How Socratic Is the “Noble Art of Sophistry”? Tracing the Gennaia Sophistike of the Sixth Diaeresis Back to Old Comedy

Several scholars agree in identifying the “sophistry” outlined in the 6th diaeresis of Plato’s Sophist with the Socratic elenchus (see esp. Cornford 1935, 177-179). In fact, refuting someone “when (s)he thinks (s)he is saying something though (s)he is saying nothing” until (s)he feels ashamed for the opinions (s)he previously held (230c-d), is a kind of purification that strongly reminds of Socrates’s elenctic activity. According to Plato and other first-generation Socratics, the shame triggered by Socrates plays a pivotal role in reversing the unfounded pretense of knowledge of Socrates’s interlocutors into an admission of ignorance. As Rosen has pointed out, the 6th diaeresis ends with a definition not of the sophist, but of “a hybrid of the sophist and the philosopher” (1983, 131). This is surprising, as one explicit aim Plato pursues very often (in the Sophist as well as in many other dialogues) is to distinguish, in most cases even to counterpose, the sophist from the philosopher. This begs the question of what kind of sophistry Plato has in mind at 226B-231B. In this paper I claim that in the 6th diaeresis Plato points at a definition of the sophist that merges both the professional sophists and Socrates—a definition that can be traced back to Old Comedy. Here, the word sophistes encompasses “intellectuals” of various kinds (sophists, philosophers, phusiologoi, and even the initiates to mystery cults such as Orphism or the Eleusinian Mysteries) that were lampooned not only in Aristophanes’s Clouds, but also in other comedies by playwrights who were active in the decade before 423 a.C. (such as Eupolis, Ameipsias, and Plato Comicus). In this paper, I show how Plato’s account of sophistry at 226B-231B depends on a variety of comic motifs.