founding of an Athenian colony at Thurii in 444 B.C.
PROTAGORAS AND THE EARLIER SOPHISTS
Gorgias of Leontini came to Athens later than Protagoras (in 427 B.C.), but we may consider his teaching first, since it is simpler and more negative than that of Protagoras. He was essentially a teacher of Rhetoric who exercised a great influence on the development of style; and it is by his name that Plato calls the dialogue in which he treats of Rhetoric. With moral and political philosophy Gorgias did not concern himself; but he attacked the prevalent physical philosophy, and by seeking to prove its barrenness he helped to suggest that the proper study of mankind was man. His ‘climax’ was famous: he attempted to prove the impossibility of the existence, the knowledge, or the teaching of ‘Being’. Orator and teacher as he was, he cannot have held that everything was incommunicable and inexplicable; and his climax must be understood as directed, like the Homo mensura doctrine of Protagoras, against the physicists and their theories of a single primordial substance. Rhetoric was another matter; and it was communicable and explicable enough. If he asserted that there was no such thing as truth, it was only in regard to the truth of which the Ionian philosophers had spoken: his assertion had no reference to morality, and conveyed no suggestion that there was no moral truth, or that might was the only right in the moral world.
Protagoras of Abdera (500–430 B.C.) came to Athens earlier than Gorgias: he carried further, and with a more positive suggestion, the attack of Gorgias on the physicists; and unlike Gorgias, he was a moral and political philosopher. Like Gorgias, and like all the Sophists, he was a teacher of eloquence, and here his importance lies not so much in the realm of style (though we are told that he insisted on the correct use of accidence, or ὀρθоέπεια, and wrote a work on that subject) as in the sphere of logic. He was the first of the Greeks to profess Dialectic: he undertook, we are told, to make the weaker cause the stronger. He also taught his pupils Commonplaces, or prepared topics (τόπоι), which they had to commit to memory for ready use in disputation. By his Dialectic and his Commonplaces he contributed something to the formation of an art of logic; but his chief importance depends on the philosophy which he sought to oppose to the Ionian physicists. In a work called Truth, or the Throwers, he advocated a robust empiricism against their attempts to find some hidden unity of the universe. ‘Man is the measure of all things’: things exist, or are non-existent, according to the measurement or determination of the common sense of the individual. The dictum as it stands may seem to commit us to an extreme individualism. Things are for each man what they seem to each man; and if we translate this mental philosophy into the moral sphere, we shall apparently have to give our adhesion to an individualist theory of ethics and politics, which makes each individual the standard and canon of what is right. That, however, was not the doctrine of Protagoras. It is true that he admitted that there might be two ‘counts’ (λόγоι) or determinations of everything, opposed to one another, and yet both true for the individuals by whom they were made. But he held that one of the two might and would be ‘stronger’, and he believed that this should he made to appear the stronger by argument. The stronger ‘count’ is apparently the normal: it is the measurement of a thing made by the normal man. The common sense of the individual is after all common; and measurement is not unique, but according to the common standard of normal sense. It follows that Protagoras was not a mere individualist, but an empiricist who believed in the normal common sense of man. It follows, again, that when he spoke of making the weaker cause the stronger, he was not inculcating the right of every man to make any view triumph at any cost, but rather the right of common sense to vindicate a belief that was normal because it appealed to a normal judgement.
There is a certain conservatism in this doctrine. Things, after all, are what they seem, if only a good common sense is brought to bear on their understanding. The moral and political philosophy of Protagoras is definitely conservative. Just as he was able to combine an apparently individualist doctrine of man as the measure of all things with a belief in the validity of normal common sense, so he combined something of a belief in the origin of the State from individual needs with a doctrine of the supremacy of a general law. Just as he does not believe in a single ‘nature’ of the material universe, imperceptible by normal sense and contradicting all its perceptions, so he does not believe in a single ‘nature’ of human society, unperceived and unrealized by the moral sense of the generations, and contrary to all their laws. He stands for empirical sense against the physicists of Ionia: he stands for the rule of law, and the solid moral sense which it expresses, against all who would champion the sovereignty of Naturrecht in human affairs. We are dependent on Plato for our knowledge of his ethical and political teaching; but there is every reason to think that the Protagoras gives a true representation of what he actually taught.1 From Plato we learn that he connected the State with education, and conceived it, in a genuinely Greek way, as an educational institution. He sought to establish his view partly by the use of analogy, and partly by a theory of social origins. He showed how, just as the teacher set before his pupils passages from good poets, full of instruction, and compelled them to learn them by heart and mould themselves to their image (325 D–326 A), so the city set before its citizens the laws, and compelled them to learn them and live accordingly (326 C–D). In his theory of social origins he distinguished three stages in human development. The first stage (320 D–322 B) was something of a state of nature. Men knew the arts of industry and agriculture, but they did not know the political art of civic life. Destitute of cities, they were the prey of the beasts; and sheer need drove them to the foundation of civic communities. Thus they attained a second stage of development (322 B), in which, by founding cities, they sought union and preservation. But though they had cities, they had no knowledge of political art, and each injured his fellows, till they were scattered and destroyed. Then came the third stage (322 C–D). Zeus sent Hermes down to men, bringing Reverence and Justice to be principles of order and bonds of union in cities of a new foundation; and thus the State came finally into existence. In this final form the State is a spiritual society, divinely sanctioned, and held together by the spiritual bonds of Reverence and Justice. As such, it is the supreme organ of the education of its members; and by the education of them all in the spirit of its laws it raises them to the stature of a full humanity. ‘The State is thus the true educator: its whole function is one of education and civilisation; the individual educator – father or mother, teacher or Sophist – is only the agent of the community and the organ of the common will,’1
Of the full bearing of this educational theory we shall have to speak later, when we come to consider the Protagoras of Plato (infra, p. 149.) The theory, it is obvious, has close affinities with that of Plato; and if in the Republic Plato carries it to further lengths, advocating an education in science and philosophy, and the rule of philosopher kings, the Republic is nevertheless conceived in a spirit akin to that of Protagoras. Protagoras is no individualist; and though he may speak of something like a State of Nature and the voluntary foundation of cities, he was no believer in the doctrine of a Social Contract. The cities of a later foundation, which endured where those of an earlier foundation had failed, rested on something far deeper than contract; and the purposes of the States which arose in those cities were something far broader than any contractual ‘guarantee of the rights of men against one another’. Protagoras did not anticipate the Sophist Lycophron in founding the doctrine of Contract. It would be truer to say that he anticipated Plato in teaching the doctrine of the educational State resting on the divine basis of justice; and he certainly conceived the State as an ordinance of God, and existing jure divino, rather than as a creation of men, existing ex contractu. The educational theory of the State is natural to a great teacher who professed himself to teach the political art; and if he believed, as Plato suggests,2 that his own teaching was indispensable, we may perhaps forgive him his zeal. At any rate he believed that law was a good schoolmaster to bring men to a right way of living; and if he insisted on the need of his own training, he also recognized that social life was a training in itself.
