Benquo

At the same time, being part of the leadership structure in control of considerable tax revenues became more profitable for more people and less economically sustainable to opt out of.

Now ambitious Athenians started using their speech to seem electable by showing off the quality of their communicate their perspectives on matters of shared concern performance.

Sophists were the professionals of this new economy.

They specialized in the performance of wisdom, partly to sell their know-how, but always claiming, with some ambiguity, that they were excellent on the same criteria as the great Athenian leaders of the previous generation.

And the consequences were not limited to the realm of speech.

People were being imprisoned, exiled, and killed on the basis of deliberative processes that had become unmoored from any standard anyone could articulate.

What had happened was not simply that Athenian politics had become venal.

The sophists taught people to run more sophisticated scripts.

Public speech, which had once been the medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems, had become a performance of thinking.

The performance could be very impressive.

It could sound like wisdom.

But there was no one home behind it, except an intelligent but inarticulate terrified hairless ape with no friends.

And then there was Socrates.

He described himself not as a sophist, a possessor of wisdom, but a philosopher, someone who likes wisdom, who has an affinity for it.

In the Apology, Plato has Socrates report that his friend Cheriphon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser, and was told no one was.

But a different tradition, preserved in Origen's Contra Celsum, claims to quote the oracle's actual verse.

End quote.

The comparison class is striking.

Sophocles and Europides were not scientific thinkers like Thales or Democritus, who investigated the underlying structure of physical reality.

They were not mathematicians.