2 The 5th-Century Challenge to Justice

In the 5th century a very important challenge to the Traditional View of Justice and conventional moral beliefs was posed by a number of sophists. The present chapter lays out the theoretical core of this challenge by introducing and analysing two important sophistic texts, the ‘Sisyphus Fragment’ of unknown authorship and fragment B44 from Antiphon’s On Truth. The authors of these texts—the Moral Cynics—harboured a deep scepticism about the interventionist gods and denied that they could be counted on to support justice. One consequence of this denial was that it raised the possibility that human beings might get more goods and make a greater contribution to their own prospering through unjust rather than just behaviour. This possibility led the Cynics to object to the rosy picture of justice and human prospering presented in the Traditional View. Through a detailed analysis of these texts, I show how naturalistic assumptions led their sophistic authors to reject the superior value of justice and instead conclude that an individual concerned to prosper would do better to practise intelligent injustice instead. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of two non-sophistic texts that attest both to the broad impact that the Cynics’ challenge had on Greek culture and to the urgent need for a response to which their dangerous views gave rise.

The so-called ‘Sisyphus Fragment’¹ is a forty-two-line fragment in verse of unknown authorship from the second half of the 5th century, possibly originating from a Satyr play.² The text describes the origin of religious belief by outlining a three-stage historical development that freed humankind from a frightful and disorderly natural condition. In the first stage, humans (ἅνθρωποι, somehow acting as a group) instituted laws in an attempt to establish order by preventing those beholden to them from wronging one another. This, however, could not prevent all acts of wrongdoing because people continued to break the laws and do wrong in secret. In the second stage of this historical development, the belief in an omnipresent deity is manufactured and perpetuated in order to curtail secret wrongdoing. This leads to a third stage, in which humanity’s unfortunate natural condition is finally overcome. Remarkably, the belief in god is explicitly said to have been produced by a ‘false account’. Given that nothing else in the text indicates that gods might really exist, SF appears to be openly and unapologetically atheistic. And with this godlessness comes the implicit but nevertheless palpable suggestion that injustice may profit the individual.

The text starts by offering a brief description of our original, brutish condition (DK88 B25.1–4):

There was a time when the life of humans was

Disordered—both beastly and the servant of

Strength.³ Back then there was no prize for the good

Nor again punishment forthcoming for the wicked.⁴

Next, it reports humankind’s first attempt to escape the wild struggle for existence (5–8):

And thereafter it seems to me that people set up

Laws as punishers, so that Δίκη would be tyrant

… and would have ὕβρις as a slave.

And they were punished if someone did wrong.

These opening lines are reminiscent of WD and should, I think, be understood as a corrective to a number of specific views advanced in that poem. Let us begin by noting that these lines evince an understanding of justice that is similar to the one put forward by Hesiod, which, as we saw above, required not only following the laws but also treating others fairly as well (WD 213–24, 256–64 and 274–80). In SF the tight connection between justice and lawful behaviour is manifest from the fact that the laws are said to have been set up so that justice will rule (5–6). But because the tyranny of justice is also supposed to free humanity from a condition in which there are no prizes for the good (3–4), the rule of justice also apparently demands rewards for those who deserve them. Its scope, then, extends beyond the relatively narrow realm of written laws and into the sphere of fairness and appropriateness. Recall also that in Hesiod δίκη is opposed above all else to ὕβρις, a term encompassing violence, sexual deviancy and the sort of behaviour characteristic of beasts (WD 190–2, 213–18 and 238–9). The opening lines of SF reveal that ὕβρις is the essential contrast case to justice in our text as well (6). This, too, suggests a connection with Hesiod, as, indeed, does the image of δίκη holding ὕβρις as her slave. Indeed, this evocative picture is so strikingly reminiscent of WD that several scholars have regarded it as a direct allusion to that text.⁵

Yet though our text seems to be in broad agreement with WD about the substantive characteristics of δίκη, it takes a very different attitude towards human nature, history and the origins of justice. Particularly telling for our purposes is that life in the pre-law state of SF is said to be disordered (ἄτακτος), beastly (θηριώδης) and later to be governed by force (βίᾳ, 10). This reads as a rather perverse echo of a central Hesiodic passage discussed earlier, in which humans are contrasted with the beasts (θηρσί) that lack justice and may, therefore, use force and violence against one another (βίης; WD 274–80). As I argued above, in this passage Zeus establishes a sharp divide between the human and the animal kingdoms, thereby marking the two out as naturally distinct. The opening of the SF emphatically rejects any suggestion of fundamental dissimilarity. Instead, it appears to posit a deep similarity between us and the animals insofar as it insists that humanity’s natural condition was literally a beastly one. This raises the question of why humans, unlike animals, are now able to follow justice. The answer we get is that our own ingenuity allowed us to institute justice so that we could overcome our original condition. In notably sharp contrast to Hesiod’s account, no gods are required to explain how humanity came to be ruled by justice in SF.