In the teaching of Protagoras, therefore, there is no antithesis between Nature and Law, or at any rate, so far as the two are in any way opposed, Law is regarded as a higher thing, due to divine sanction, which rescued men from a ‘state of nature’ in which they were no better than beasts. Nor is Protagoras a preacher of individualism – much less of the superman: he is interested more in the State than in the individual, and far from vindicating the rights of the strong man armed with efficiency to dominate his fellows, he asserts that all men participate equally in Justice and Reverence by the command of Zeus, and that all, equally endowed thereby with ‘political art’, have an equal voice and concern in political deliberation (Protagoras, 322 C–323 A). Sophist as he was, Protagoras was thus an apostle of the State, who preached the sanctity of its law and the equality of its members. Of the other Sophists of the fifth century, there were two – Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis – who won some fame in their generation. Prodicus is recorded only as a teacher of ethics and an inventor of grammar, who paid special attention to the discrimination of synonyms. Hippias of Elis, as we have seen, was a pretender to universality of knowledge1 who, among other things, professed to teach a system of mnemonics and was interested, like Hobbes at a later date, in the squaring of the circle. If we may trust the account, given by Xenophon,2 of an argument between Hippias and Socrates on the nature of Justice and its relation to Law, it would seem that Hippias had something of a philosophy of law which is not without interest. He agrees with Socrates that Justice and Law are coextensive, and that the Just and the Legal are identical, though he is troubled by the fact that those who have enacted laws often reject and change what they have enacted. He agrees, again, that there are certain unwritten laws, which are observed in the same way in every country, and which cannot have been enacted by men (who could never have met for their enacting, or understood one another if they had met), but must have proceeded from the gods. The suggestion of a jus naturale, distinct from the positive laws of each State, and superior to those laws (since it proceeds from divine commandment, and not, like them, from human enactment), may obviously lead to an antithesis between ‘natural law’, which is universal and divine, and mere positive law, which is local and human. In a passage of the Protagoras (337 C–D) Plato suggests that Hippias made that antithesis. Hippias, a stranger from Elis, is made to say to his Athenian audience: ‘I hold you all kinsmen and relatives and fellow-citizens by nature, though not by law; for like is, by nature, kin to like, but law, the tyrant of mankind, often constrains by violence in contravention of nature’. The words of Hippias seem almost to suggest in advance the Cynic view of a cosmopolis in which all men were equally fellow-citizens. In any case, the antithesis here suggested between Nature and Law is of great importance, and brings us face to face with a new and radical trend of sophistic teaching. Nature, whatever may be understood by Nature, is now opposed to Law; and Nature is enthroned above Law. The ultimate result of her enthronement will be the liberation of the individual from the educating care of the State and its laws, now regarded as mere duress; and it may even be, with some extreme enthusiasts, the enthronement of the superman.
THE ANTITHESIS OF ϕύσις AND νόμоς
The antithesis of Nature and Law, in the view of Sophists of a radical type, meant that the moral content of tradition and custom and institutions was opposed to an ideal code of morality based on a conception of the ‘first principle’ of human life. To understand the origin of this opposition we must perhaps recur to the theories of the physical philosophers of Ionia.1 The early physicists, when they attempted to find a permanent basis underneath all the flux of the corporeal world, always attempted to discover it in a corporeal body. Even the Pythagorean ‘numbers’ were extended in space: even the Anaxagorean 
, or Reason, was, after all, a substance. But if the permanent basis of the world is corporeal, and the world of perception is also corporeal – if both, in a word, exist in pari materia – then one of the two must be unreal. In the result, the world of actual perception was regarded as unreal: the new reality of Nature forbade the real existence of the world of sense. The saying of Democritus of Abdera, the founder of the atomist theory of matter, is significant: ‘By convention (νóμῳ) exist colour and taste: really (
) there are atoms and the void.’ The error lay, we may say, in the conception of the nature of things as corporeal: if it had been regarded as spiritual – something not outside the everyday world, but immanent and indwelling as the principle of its life – such a result need not have followed. Similarly, when the early moralists attempted to find a permanent basis or ‘nature’ underneath all the flux of the moral world of man’s life and institutions, they sought, not a spirit, but a code, of like material with the many codes of which it was the basis. It followed on this procedure, that the permanent basis of morality which they sought was conceived as annihilating the many codes and laws of actual life.1 The relation of the ideal code of morality to ordinary codes could be only one of opposition: the latter were so many backslidings, so many perversions, of the former. Here again, as in physics, the error lay in making the permanent basis no less material and objective than the facts which it underlay, and in conceiving the ‘nature’ of morality as external, and therefore inimical, to the ordinary custom of moral life. What thought should have done was to find an inner spirit pervading the sphere of ordinary moral life, and permeating the sphere of ordinary physical existence. What it actually did was to use the dividing sword of an external and material ‘nature’ to annihilate the mere ‘appearances’ of the physical world and the mere ‘customs’ of the moral universe.
