This chapter discusses connections between the Sophists and their wider intellectual context. It argues for the value of the term “enlightenment” as a characterization of the period in two respects: as pointing to a widespread self-consciousness of intellectual change, and as encompassing a range of discourses and thinkers beyond the philosophical. Using Aristophanes’ Clouds as a guide, the chapter discusses three modes of thinking that are characteristic of the sophistic period as an enlightenment, understood in these senses: an interest in empirical research and collection, particularly in the human social realm; a concentration on methods of argument and widespread employment of antilogistic forms; and a skepticism toward causal reasoning concerning divinity and the unseen generally. These three modes of thinking are found importantly among the Sophists, but are manifest widely beyond their thought, and are best understood as characteristic practices and attitudes of a fifth-century enlightenment.

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

This chapter emphasises the key role that comic revues and music hall acts played in ensuring the British army had a continuous stream of recruits throughout the First World War. Through examining the songs, sketches and characters through which this was achieved, the chapter demonstrates the varied strategies used and the ways they drew on earlier modes of performance such as nineteenth-century melodrama. Particular emphasis is placed on the gendered ideology that was implicit in the performances examined, for example in looking at the dramatization of atrocity stories which were circulating in the press and the treatment of women in these plays and wider narratives. The chapter also focusses on music hall songs and performances by male impersonators such as Marie Lloyd. It encourages us to question the simple alignment of propaganda and popular entertainment and offers a more nuanced understanding of these performances through the lens of satire. By doing so, it demonstrates how satirising and parodying wartime experiences provided a release from anxiety. Stage satire and comedy, it concludes, offer a unique perspective on how modern total war saturated public life.

Following the previous discussion of popular performance forms, this chapter examines the ways in which popular war-time melodramas drew on both existing traditions within British theatre and on the kinds of social debates which prevailed before the war and were transformed by it. The chapter also considers how genres such as the sketch or the one act play, circulating in music halls, in revues and at wartime charity fund-raisers, like melodramas, adapted to and reflected the changing and gendered experience of wartime conditions. These dramas often represented topical events - such as espionage - and explored contemporary anxieties - especially around gender and domestic life in war-time - whilst capitalising on the popularity of pre-existing dramatic forms.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.

This chapter will examine theatre both for, and by, the armed services on the fighting fronts. It will outline how and why theatre was an important aspect of leisure time for British, Colonial and allied troops fighting on land, at sea and in the air. This chapter will examine the importance of both watching and taking part in theatrical entertainments through a discussion of the professional civilian and military Concert Parties in the Army, Navy and the RFC/RAF, the role of voluntary-aid organisations such as the British Red Cross and the YMCA, and theatrical entertainments in wider wartime contexts such as PoW camps and military hospitals. A key focus of the chapter will be the social function of such entertainments, the content, and the practicalities of how they were staged in various wartime contexts.

This chapter discusses the importance of rhetoric to the rise of the Sophists and the way that an attention to language as such conduces to a novel and controversial understanding of reality. Language, for the Sophists, is more than a medium for conveying meaning; it is itself creative of meaning, making the education that they offer uniquely powerful. This is the fuller sense of their professing to make their students “clever at speaking” (deinos legein). The chapter traces three specific areas on which the Sophists brought to bear their interest in logos: grammar and the issue of the correct names; the criticism of and engagement with poetry; and rhetoric and the effectiveness of argumentative techniques. We see that these explorations cannot be said to aim at a systematic theory. But they helped to inaugurate the study of language for its own sake, a topic that would play an important role in the philosophical debates of the following centuries.

The Introduction begins by examining the treatment of First World War theatre in academic scholarship over the last century, and identifies reasons for its neglect and the resurgence of interest in the topic over the last decade. It considers this resurgence in relation to work on popular theatre, the focus on cultural histories of the war, and the centrality of theatre and performance to centenary commemorations. In addressing how theatre contributed to the war effort it considers themes including: recruitment and enlistment, fundraising for war charities, and the value of theatre for servicemen and the wouded. It also considers challenges to theatre production created by the wartime conditions. Drawing on the work of the Great War Theatre project it highlights the large number of war-themed plays produced during the war, arguing that plays did not have to ignore the war to be entertaining or popular. The introduction emphasises the importance of looking at the diversity of theatrical production across the country and in both amateur and professional contexts. As such it provides the framework for the in-depth analyses of these and other topics examined across the volume.

The chapter argues that the antecedents of Greek philosophical interest in logical argumentation can be found in the late-fifth-century sophistical practice and teaching of technê logôn or “the art of arguments.” It assembles the extant evidence for the teaching of technê logôn by figures such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Antisthenes, Antiphon, Prodicus, Socrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. Original and provocative features of technê logôn taught by these figures include: (i) the ability to produce opposing arguments on both sides of any question (antilogiai); (ii) the ability to refute any given position or argument; (iii) the ability to skillfully question another person, or to answer such questioning, on any topic; and (iv) the subject-neutral ability to produce arguments on any subject. These features would later become important elements in what fourth-century philosophers would call “dialectic,” “rhetoric,” and other successors to the fifth century “art of argument.”

From 1915, theatrical commentators repeatedly expressed concern over the American ‘Invasion’ of British theatre. For some, the presence of American actors and writers in London was to be celebrated as a sign of a transatlantic theatrical fraternity. Yet, for a large number of critics, it pointed to a more sinister shift in power from which British theatre had to be defended. This chapter examines what these fears reveal about the wider social anxiety of the time, arguing that the perceived threat to the national drama must be understood in dialogue with the perceived threat to national identity that came with the war and the need to defend national honour on the battlefields. Further, it suggests that the concerns raised speak to a growing unease at the changing power dynamic between the two nations and, more acutely, the suspicion levelled at the neutral stance that America adopted in the war. In discussing concerns over the American ‘invasion, this chapter focuses on the growing popularity of the ‘crook’ play. It also looks at the transfer of British productions to America, focussing on Granville Barker’s ground-breaking tour to the east coast as a means of cultural propaganda.

A Voyage to Lilliput lays the ground for a number of satirical techniques that continue throughout Gulliver’s Travels: selective use of detail; topical allusions to real people and events; an unreliable narrator; competing claims of the abstract (language, human ideals) and the concrete (the human body, the physical world); reversals; and manipulation of size and perspective. Lilliput, where everything shrinks by a scale of 12 to 1, has proven to be the most beguiling fantasy among the satiric fictions in Gulliver’s Travels that ultimately entrap Swift’s readers in painful truths. This chapter discusses the narrative style that readers encounter at the start of Gulliver’s Travels; the political parallels between Lilliput and England; the play on perspective and expectations; and Swift’s interest in the volatility, manipulability, and power of language.