Sadly, however, the momentous creation of laws was not enough to solve humanity’s woes (9–15):

Then, since the laws kept them from openly

Accomplishing their crimes by force but people

Continued to accomplish them in secret—it was at this

Point, it seems to me … that some clever and wise man

Invented the fear of the gods for mortals so that there

Would be some fearful prospect for the bad people

Even if they did or said or thought something in secret.

The institution of laws marks the beginning of the second historical stage. People stopped committing crimes openly to avoid being punished. But they did not quit their bad behaviour altogether. Rather, their illicit activities were driven into hiding, as it were, and people began practising injustice in secret. Such a state of affairs represented an improvement on the earlier condition, but evidently only a limited one. Things were still bad enough at this point in time that an orderly social life was impossible. Enter some clever and wise man (NB not humankind as a collective, but an individual) who invented and promulgated a belief in, as well as the fear of, an all-seeing god as a means to address the new social problem of secret injustice.

How did this fear work in practice? The mention of ‘fearful prospects’ in line 14 indicates that belief in the gods functioned to prevent secret injustice by convincing people that even if their crimes (or thoughts) went unnoticed, they would still be punished as consistently as if they were committed in public.⁶ Belief in the gods thereby plays a similar role to laws, which also function by issuing credible threats of punishment (6), albeit threats credible only when the violations of the laws are detectable by other people. In any case, SF suggests that the gods’ functional purpose is to extend the threat of punishment, hitherto restricted to the public domain, into all spheres of human life, however private.⁷ And this suggestion is later confirmed when we are told that the wise man who invented belief in the gods extinguished lawlessness with laws (τοῖς νόμοις, 40). Because this wise man did not invent the laws, the point of our text must be that his invention made the laws more effective and enabled them to do what they were always designed to do.

It is worth emphasising how truly remarkable this idea is. Our text is boldly and unambiguously suggesting that the sort of religious commitments presumably held by the majority of Greeks were consciously manufactured at some point in the past to amplify the deterrent force of the laws onto a cosmic scale. And though our author does not stop to say this explicitly, he must have understood this to be a targeted repudiation of the Traditional View. It was not the gods who created justice and who issued laws to humankind. On the contrary, it was the human invention of the laws and justice that ultimately gave rise to the need for us to believe in the gods. This is a very clever inversion of the traditional picture presented in the poetic tradition. And there is good reason to believe that Hesiod was SF’s main target. For the description of the god we get in our fragment appears to echo the description of Zeus in WD.⁸ Our text is, therefore, not-so-subtly hinting that the sort of gods described by Hesiod and presupposed by the Traditional View of Justice are in truth nothing more than human-made tools meant to augment the force of the human-made laws.

The first fifteen lines of SF thus present an ingenious and naturalistic reinterpretation of traditional material. Readers are informed that humans are not nearly as different from the animals as Hesiod’s poem had suggested and that any differences that do exist need not be due to the gods. History and human innovation can perfectly well explain how people, in contrast to the other animals, managed to make laws and come to be ruled by justice. Human innovation can also explain how and why humans came to believe in the gods, even though they do not actually exist. SF strikes the gods from the heights of Mt Olympus and recasts them as fictionalised tools to make humanity’s legislative practices more effective. It follows that SF emphatically rejects the first thesis of the Traditional View of Justice. Humans—and not any of the gods—thought up and established justice. For obvious reasons, our text must also reject the second thesis as well. Since the belief in interventionist gods is a political fiction, there is no literal sense in which humans receive divine rewards or punishments for their good or bad behaviour. Yet though justice is not beneficial because the gods reward it, it may nevertheless remain beneficial. I argue below that the evidence suggests that although our author ultimately regards the life of intelligent injustice as more profitable and prudent than the life of justice, there is one important respect in which justice is indeed beneficial for the just agent. To make this clear and to determine SF’s attitude to the remaining theses of the Traditional View, we turn to the overall message of our text.