On this basis, the ideal code, which constitutes the ‘nature’ of ethical and political phenomena, will be everything which the ordinary codes, to which it is opposed, are not. Just as the ‘nature’ of the material world, being conceived as the opposite of ordinary objects, came to be regarded as spatial extension, or as pure but materialized Reason, so the nature of the moral world, being equally conceived as the opposite of the ordinary rules of social life, came to be regarded as the mere pleasure and satisfaction of the individual. The parallel here suggested between the physical doctrines of the Ionian philosophers and the moral theories of the more radical Sophists suggests a further reflection. Even if the Sophists mark a reaction against the physical philosophy of the Ionian School, it is none the less possible that many of them were affected by its materialistic trend. At any rate we have Plato’s word for the view that conceptions of the physical universe underlay their conception of human life. It is a materialistic view of the world, as without God or Reason, which produces the theory that ‘might is right’.2 Starting from the assumption that the physical world in which we live came into existence not through the work of Reason, or by the creation of God, but by Nature and Chance, and that its units were compounded together ‘by the chance of the immanent power of each’, men have invented a moral philosophy in harmony with their assumptions. They hold that in the moral world, as in the physical, ‘the chance of the immanent power of each unit’ should be the dominant factor of composition, and that ‘the right life according to Nature is to live in domination over others’ to the limits of one’s power. They believe that all human laws to the contrary, differing as they do in different places, are mere products of art and convention; that it is absurd to live in slavery to others, according to such laws which have no natural validity; and that all men have a right to all that they can conquer by might. It is true that in this argument Plato is treating the development of thought ideally and not historically. He is showing the inner affinity, visible to the philosophic mind, between a naturalistic philosophy of the material world and a naturalistic conception of ethics. An inner affinity does not constitute an historical affiliation. Sophists who talked of the natural right of the stronger may have had no philosophy of the material world; and indeed we have seen that the Sophists in general turned their attention deliberately away from all such philosophy. Yet that philosophy was in the air; and no one who has realized the extent to which the scientific theory of evolution has been, in our generation, both consciously and unconsciously, transferred to the sphere of ethical and social philosophy, can fail to see the fundamental truth of Plato’s argument.
THE SOPHIST ANTIPHON
A recently discovered fragment of the sophistic literature of the later fifth century may serve to illustrate the views of the school described by Plato. The fragment comes from a treatise by the Sophist Antiphon.1 Antiphon, who has to be carefully distinguished from his contemporary and namesake, Antiphon the orator, the oligarchical leader in the revolution of 411, was a writer on many subjects. To his pen are attributed, by the critics of antiquity, treatises on ‘the Interpretation of Dreams’, on ‘Concord’, on ‘the Statesman’, and on ‘Truth’. It is from the last of these treatises that the newly discovered fragment comes. The treatise on Truth was in two books, and it dealt mainly with questions of physics and metaphysics. But it also dealt, as the new fragment proves, with questions of ethics and politics. This is a fact of considerable importance; for it corroborates the suggestion, which was made above, that works of a physical character were also concerned with human affairs. But the new fragment of Antiphon goes further, and it corroborates another suggestion. It shows that there was a connexion, such as Plato suggests, between physical and ethical speculation, and that a naturalistic view of the universe led to a naturalistic system of ethics and politics. Such a system definitely appears in the fragment of the treatise on Truth; and its great importance lies in the fact that in it, for the first time, we can read the ipsissima verba of a Sophist who opposed a naturalistic conception of ϕύσις to νόμоς, and believed in the superiority of ϕύσις. In its light we can test Plato’s account of sophistic tenets, and from it we may discover that he was not criticizing positions which he had invented for the purpose of criticism, but views which were actually held. In this way the fragment of Antiphon is of no small value for the understanding of the Republic and other Platonic dialogues.1
Antiphon uses the conception of ‘nature’, which is the ‘truth’ or reality of which he writes, in two directions – partly to discredit the enacted law of the State, as a matter of mere opinion and convention; and partly to overturn the current distinction between Greek and barbarian, and to suggest that both alike share in the common ‘nature’ of humanity. If we ask what he means by ϕύσις, the answer is not altogether clear: we can only guess from the fragment the character of the premisses which he had probably stated already, and which he now simply assumes. The rules of Nature, we are told, are necessary: they are laws, apparently, in the sense in which the law of gravitation is a law. If men attempt to contravene them, an inevitable reaction follows, just as a fall inevitably ensues on any attempt to contravene the law of gravitation. As far as one can gather, Antiphon holds that it is the law of Nature for men that they should seek life and shun death, and consequently that they should seek the things that promote life, or comfort, and shun the things that involve death, or discomfort. This is a simple naturalistic view like that of Hobbes. But whereas Hobbes thinks of men as by Nature curtailing one another’s lives when they are brought into contact, and therefore as naturally needing the coercion of law to induce them to respect one another’s lives, Antiphon regards coercive law as opposed to the natural law of life. He seems hardly to face the problem raised by the fact that men have to live together: he follows a line of abstract individualism.1 He argues that human law sets up rules of behaviour which contradict Nature’s law that each individual should seek life and comfort. Its rules are adventitious (
): they are based only on covenant and convention (
): they are the product not of truth but of mere opinion. They bid us do things which are unnatural, because they are unpleasant, and only make life poor and nasty. They bid us never to be aggressors against our neighbours, but at the most to defend ourselves against their aggressions: they bid us never to do evil to our parents, even when they do evil to us, but to return their evil with good. Antiphon does not conclude from these arguments that Right is Might, or that a man should overturn the laws openly and boldly, to the best of his power, in order to gain greater fulness of life; but he does conclude that it is good to evade the laws wherever one can do so without detection. The penalties of the law are really only the penalties attached by man’s opinion, and one evades these penalties if one evades any appearance at the bar of that opinion. Generally, and on the average, law-abidingness is wrong, because generally, and on the average, laws are contrary to Nature, which is the standard of right. Sometimes, indeed, obedience to the law may be expedient: but it is seldom even that. He who looks to the law for redress is generally deceived; for the law-courts are seldom capable of giving proper redress. The aggressor has as good a chance of making good his case, and persuading his judges, as the injured party. In a word, law-abidingness is generally wrong, if you look to the standard of right: it may sometimes be expedient, if you look to the standard of expediency; but on the whole it fails to satisfy either standard.
Just as Antiphon seeks to discredit the conventional law of the Greek city-state, so he seeks to overturn the conventional distinction of Greek and barbarian. We know that there were Greek thinkers of this period who held the distinction between noble and commoner to be contrary to Nature: we know that there were others who held the same view of the distinction between freeman and slave.2 Here we have a thinker who goes still further, and anticipates the cosmopolitanism of a later age by attacking the fundamental distinction which current opinion held to exist between the Greeks and the rest of the world. Φύσις. is again the clue. The physical attributes of Greek and barbarian are the same. If we reduce the matter to mere terms of sentient life (and it is really to those terms that Antiphon has already reduced the matter of law-abidingness), we shall see that, judged by these terms, all men are like and equal. They breathe the same air through the same bodily organs. ‘Nature,’ as Hobbes says, ‘hath made men equal in the faculties of body.’ Hobbes adds that they are also equal in the faculties of mind. Perhaps Antiphon said the same: but at this point the fragment ends, and we cannot tell how he pursued the argument.
