If the sophists taught young men to argue falsehood as persuasively as to argue truth, then how could anyone when confronted with a sophist trained person know if that person was telling the truth? How can we trust what someone says to us if falsehood can be argued as persuasively as truth? And so the sophists were often accused of training young men to make the worst argument seem better and of corrupting the morals of young men by doing so.
The most famous sophist was Protagoras. And in what we know about him, we see that it was not just rhetoric that made the Athenians by and large nervous about the sophists, but it was also their approach to the gods and to knowledge in general. Protagoras wrote several works, none of which have survived. Unfortunately, we have only fragments of his work, usually single sentence fragments.
His most famous saying is usually translated, man is the measure of all things. I like to paraphrase that a bit as the human intellect is the measure of all things because I found that very frequently modern students, when they hear man is the measure of all things, interpret that to mean something like man is the crowning pinnacle of creation by which standard all other creatures are to be judged. That, I think, is not at all what Protagoras meant by it. I think he meant, rather, our own minds, our own intellects are the only measuring stick we have for us to judge the rest of the world.
Our intelligence is our only measuring stick. In another sentence that probably opened one of his books, Protagoras says, about the gods I know nothing, whether they exist or not, and therefore I will not speak of them, and that I think encapsulates what scared the Athenians and worried the Athenians about the sophists Protagoras is not an atheist though he was accused of being one he’s not saying there are no gods he’s saying I don’t know if there are any gods and more than that he’s implying gods are irrelevant I’m not going to talk about them I’m not interested in them I’m interested in the human mind human intellect and what it can do now obviously, if gods are considered irrelevant, the validity of oracles is called into question.
And as we talked about when discussing Apollo and the oracle at Delphi, oracles were an extremely serious matter in Greek society. They were taken seriously, they were trusted, they were believed in. A group of people who intentionally and directly questioned the validity of oracles are not going to be very popular among Greek traditionalists and the sophists indeed were not very popular. This was all taken extremely seriously by the way. The most famous indication of how seriously the sophists were regarded and what a threat they were seen as being is that Socrates was executed in 399 BC largely on charges of being a sophist.
He said he was not. He said that his teachings were very different from Sophism. But the charges against Socrates, the charges which led to his execution, were that he had corrupted the youth of Athens and that he had denied the gods of Athens, the charges made against Sophists. So this is a very serious subject, that Sophocles, I think, addresses in Oedipus the King. And if we look at the play, the Oedipus myth as Sophocles uses it, in this context, we see that Oedipus can be read as an example of, almost a paradigm of, a sophist.
He refuses to simply accept what the oracle at Delphi tells him will happen. More importantly in the play, he refuses to accept the warnings of the prophet Tiresias, an old blind prophet who tells him rather frequently in Sophocles’ play and pretty clearly that he is the one who killed Laius and that he is living in an incestuous union with his mother Jocasta. Oedipus directly accuses Tiresias, a prophet of the gods, of lying. Furthermore, Oedipus is also sophist-like in his insistence on his own intelligence and his determination to reason out for himself the puzzles of his origin and the question of who killed Laius. It’s the question of who killed Laius that motivates the action of the entire play.
Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus story opens with Thebes suffering under a great plague Oedipus sends a messenger to the Oracle at Delphi to find out what is causing this plague, the answer comes back that the cause of the plague is the fact that the murderer of Laius is living in Thebes, unknown and unrecognized. And so Oedipus sets out to discover who it is that murdered Laius, and that leads to the entire unraveling of the whole story.
So if we read Sophocles presentation of Oedipus as a presentation of a sophist, a kind of prototype of a sophist, then I think Sophocles play indicates pretty clearly that in the view taken by this play the human intellect alone is not sufficient for understanding the world. I think Sophocles here is coming down on the traditionalist side saying that sophism doesn’t work. The human intellect alone cannot solve all the problems of existence. In particular, Oedipus acts throughout the play on a mistaken premise. All of his logic works perfectly well, except he begins from the mistaken premise that he is the son of Polybus and Merope of Corinth, not the son of Laius and Jocasta of Thebes.
And so his entire intellectual structure crumbles because it’s built on a faulty basis. I think that’s a fairly clear warning by Sophocles of the limitations of human intellect and the mistakes to which it’s liable. Sophocles also seems pretty clearly to say the gods’ oracles are indeed valid and the gods must indeed be taken into account. And throughout the play,
Sophocles underlines all of these ideas with a running correspondence that he makes over and over again in the play between knowledge and blindness, ignorance and sight. Tiresias the prophet is blind but knows the truth from the beginning of the play through to the end.
Oedipus, when he has his eyes, when he has those senses that are so important for intellect, so important for human reasoning, he doesn’t know the truth. He doesn’t know who he is. While he has his sight, he’s ignorant. Once he learns the truth, he blinds himself. And so throughout the play, Sophocles underlines his themes by stressing the idea that sight in some way equals ignorance, blindness in some way equals knowledge.
All of these different readings of Sophocles’ play indicate how very difficult it is to separate the Oedipus myth from Sophocles’ particular retelling of the Oedipus myth. Oedipus the King has become so central a text in Western literature that it has even eclipsed Sophocles’ own further telling of the story in his later play, Oedipus at Colonus, where he treats of the death of Oedipus. In that play, Oedipus comes to Athens, to a town named Colonus, which was actually Sophocles’ hometown near Athens, dies there and becomes a protective spirit for the Athenians, becomes a hero worshipped by the Athenians. But Oedipus at Colonus is not nearly as well known in general terms as Oedipus the king.