Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) Read Free Page A

relevant skills and techniques. The sophists, though definitely not constituting a school, and perhaps only secondarily linked together as part of a single intellectual movement, offered themselves as teachers of useful knowledge and usable skills. 11
    Since they charged high fees affordable only by the seriously wealthy, they pitched their appeal especially to the adolescent and young adult sons of the propertied leisure class. This was a section of society that in democratic Athens was finding itself increasingly out of sympathy with the shift in the balance of power from the elite few to the – as the elite saw them – untutored and unwashed masses. Thepseudo-Xenophontic ‘Old Oligarch’ neatly reflects both the anti-democratic outlook of this elite and the consequences of sophistic teaching. The sophists themselves, however, were by no means all necessarily anti-democratic. The instruction they provided in the arts of persuasive rhetoric could have been as well deployed on the democratic side of an argument. For it was argument, one of the several meanings of the Greek word
logos
, that their teaching was principally about, in both theory and practice.
    One of their main pedagogical gambits was to ask a pupil to distinguish between ideas or practices that were traditional and yet intellectually respectable and those that were merely conventional but rationally indefensible. It was not difficult therefore for conservatives to paint the sophists as dangerous radicals undermining the traditional foundations of social solidarity. This was how Aristophanes comically represented Socrates and his ‘Thinkery’ in his
Clouds
of 423. But that was not at all how Socrates’ own pupils saw him. Indeed, it was they who in their all too successful efforts to distinguish their revered mentor as sharply as possible from the sophists gave them their bad name (and us the negative term ‘sophistical’). What Plato seems to have objected to most about the sophists was their claim both to know and to be able to teach wisdom, when really they were merely clever-clever tinkerers with words and ignorant of what true wisdom was. What Xenophon, however, seems to have principally feared was that their teaching would legitimize and foster the irreligion that he saw as in any case steeply on the increase, thanks to an unholy combination of factors fostered by the morally debilitating circumstances of the Peloponnesian War. In this regard, as in many others, Xenophon’s outlook was far more conventional and traditional than that of Plato. 12
    In one respect, however, Xenophon was very much a child of his progressive times. Although he spent almost half of his life, and perhaps as much as three-quarters of his adulthood, in exile, he had been born and raised at the epicentre of the panhellenic intellectual ferment associated with the ‘sophists’. He thus became willy-nilly part of the revolution in intellectual discourse that these newfangled thinkers set in train. A subsidiary but vital part of this revolution was thetransformation of a broadly oral intellectual culture into a broadly written one. Strictly, Greek had no word for a ‘reader’. The word that did service for it,
akroates
, meant literally a ‘hearer’. Likewise, one of the Greek verbs used to mean ‘to read’,
anagignoskein
, meant literally ‘to recognize again’, that is recognize again in their concretized, written form the sounds of words that one had first heard. Most Greeks most of the time would primarily hear words rather than read texts. But from the second half of the fifth century onwards, intellectual interchange increasingly relied on the written word. It is not therefore accidental that Xenophon’s work should contain some of the earliest known references to the ownership of books. In
The Persian Expedition
(7.5.14), for example, we are told that among the items carried on a trading ship wrecked off Salmydessus in the northern Aegean would be found