Realism is thus the note of Antiphon’s thought. He goes, like Machiavelli, to the verità effettuale delle cose; and he finds such truth, in the realm of human affairs, not in what men think, but in what, by the constitution of their bodies, and as they come from the hand of Nature, they actually are. They are seekers of life and pleasure: this is the true law of their life, and on this ground one man is as good as another. Any view which makes man other than seekers of life and pleasure, or which makes some men better than others, is artificial and fantastic. It is a mere figment of the mind, made by opinion. Most of the presumptions of the laws are such figments. Our duty towards our parents, for instance – a duty to be discharged, apparently, no matter how they may behave to us – is a figment. And our superiority to those beyond the pale – as if there were any pale in the realm of Nature – that, again, is another figment.
PLATO’S ACCOUNT OF SOPHISTIC THEORIES
Apart from this fragment of Antiphon, it is to Plato that we owe the knowledge which we possess of the teaching of the school, if it may be called a school, which opposed Nature to Law, and often, if not always, proceeded to identify Right with Might. We may distinguish two forms of that teaching, as it is recorded by Plato. One, which is more moderate, appears at the beginning of the second book of the Republic.1 The other and more extreme form appears in the Gorgias, and, in its logical extremity, in the first book of the Republic.
The moderate and current form, as it is stated by Glaucon (not a Sophist, but an elder brother of Plato himself, and one of the dramatis personæ of the Republic), is as follows:
‘To do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice, and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither: hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by men lawful and just’ (Rep., 358 E–359 A).
In this theory the individualism of the present projects itself into the past. Because men are today fully conscious of their individual will and its claims, they begin to ask how it came about that the men of the past, who are imagined to have been equally conscious, surrendered the free exercise of that will and the full assertion of those claims. Such a surrender, some will say, can have been only the result of a voluntary act, by which men abandoned a satisfaction, limited by the weakness of individual strength, for the advantages of co-operation. Here we get the conception of a voluntary contract of each with all. But the State constituted by that contract has only, as it were, a conditional validity. It is only a pis aller. The right which it enforces is not the ideal right, or natural good, of complete self-satisfaction: it is the practical right, or conventional good, of a satisfaction limited by mutual forbearance. It is not the might of the strong, but the necessity of the weak; or, if in a sense it is might, ‘the might is the weakness of the many combined against the strength of the few’.1
So far, individualism does not present itself in its extreme form. It involves only two conclusions, which may be regarded as moderate: that there was an original condition of Nature, in which men lived as individuals according to their own good pleasure, and that there was afterwards an act of contract by which these individuals surrendered, in a conscious bargain, the free exercise of their own wills in return for the protection and preservation of their lives. In this moderate form the theory of a social contract stated by Glaucon may perhaps have been a tenet of Democritus. There are several reasons for so thinking. In the first place, we know that Epicurus in later days held the theory of a social contract, and as he was in many respects a follower of Democritus, it seems natural to suppose that he was following Democritus in his political theory. Democritus, like Epicurus, professed a theory of hedonism, and such a theory, emphasizing as it does the individual, is naturally allied with a political theory which finds the origin of the State in a contract of individuals. Again, we know that Democritus believed in the conventional and artificial origin of language; and we are told that he attributed secondary qualities like colour and taste to ‘convention’. What he believed with regard to language and secondary qualities may well have been his belief with regard to the State.
We have now to consider the second and more extreme form of the antithesis of Nature and Law, as it is stated in the Gorgias of Plato. Here we find an utter rejection of the conventional justice instituted by the social contract, and a thorough-going adoption of the natural right of might. Though it is stated in the Gorgias, this view is not ascribed by Plato to Gorgias himself (who, as we have seen, had taught no ethical or political doctrine, and to whom no such doctrine is assigned by Plato), but to a certain Callicles, who may well have been – though we have no other mention of his existence – an actual and historical person of the later fifth century.1 Callicles rejects all law as the mere product of contracts, or 
(492 G), made by the weak to defraud the strong of the just right of their might. Law institutes a ‘slave-morality’ (
), and slave-morality is no true morality, for Nature and Law are opposite, and Nature is the true rule of human life (483 B–G). If we follow this rule, as we must, we shall find that morality and right consist in the use of strength to its utmost limits, in order to gain the utility of the pleasure it can give, and to gain it more abundantly than the weak ever can (πλεоνεκτε
ν). Inequality is thus the rule of Nature. It is only by convention that equality exists, or that men claim an equality of distribution (ἰσоνоμία): by nature men are unequal, and the stronger gets more than the weak. The strength of which Callicles is here speaking is not mere physical strength: it is the strength of the faculties both of body and of mind, or, in a word, of the whole personality. It is the virtù, of which Machiavelli wrote, and which he ascribed to Cesare Borgia: it consists (491 B, D) in force of will (ἀνδρεία) backed by intellect (ϕρóνησις). If once the man of virtù, or, as a Nietzschian would say, the Superman, arises in his strength, he will fling aside the domination of the herd and the rules of its herd-morality; and in him the justice of Nature will stand revealed in perfection (484 A).
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;
Our strong arms be our conscience.
It is hardly necessary to draw attention to the affinities1 between this old Greek doctrine of ‘the will to power’ and the teaching of Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who said – but Callicles might equally well have said – that ‘the criterion of truth lies in the enhancement of the feeling of power’. Like Nietzsche, Callicles is not so much an iconoclast of morals as a moral revolutionary. He does not fling aside morality: he flings aside a conventional or herd-morality to make way for a natural or mastery-morality. He holds that there is such a thing as natural Right, but he holds that its basis is Might.
