Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed.

This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.

This chapter considers changing representations of the First World War on stage after the Second World War and through to the centenary. It examines the significance of Oh What a Lovely War (1963) as a product of the Cold War and fears over a third world, and nuclear, war. Emphasising the importance of understanding theatrical representations of the war in relation to their socio-political contexts, the chapter shows how the changing political context of the 1990s and anxieties over the loss of memory led to shifts in how the war was represented on stage, with Lovely War increasingly being used to ‘teach’ the war. The chapter argues that twenty-first century plays including Morpurgo’s War Horse and Private Peaceful, and Faulks’s Birdsong, are driven by an imperative to remember the war and fill a gap left by the loss of direct memory and experience of the war. It shows how this leads to the privileging of the personal, individual, micro experience of the war over the macro history of the war. It addresses the tension between history and memory in these plays as well as demonstrating their role in shaping commemoration during the centenary.

The portrayal of male and female bodies in Gulliver’s Travels has long been the subject of critical debate, from early suggestions that Swift was motivated by personal animus against Maids of Honour to more recent studies characterising him as an inveterate misogynist or an effeminised admirer of women. This chapter suggests that the depictions of female bodies must be read alongside Gulliver’s preoccupation with his own body and its functions, and these representations should be understood in the context of a culture in which sexuality provided a recognised shorthand for political debate. The aristocratic rakish discourse of Restoration theatre, with its presentation of relations between men and women through metaphors of battle and struggle, was being challenged by the emergence of sentimental dramas celebrating marital harmony. Gulliver’s horror at female bodies and his idealisation of the social systems of Lilliput and Houyhnhnmland challenge the fetishisation of the family and reverence for domesticity that were increasingly characterising moral discourse and found their ideal form for expression in the development of the novel.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

The introduction recounts the life and writing career of Jonathan Swift, centred on his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It provides an overview of the action of Swift’s masterpiece, placing the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in parallel to the events of Swift’s life: his education, early career as secretary to William Temple, forays into satire, political writings during Anne’s reign, and Irish writings in the decade before he published Gulliver. The introduction establishes the circumstances of its publication, the different states of the text (and its paratexts), and some of the main critical attitudes to the work. It summarises the chapters within the volume.

The chapter reviews literary contexts for Gulliver’s Travels, surveying relevant earlier texts, and indicating their satiric influence. With little reference to major verse satirists of Greece and Rome, key works include fictional narratives such as the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and most significantly the True Histories of Lucan, and his widely copied Dialogues of the Dead. In the Renaissance, we find specific links with More’s Utopia and a general debt to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. An imaginary voyage in space available to Swift is Cyrano de Bergerac’s States and Empires of the Moon. The biggest single influence comes from the twin stories of Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. More modern writers whose practice was known to Swift are seventeenth-century English poets, headed by Dryden, Marvell, Butler, and Rochester. Contemporaries who produced effective satires in prose were Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and William King. The author’s friends in the Scriblerus group, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, naturally left some mark on Gulliver. Overall, the satiric workings of Swift’s masterpiece show abundant traces of these traditions, but its success owes most to his own comic gifts, learning, and capacity at once to attract and disturb the reader.

“The Sophists” generally refers to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon, as well as to a few lesser-known fifth-century figures; but why it does so, and what holds these men together, has been a matter of debate from Plato’s time to our own. Neither of the two standard explanations fit all and only these figures – the philosophical one, that they share some revolutionary epistemological outlook (for instance, relativism or anti-realism), or the sociological one, that they are primarily teachers of virtue of pay. This Introduction proposes revisiting the Sophists as celebrated instances of their time, a period of energetic intellectual discovery, experimentation, and communication. Doing so opens new questions about their continuity with their background culture as well as any distinctive interests, methods, or beliefs they might have. The Introduction goes on to discuss all early uses of the term sophistês in the fifth century (from Pindar through Thucydides) and its dominant uses in the fourth century, allowing us to see the range of kinds of people it applied to and the force with which it was applied. Then it describes the heterogeneous evidence base for Sophists and cognate figures. It concludes with a summary of the volume’s chapters.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.

The chapter presents the Sophists’ more original contributions to political thought and shows how some of their ideas, which were often developed in the course of their practice as advisors or pedagogues, influenced the work of the two major philosophers of the next generation, Plato and Aristotle. The chapter’s first section shows the debt of early theorizing on constitutions to the Sophists’ practice of antilogia or debate but also to the discussions about democracy that mark Athenian intellectual life in the last decades of the fifth century, and shows how such theorizing provides the springboard for Plato’s pursuit for the best constitution. Its second section focuses on the criticism of law and argues that (despite what continues to be a dominant interpretation in the study of Sophistic thinking) such criticism should not be understood as a threat to morality but rather as constructive reflection on the nature and the limits of legislation.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.