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V Teaching Virtue: The Sophists on Happiness and Success
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2020
Extract
One frequently overlooked aspect of the sophists’ reflection concerns the kind of problems that today might be included in an ethical treatise, such as happiness and pleasure. Usually it is claimed that the sophists shifted the focus of enquiry from nature to the human world, but then the emphasis is almost exclusively placed on the political side of these investigations (which is no doubt significant, as we have seen in the previous chapter). This is a misleading perspective, which applies modern conceptual schemes to the ancient world, creating distortions and misunderstandings. Before Aristotle, there is no point in distinguishing between the ethical and the political spheres, since ethics and politics ultimately constitute two aspects of the same problem: how to reach fulfilment and thus lead a happy life. Certainly, in order to answer this question it is necessary to embark on an analysis of political problems, such as justice or the best form of government: the fact that human beings live together is something that must be taken into account. But the ultimate goal is self-realization. This is the end towards which everyone tends.
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References
1 See, for example, Theognis, lines 27 ff.; Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2.86, 9.100, 10.20.
2 Also revealing, in this respect, is an epigram from Olympia that was written in his honour: ‘No mortal ever invented a finer art than Gorgias / To exercise the soul in competition of excellence. / And it is of him that, in Apollo's hollows, the statue is dedicated, / A paradigm not of wealth, but of the piety of his character’ (82A8 D.-K. = 32P34b L.-M.).
3 See Bett 2002.
4 A detailed overview of these testimonies may be found in De Romilly 1988: 194–231; see also Chapter 1, pp. 8–9.
5 Ostwald 1986: 229–50.
6 See also Trabattoni 2000: 19–21.
7 In the Gorgias, a character who is presented in much the same light as Meno is Polus of Acragas, historically another pupil of Gorgias and the author of a treatise on rhetoric. See, for instance, Nails 2002: 252.
8 See Chapter 4, pp. 77–80.
9 Hobbs 2000: 137–74.
10 See Kerferd 1981a: 123.
11 Cf. also 87A6 D.-K. (= 37P9 L.-M.): ‘When Antiphon had attained a great degree of persuasive power and was nicknamed “Nestor” because he could succeed in persuading people when he spoke about anything, he announced that he would give lectures capable of eliminating pain, as he supposed that no one could name to him a grief so terrible that he could not banish it from that man's thought.’
12 Gagarin 2002: 95.
13 Predictably, given the importance of the problem for an expanding society such as fifth-century Athens, Antiphon was not the only sophist to deal with the issue of wealth: see Gorgias 82B20 D.-K. (= 32D40 L.-M.), Prodicus 84B8–9 D.-K. (=34R4 andP6 L.-M.), and Anon. Iambl. 89.7.1 and 7.8 (40.7.1 and 8 L.-M.); see too Soverini 1998: 45–65 and 81–9; Demont 1993; Bonazzi 2009a: 28–31 and 2016; Gavray 2016.
14 See Bonazzi 2009a.
15 Bonazzi 2006b.
16 Capra 1997: 298–303.
17 Although it chiefly applies to ethical issues, it cannot be ruled out that this ‘morality of concord’ also had more explicitly political consequences (Bonazzi 2006a). ‘Concord’ is one of the central terms in the heated ideological and political debate that raged in the years of the Peloponnesian War, so much so that it became one of the key terms that moderates and oligarchs invoked against democratic nomos. Likewise, for Antiphon the concept of ‘concord’ does not amount to a generic call to collective reconciliation, but rather serves to trace the profile of true wise men, who alone ought to govern, since ‘nothing is worse for human beings than lack of rules (anarchias)’ (87B61 D.-K. = 37D63 L.-M.). Concord, then, emerges as the capacity to take care of oneself and others by curbing violent and irrational impulses. Obviously, a thesis of this sort potentially applies to all people, but it is easy to see how the concept could be exploited by the oligarchic faction as a powerful way to criticize the alleged freedom of the democrats: according to oligarchic propaganda – as illustrated by the anonymous author of the Constitution of the Athenians – democracy is a system which justifies the unruliness of the masses, which allows the masses to yearn for and achieve more and more, thereby laying the ground for the outbreak of increasingly violent conflicts. When set in its context, this praise of self-control and privileging of intelligence over law lose much of their apparently generic quality and prove closely reminiscent of the typically aristocratic themes that characterize pro-Spartan polemics. Regrettably, the limited number of surviving fragments of On Concord do not allow us to further investigate this hypothesis. Be that as it may, the fact that considerations of this sort could be exploited for political and especially anti-democratic purposes is confirmed by the theses of another opponent of (democratic) nomos, the oligarch Critias: see e.g. H. Patzer 1974 and Bonazzi 2018: 33–41.
18 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.1.21–34 (= 84B2 D.-K. = 34D21 L.-M.). Recently, Dorion 2008 has denied that the passage from Xenophon is a reliable testimony on Prodicus, arguing that the apologue is used to investigate ethical issues addressed by Xenophon's Socrates. This is an intriguing hypothesis, which highlights some interesting affinities between Socrates and Prodicus, but which fails in its attempt to disprove Prodicus’ authorship. Certainly, this text is not to be taken as a word-by-word quotation (as suggested instead by Sansone 2004, criticized by Gray 2006); rather, in the light of the introductory expressions used by Xenophon, it is more reasonable to assume that what we have is a summary of Prodicus’ argument: see now Mayhew 2011: 201–21.
19 Momigliano 1930: 102–3. The frequency of ethical terms among Prodicus’ synonyms has also been noted by many other scholars: see esp. De Romilly 1986, Dumont 1986, Tordesillas 2004, and Wolfsdorf 2008a. However, in many cases it is difficult to establish whether we are dealing with reliable testimonies (as in the case of 84A19 D.-K. = 34D6a L.-M.) or mere parodies (as is probably the case with 84A15 D.-K. = 34D22 and 23–5 L.-M.). A testimony by Galen (84B4 D.-K. = 34D9 L.-M.), concerning phlegma (inflammation), shows that Prodicus was not exclusively interested in ethical terms.
20 Guthrie 1971: 277–8.
21 Casertano 2004: 78. Some very interesting observations on this hedonistic perspective may be found in Capra 1997: 289–98.
22 In this respect, it has been observed that the criterion of usefulness appears to have played a part even in the case of linguistic distinctions: in other words, it is reasonable to suggest that the primary aim of the distinction drawn between positive and negative terms was to identify what course of action one ought to follow. See Dumont 1986 and Tordesillas 2004: 61–3. Notwithstanding the reservations expressed in n. 19 above, this is an intriguing hypothesis.
23 Significantly, Prodicus would appear to share Antiphon's dualist psychology, if De Romilly 1986: 6 is correct in noting that his linguistic distinctions are always based on a contrast between terms associated with the spheres of irrationality and rationality.
24 See the crucial analysis provided by Morgan 2000: 106–15.
25 Dorion 2009b: 536 n. 34.
26 Kuntz 1993.
27 In this respect, it is interesting to note that, in the Protagoras, Plato parodies Hippias in the figure of Nestor: see Brancacci 2004. Nestor is certainly a paradigmatic figure, also apparently evoked by Gorgias (82B14 D.-K. = 32D52 L.-M.) and Antiphon (87A6 D.-K. = 37P9 L.-M.).