A further, and still more extreme position, is represented by Plato, in the first book of the Republic, as having been held by Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, a Sophist of the later fifth century. In the view of Thrasymachus there is no such thing at all as natural Right. Right is simply whatever is enforced by the strongest power in the State in accordance with its own view of its own interests. It does not matter what it enforces, whether the right of the strong or the right of the weak, whether inequality or equality: whatever it enforces is right. Thrasymachus does not hold that might is fundamentally right by Nature’s ordinance: he holds that right is nothing more than the enactment of might, wherever might may reside in any given State, and whatever its enactment may be. If the weak make laws in their interest, or in accordance with their conception of their interest, those laws, and the right they establish, are just and right so long as the weak can enforce them, and they cease to be right so soon as they cannot be so enforced. While Callicles is something of an idealist, believing in a natural right which is always right, Thrasymachus is thus an empiricist, who believes that there is no such thing as a single and permanent right. His affinities are with Hobbes rather than with Nietzsche; and like Hobbes, he believes that the only right is the enactment of the sovereign power. This, it has been said,1 is ethical nihilism. It is the logical complement in the sphere of morality to the intellectual nihilism of Gorgias, though it is a complement that was absent in Gorgias’ own teaching. As Gorgias holds that you could not know Being, so Thrasymachus holds that you cannot know right: as Gorgias, by implication, throws you back on the ‘appearances’ of things, so Thrasymachus explicitly throws you back on the appearances or enactments (
) of the different laws enforced by different sovereigns.
Behind these theories there lie historical facts which are necessary for their explanation, and without which they could hardly have come into existence. This is well illustrated by the argument of Callicles in the Gorgias. Callicles, as we have seen, believes that inequality and the rule of the strong are the dictates of natural Law. If we ask for his proofs, we shall find that they are two. One is the example of brute creation (
), or, in other words, the argument from the animal world. This is the argument which Plato himself uses, but in a very different way, in the Republic; and it is an argument which seems often to have been used at Athens, in the sense in which it is used by Callicles, to justify the doctrine that Might is Right. In the Clouds of Aristophanes, for instance (a play in which the teaching of the radical Sophists is pilloried), Strepsiades is represented as striking his father, and justifying his action by the remark: ‘Look at cocks and other such animals – they punish their fathers; and how do they differ from us – except that they don’t make Acts of Parliament?’ Used in this sense, the argument may remind us of modern arguments for the rule of force drawn from the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest in the animal world. The apache who calls himself a ‘strugforlifeur’ has his ancient prototype; and Callicles may be regarded as using in advance the doctrine of ‘tiger-rights’ – to borrow Huxley’s term – which many modern thinkers have also used, but which is fundamentally inapplicable to the world of human life.2 But this is not the chief argument of Callicles. The real ground for his conception of Nature is the conduct of States when they are acting as States (
), just as the ground which Hobbes alleges for his conception of a savage state of Nature is the fact that States are always ‘in the state and posture of gladiators’.
Whether an argument can fairly be drawn from the relations of States to the relations of individuals is too large a question to be treated here. Such an argument differs from the argument drawn from the animal world, in that it is a transference of the observed rule of one department of human life to another department; but it is permissible to hold that there is a fundamental difference between the two departments, and that it is not fair to argue from one to the other, or, at any rate, that if the argument is used, it should be used in the reverse direction. Be that as it may, it is important to notice that the philosophy of might, as it appeared in Greece, seems to have rested largely on political facts, and especially on the political fact of the Athenian Empire. Athens, the head of that Empire, was conceived as a tyrant, who in virtue of her strength imposed her will and her interest, as the canon of right, on all the other members of the Empire; and it was argued that the individual was entitled to follow the example of the city. Tyranny, indeed, in all its forms – whether that of the individual tyrant or that of the tyrant city – seems to have had at once an attraction and a repulsion for the Greeks; and ‘the tyrannical life’ appears sometimes as the basest, and sometimes – as it does to Callicles – as the best. The individual tyrant had his charm for Euripides, as we may see from the Hercules Furens;1 nor can one but feel that behind the philosophy of might represented in the Gorgias and the Republic there stands, as Plato indeed expressly indicates, the figure of the tyrant, the Superman possessed of virtù, who, being the stronger, makes his might the standard of right. But even more influential, perhaps, than the figure of the individual tyrant was the fact of the tyrant city. Again and again it is emphasized by Thucydides that the basis of the Athenian Empire is the right of the strong to rule the weak. ‘It was always an established thing that the inferior should be kept under control by the more capable,’ the Athenian ambassadors say to the Spartans in the negotiations that precede the Peloponnesian War. The leaders of the Athenians talk in the same strain in the Assembly. ‘Your Empire is like a tyranny,’ says Pericles in 430 – ‘a tyranny’, adds Cleon in 427, ‘based on your own strength rather than the good will of your subjects.’ Most famous, and most striking of all, is the language of the Athenian envoys to the people of Melos, an island nominally included in the Empire since 425, and attacked by the Athenians for failure to pay its tribute in 416.
‘You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.… Of the gods we believe by tradition, and of men we know for a fact, that by an irresistible law of Nature they rule wherever they can.’1
These are the sentiments put by Thucydides into the mouths of official Athenians, whether envoys or domestic politicians, whose speeches he professes to report. It may be that he is writing more as a philosopher than as a historian, and that he makes his figures explicitly profess the principles which underlay their action – principles which they themselves perhaps veiled, after the manner of politicians, in a discreet cloud of respectable words. But there can be little doubt that in oligarchical quarters, and especially in oligarchical clubs, the government of the Empire by Athens – and, we may add, the government of Athens itself by the democracy – was denounced ore rotundo as merely based on power. Oligarchical circles at Athens professed a sympathy with the allies against the tyrant city, and they regarded the democratic government of that city as a species of mass-selfishness, which issued in the promotion of the interest of the combined masses by heavy taxation of the rich and rich endowment of the poor. Nor did the oligarchically inclined Athenians, who detected at the basis of democracy the doctrine that Might is Right, necessarily reject that doctrine themselves. What they disliked was less the doctrine than its application; and if ever they had their day, Alcibiades and his friends were probably ready to apply it themselves, in the opposite way. It was, indeed, the affinity between oligarchical opinion and the teaching of the radical Sophists which brought the Sophists into such disfavour with the Athenian populace. Already suspect, because they imparted to the rich an eloquence and a political ability which the poor could not afford to buy, they became doubly suspect when some of their number were felt to be giving a philosophic expression to the current opinion of oligarchical clubs.1
GENERAL ICONOCLASM
The tendency to oppose Nature to Law not only resulted in views subversive of the State, but also in opinions destructive of many institutions and beliefs. Once oppose Nature to Convention, and the whole inherited tradition of the ages goes by the board. Various things may be proposed as substitutes; for Nature may be interpreted in various senses. It is constant only as a negative, and in not being what Convention is: it is inconstant, and indeed inconsistent, as a positive, and it may be used sometimes to condone master-morality, and sometimes, in the opposite sense, to condemn slavery. That it should be used to undermine religion, and to turn the gods into creatures of convention, was an easy and natural step. Prodicus taught that the first gods to be worshipped were man’s personifications of Nature’s forces: Diagoras the ‘atheist’ attacked the gods in a set treatise: Critias spoke in the Sisyphus of the gods as the invention of wise men for the better security of social life, since the fear of the gods stopped the secret imagining of evil, as the laws which wise men had equally instituted stopped its overt manifestation. Slavery too was condemned, as we may learn from the verse of Euripides:
The name alone brings shame upon the slave;2
and the Sophist Alcidamas, in the fourth century, re-echoed the condemnation, when he maintained that no man was by nature a slave. The difference between a noble and a non-noble class was pronounced as artificial as the difference between freeman and slave. Euripides writes:
The honest man is Nature’s nobleman;3
and Lycophron is said by Aristotle to have denied the reality of any distinction of birth – just as, we are told in the Politics, he spoke of law as merely conventional, and as simply ‘a guarantor of the rights of men against one another’. But criticism went still further. Not only did it attack the apex and the basis of Greek society, the noble and the slave, as both unnatural: it also laid hands on such institutions of everyday life as the family.1 The position of women is a problem that occupies Euripides. In the Medea he makes his heroine complain of the lot of women as compared with that of men: she would rather fight in battle thrice than suffer the pains of labour once. In a fragment of the Protesilaus he advocates community of wives.2 Aristophanes, who in the Clouds satirizes sophistic teaching in the person of the Unjust Argument, makes merry with the idea of a parliament of women in the Ecclesiaeusae. It is obvious that there was contemporary discussion with regard to the emancipation of women; and the Platonic solution which lies in communism, and in giving to women the same work as to men, seems to have been already anticipated. Indeed, the Republic is indebted generally to all the seething of opinion which characterized the end of the fifth century at Athens. If Plato attempted to remodel the Greek conceptions of religion, he had his forerunners here. If he attempted to reconstruct the system of social classes, and to create a new aristocracy of philosophers, there were others before him who had attacked the existence of a nobility of birth. If he sought to remodel society by the abolition of the family, he had his precursors in this field too, as we learn from Euripides. The collectivism (if it may be so called) of his politics is a natural reaction from previous individualism; and the philosopher-king is the ‘strong man’ adopted, educated, and transmuted. The Republic did not spring at once to life, self-begotten in Plato’s brain; it had its prelude and its preparation in previous thought. And if we find Plato in constant antagonism to his precursors, let us not forget his indebtedness. Not only did they furnish him with a starting point and a stimulus: they gave him also some of the materials which he used.
It is difficult to attempt any general view of the teaching and tendency of the Sophists. It is a long way from Protagoras to Thrasymachus; and it is difficult to comprehend the two in any formula. We have to distinguish the early generation represented by Protagoras, with its conservative trend, from the later generation represented by Callicles and Thrasymachus – a generation which we know only from Plato and the new fragment of Antiphon, but which, we may gather, had become revolutionary in its tenets. The Sophists of both generations figure largely in the Platonic dialogues; and both by way of attraction and by way of repulsion Plato was greatly influenced by their teaching. On the whole, however, his verdict upon them is unfavourable. It is true that he can do justice to Protagoras, and that he speaks with some respect of Gorgias; but it is eloquence rather than argument, and conventionality rather than originality, which he assigns even to the older Sophists. Generally, however, his attention is concentrated on the radical school which had divorced Nature and convention; and in the Gorgias, the Republic, and the tenth book of the Laws, he insists on the error of that divorce, and the fatal practical consequences to which it leads. For truth is to be found, and justice is to be attained, not by any facile antithesis of Nature and convention, but by discovering in conventions, through philosophic training and insight, the eternal ‘ideas’ which are implicit in them, and by elevating and ennobling conventions in the light of those ‘ideas’.
PAMPHLETEERS AND UTOPIANS
Whatever the divergencies of view among the Sophists, they were all at one in turning from Nature to man. Protagoras and Gorgias, as we have seen, made the transition easy, the latter by showing the impossibility of the old physical conceptions, the former by emphasizing the truth and the value of the measurements of human sense; and following in their steps, many Sophists had pursued the study of man in all the manifestations of his activity – in his politics, in his law, in his language. For the future, the study of ‘human things’ was to be the channel in which thought would flow. That thought could not but be preeminently political. Man was too much tied to the State for a pure discussion of individual ethics: any philosophy of human action must be largely a ‘political’ philosophy. In the struggle of contemporary parties, again, questions would constantly arise, which called for an answer, and made political thought a pressing and practical thing. The busy study of politics moved in various directions. It was partly historical; and here political thought clothes itself in historical narrations or disquisitions. It was partly ideal; and men imagined Utopias which did not seem visionary. Finally, in the mind of a Socrates it was something of a reformation – a matter of prophesying and a theme for preaching.
In its historical aspect, political thought appears in various forms. It appears in the set history of Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus reflects on varieties of custom: he compares the merits of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Thucydides gives us the philosophy of Greek στάσις: in the speeches, where he gives free rein to political reflection, he makes Pericles sketch the picture of an ideal Athens, or Athenagoras of Syracuse defend the principles of popular government, or the Athenian envoys at Melos disclose the principles which underlay the government of their Empire. But the political pamphlet concerns us more closely than history; and many political pamphlets were written at Athens towards the end of the fifth century.1 The first of these was written by a littérateur from Thaos, Stesimbrotus, who composed, soon after 430 B.C., a work which dealt with Themistocles, Thucydides the statesman (the son of Melesias), and Pericles – a work which some have regarded as an attempt to estimate Athenian democracy by its greatest statesmen, and others have viewed as a mere collection of political scandals. There is still preserved a treatise on the Athenian Constitution, once attributed – but erroneously – to Xenophon. It is a treatise written, perhaps about 425 B.C., by a member of the oligarchical party, who criticizes what he describes, and yet seeks to understand what he criticizes. The characteristics of Athenian democracy are shown to flow from the principle of freedom which it had adopted; and a close connexion is also drawn between sea-power and democracy. The extent to which the ‘old oligarch’ has made general principles inform his record of details has caused his treatise to be called ‘the earliest model of the deductive method as applied to society and politics’.1 Yet another pamphlet on the Athenian Constitution, written from a different point of view, has been conjecturally attributed to Theramenes the trimmer; and it has been suggested that the Aristotelian treatise on the Constitution of Athens which we possess was based on this pamphlet, which, if it ever existed, is now lost. In it Athenian democracy was discussed in the light of its leading statesmen; and from their history it was argued that Athens would do well to substitute a moderate constitution for the extreme democracy which the Periclean age had produced. This form of constitution the author endeavoured to identify with the old ‘ancestral’ constitution of Solonian times; and Aristotle may have been helped by his arguments to form that preference for a moderate democracy (or ‘polity’) which he shows in the Politics.2
It is possible – though it is wise to suspend judgement, and even to entertain a certain amount of sane scepticism, about the bold conjectures of German critics, which rest on very exiguous grounds – that the last quarter of the fifth century at Athens was a time of busy pamphleteering of all kinds; and that some traces of this activity may be detected in the writings of antiquity which we still possess. Antiphon, the real leader of the revolution of 411, who at his trial delivered a fine speech (now lost) in his own defence, may have been the writer of pamphlets on Concord and Statesmanship, in which he vindicated his principles; but since the only ancient evidence we possess ascribes these treatises to the other Antiphon, the Sophist, speculation seems idle; and to seek, as some have done, for traces of these lost works in the works of other writers which we possess (as, for instance, in the plays of Euripides) seems doubly idle. The so-called Anonymus Iamblichi – a writer supposed to belong to the later fifth century, whose work has been detected in the pages of Iamblichus, a late neo-Platonist author – has by some been identified with Antiphon the Sophist (though on what grounds it is difficult to see),1 and his work has been supposed to be a pamphlet in favour of εὐνоμία. Whoever he was, and whenever he wrote, he has some curious references to the Superman (‘a man invulnerable in body, free from disease and the play of passion, mighty of bulk and hard as adamant in body and mind’); but he holds that the rest of society will be an adequate match for him, in virtue of their obedience to law and the strength that it gives, and he believes that strength can remain strong only by means of the law and in virtue of justice. Finally, it has been conjectured that the short speech 
traditionally attributed to Herodes Atticus, an orator of the second century A.D., and supposed to be an oratorical exercise on a theme taken from classical Greek history, was really a political pamphlet couched in rhetorical form, written by an unknown author between July and August 404 B.C. (the date is precise), and, though nominally addressed to the people of Larissa to advocate an alliance with Sparta and a change of their constitution in the direction of moderate oligarchy, really intended for the people of Athens. It is true that the description in the speech of the horrors of στάσις (‘as much worse than war as war is than peace’), and the account which it gives of oligarchy, are both interesting; but a later writer, familiar with early authors, and composing an oratorical exercise, may well have borrowed both. All that we are entitled to say is that speeches may have been written at Athens in the last quarter of the fifth century on general political themes, and they may have been circulated as pamphlets (as were the speeches of Isocrates at a later date); but if they were, they are lost, and we are necessarily ignorant of their nature, and still more of their content. The only pamphlet of which we can be certain is that of the pseudo-Xenophon on the Constitution of Athens.
Alongside of histories and pamphlets, recording or judging the present or the past, came also attempts to sketch the lines of the future. Not only did men attempt to elicit political ideas from existing constitutions: they also tried to embody political ideas in pictures of ideal constitutions. Such pictures were a natural result both of the tendencies of thought and of the practical needs of the hour. The attack on things conventional, and the praise of things natural, inevitably led to the suggestion of ideal States possessed of ‘natural’ institution. The anthropology, which may have helped to produce the attacks on institutions like the family, may now have served as the basis of positive construction. The first ideal States would naturally be based on travellers’ accounts of Nature-peoples; and even in Plato’s Republic some traces of this basis may be seen. The practical problem of colonization made these sketches less visionary than they would otherwise have been. The great age of colonization was indeed past: the boundless field for political experiment which had been presented by the incessant foundation of new communities was by this time restricted. Yet there were still cases of colonization, and there was still room for experiment; and in 444 we find Protagoras acting as legislator for the Athenian colony at Thurii.
The dramatist Cratinus first sketched an ideal State in a comedy called the 
but the two chief writers of Utopias were Phaleas and Hippodamus, who both belong to the end of the fifth century.1 Their views are recorded by Aristotle in some detail, in the second book of the Politics. Phaleas of Chalcedon started, we are told, from a conviction that it was economic troubles which led to civil dissension; and he accordingly proposed the equalization of property in land. In the foundation of colonies, he thought, this could readily be secured: in an old State it might be effected by the regulation of dowries. The rich might give dowries, but should not receive them: the poor might receive dowries, but should not give them. The proposal may remind us of Mill, who similarly proposed to remedy the inequalities of property, by limiting the amount ‘which any one should be permitted to acquire by bequest or inheritance’.1 But Phaleas not only proposed the equalization of property: he was anxious that there should also be equality of access for every citizen to a uniform education. A further feature of his scheme was that he wished to make all the artisans public slaves, possibly in order to increase the revenues of the State, but more probably in order to prevent the competition of men, who had acquired different degrees of wealth by industry, with a peasantry settled on equal holdings.2
A more ambitious scheme was propounded by Hippodamus, a native of Miletus who had settled in Athens. He was a man of some pretensions, as we learn from Aristotle. An innovator in architecture, he was the author of the plan for cutting cities into square blocks by a system of intersecting roads. He sought for effect in his personal appearance: he wore his hair long and set with ornaments: his clothing, made of cheap material but warm texture, served him in winter and summer alike. He was a man of learning in physics; and it accords with his somewhat pretentious temper that he should have been ‘the first man who was not a politician who tried to describe an ideal State’. He anticipated Plato in his division of the State into three classes: he differed from Plato in that his three classes consisted of artisans, farmers, and warriors, while Plato’s were formed of a single producing class, a class of warriors, and a class of philosophic rulers. Possibly there is some imitation of Egyptian castes in Hippodamus’ plan: possibly, as his use of the number three suggests, he was under Pythagorean influences. As he divided the citizens into three classes, so he divided the land into three portions – one sacred, and reserved for religious purposes; one public, and assigned to the use of the warriors; a third private, and left to the farming class. That he should have made the land, which supplied the needs of the soldiers, public property again reminds us of Plato’s scheme – though Plato pursued a different plan, and, assigning all the land to the producing class, imposed on it a tribute in kind which the soldiers and rulers consumed in common. Both in suggesting a special fighting class, and in making its property the property of the State, Hippodamus may be said to have aimed at instituting a reformed government, exempt from the vices of the times – a government freed from political incapacity by specialization, and from political corruption by communism. But in one respect he did not depart from Athens. The three classes of his ideal State in conjunction formed ‘the people’, and the people elected its rulers. Here Hippodamus differs widely from Plato, who leaves nothing to the people, and proposes that the producing and fighting classes shall be governed by a class in whose appointment they have no part. The laws, like the citizens and the land, Hippodamus divided into three classes, according as they dealt with offences against honour, or property, or life; and he similarly distinguished the administration by the three subjects of its action: public matters, matters relating to resident aliens, and matters concerning foreigners. He advocated the institution of a Supreme Court of Appeal, composed of a number of the older citizens appointed by public election. Finally, he proposed rewards for men who found out inventions which were of service to the common weal.1
APPENDIX
Two Fragments from the Treatise of the Sophist Antiphon ‘On Truth’
I
Justice [in the ordinary view] consists in not transgressing [or rather, is not being known to transgress] any of the legal rules (νόμιμα) of the State in which one lives as a citizen. A man, therefore, would practise justice in the way most advantageous to himself if, in the presence of witnesses, he held the laws in high esteem, but, in the absence of witnesses, and when he was by himself, he held in high esteem the rules of nature (
). The reason is that the rules of the laws (
) are adventitious,1 while the rules of nature are inevitable [and innate]; and again that the rules of the laws are created by covenant (
) and not produced by nature (ϕύντα), while the rules of nature are exactly the reverse. A man, therefore, who transgresses legal rules, is free from shame and punishment whenever he is unobserved2 by those who made the covenant, and is subject to shame and punishment only when he is observed. It is otherwise with transgression of the rules which are innate in nature. If a man strains any of these rules beyond what it can bear, the evil consequences are none the less, if he is entirely unobserved, and none the greater, if he is seen of all men; and this is because the injury which he incurs is not due to men’s opinion (
), but to the facts of the case (
).3
The question with which we are here concerned arises from every point of view (
). Most of the things which are legally just are [none the less] in the position of being inimical to nature. By law it has been laid down for the eyes what they should see and what they should not see; for the ears what they should hear, and what they should not hear; for the tongue what it should speak, and what it should not speak; for the hands what they should do, and what they should not do; for the feet whither they should go, and whither they should not go; and for the mind what it should desire, and what it should not desire. Now the things from which the laws seek to turn men away are no more [? less] agreeable or akin to nature than the things which the laws seek to turn men towards. [This may be proved as follows.] To nature belong both life and death. Men draw life from the things that are advantageous to them: they incur death from the things that are disadvantageous to them. But the things which are established as advantageous in the view of the law are restraints on nature [i.e. they prevent men from drawing life, which belongs to nature, from the things that are really advantageous to them], whereas the things established by nature as advantageous are free [i.e. they leave men free to draw life from the things that are really advantageous to them; for they are identical with those things].1 Therefore things which cause pain [and so are akin to death] do not, on a right view, benefit nature2 more [on the contrary, they benefit nature less] than things which cause pleasure [and so are akin to life]; and therefore, again, things which cause suffering would not be more advantageous [on the contrary, they would be less advantageous] than things which cause happiness – for things which are really (
) advantageous ought not to cause detriment, but gain.…3 [Take the case of those] who retaliate only after suffering injury, and are never themselves the aggressors; or those who behave well to their parents, though their parents behave badly to them; or those, again, who allow others to prefer charges [against them] on oath, and bring no such charges themselves. Of the actions here mentioned one would find many to be inimical to nature. They involve more suffering when less is possible, less pleasure when more is possible, and injury when freedom from injury is possible.
[The writer now attacks legal justice from another point of view. Hitherto he has attacked law and its presumptions; now he attacks law-courts and their operation. Hitherto he has argued that law makes wrong what is right; now he argues that the machinery of the law cannot carry its own false presumptions into effect.] Now if those who adopted such courses received any help from the laws, or those who did not adopt such courses, but took the opposite line, suffered any loss from the laws, there would be some use in paying obedience to the laws. But, as a matter of fact, it is obvious that legal justice is inadequate to help those who adopt such courses. In the beginning [i.e. before any legal cognisance can be taken of the facts] it permits the injured party to be injured and the offending party to commit his offence. But it is not only that legal justice is in no position, at this point, to prevent the injured party from being injured, or the offending party from committing his offence. There is more. If we consider the action of legal justice in reference to retribution [which at any rate it professes to give] we find that such justice is no more favourable to the injured than it is to the offending party. [The remaining lines of the fragment are mutilated; but they seem to mean that, when a case comes before a court for trial, the injured party is in no better a position, and may be in a worse position, than the offending. He can only affirm the fact of injury, and endeavour to persuade the court of the fact. The injured party can deny the fact, and seek to persuade the court of the truth of his denial. What finally determines the court is the greater ability of one or other of the parties; and there is no guarantee that the greater ability will be found on the side of the injured party.1]
II
[Those who are born of a great house] we revere and venerate: those who are born of a humble house we neither revere nor venerate. On this point we are [not civilized, but] barbarized in our behaviour to one another. Our natural endowment is the same for us all, on all points, whether we are Greeks or barbarians.2 We may observe the characteristics of any of the powers which by nature are necessary to all men.… None of us is set apart [by any peculiarity of such natural powers] either as a Greek or as a barbarian. We all breathe the air through our mouth and nostrils.
pp. 110 sqq.
has now entirely disproved this identification, and corroborated the suspicions expressed in the text. Antiphon’s views are almost the opposite of those of the Anonymus Iamblichi.
– a word which implies imposition ab extra, and suggests something factitious. It is even used, in later Greek writers, in the sense of ‘fictitious’, and in opposition to 