Until recently, scholars typically held that SF was a subversive text endorsing a sort of irreligious hedonism. Charles Kahn gave voice to this view when he said that the text contains ‘the most extreme expression of this atmosphere of moral cynicism, documented in the Antiphon fragments and caricatured in the Clouds’ (1997, 259). On this interpretation, SF’s rediscovery of godlessness is the gateway drug to dangerous, unjust and self-serving behaviour. Once the divine punishments that people were raised to believe in are exposed as fictions, the thought goes, very little remains to prevent anyone from ruthlessly pursuing their own advantage. To be sure, the laws still exist and threaten punishment for unjust behaviour. But we are invited to think of the laws as hurdles to our satisfaction, to be surmounted or swept aside whenever possible. Several newer treatments of our text have, however, attempted to save it from this sort of interpretation. Patrick O’Sullivan (2012) and Klaus Hoffmann (1997, 274–88), for example, stress the important function played by both the laws and the belief in the gods in SF. They note that the clever and wise man’s invention was successful: the fragment calls his words ‘the sweetest of lessons’ (25) and its penultimate line explains that he ‘extinguished lawlessness (ἀνομία) with laws’ (40). This marks the culmination of humanity’s earliest attempts to escape the natural condition into which they were born. Should we really understand our text as endorsing injustice if the whole point of the historical development outlined within it is to overcome injustice? Additionally, these scholars note that our text calls the inventor of the fear of gods ‘clever and wise’, which sounds like praise. We are, therefore, invited to understand his false account not as pernicious perjury but as fanciful fibbing, which, like Plato’s noble lie, ultimately makes society better.⁹ On this reading, SF endorses the rule of law and supports the fictional account of the gods that makes an orderly life possible for everyone.

Both of these interpretations get something right. Recent authors are correct to point out that SF recognises the importance of the laws and religious belief both for society at large and, by implication, for every individual who profits from their society. However, proponents of the first interpretation are right to maintain that—all that notwithstanding—the text offers more than a little hint that some people will, and perhaps even should, pursue their self-interest through calculated injustice. To see how, let us return to the beastly natural condition with which the fragment begins. Our ancestors desired to escape this condition because they believed that their lives would be better in an ordered society governed by laws. That is to say, they were motivated to bring about the rule of justice because they saw that it would promote their individual and collective self-interest. Yet our text indicates that many people, despite working hard to institute the laws, nevertheless broke those very laws in secret once they had been instituted (9–11). Why? The answer must be that our ancestors wanted to live in a peaceful and orderly society but also wanted to be able to steal from, assault or otherwise take advantage of their fellow citizens. That is to say, they wanted to live in a world where others were just and left them alone, but where they could get the better of others through secret injustice.¹⁰ Unfortunately, this was not a realistic prospect. One cannot pilfer another’s cake and expect to eat it in peace, too. Either a critical mass of people started to practise secret injustice immediately after the introduction of the laws or only a few did at first and then others, upon realising what was going on, joined in the fun later. Either way, enough wrongdoing continued to be perpetrated in this second historical stage to make a peaceful and orderly life impossible. Before lawlessness could be overcome and order established in the final historical stage, people needed to be convinced that all injustice—whether open or hidden—would inevitably be punished and would, therefore, prove detrimental to their self-interest (40–1).

But how much wrongdoing was perpetrated after the introduction of laws that the skies needed to come alive with gods? That the solution to the problem of secret injustice was the manufacture of divinity itself suggests that the situation must have been dire. Gods are not created to resolve minor inconveniences. Moreover, our text confirms that a considerable amount of injustice was being practised after the introduction of the laws when it later refers to the condition of society in the second historical stage as one of ἀνομία (37–40). ἀνομία is a term that typically indicates a condition of serious and pervasive social problems.¹¹ Thus things remained bad even after the laws were introduced.

But if this is right, then SF quietly leaves open plenty of conceptual space between the failure of the laws in its second historical stage and their eventual triumph in the third. In particular, it leaves open the possibility of an intermediate condition in which a modest amount of injustice is perpetrated without it being the case that society is plunged into dreadful ἀνομία. Of course, the wrongdoing would have to be localised to a smaller segment of the population than it was in the second historical stage. It would presumably also have to remain hidden. But still, nothing in the text speaks against this possibility. A small intellectual elite—those few who discovered (or, perhaps, learned from SF) the truth about the gods—would be the ideal population to practise this sort of selective injustice. They would understand that although there are no divine punishments for unjust behaviour, this truth should not be promulgated. To spread it would be to let too many in on the secret and invite the sort of chaos that everyone wishes to avoid. So long as they protected this secret, however, our text allows that they might be able to engage in calculated, secret injustice while their fellow citizens dutifully treated them (and others) justly out of fear of the gods.

I admit that this line of thought goes beyond the text of SF. The fragment nowhere says that a select few can or should practise injustice. Nonetheless, it should be obvious by now that the text seems to allow that an intelligent agent might practise injustice profitably—that is to say, without getting punished in turn. Two further considerations suggest that our author would have endorsed such injustice as genuinely valuable. The first and most compelling consideration is simply that the text itself testifies to the fact that humans have a natural desire to get the better of their peers. This, after all, is exactly what our ancestors were trying to do when, once laws were first established, they started to practise injustice in secret. They wanted to take from others without having anything taken from them. By revealing that there are no real gods our author is, in effect, thrusting the audience of SF back into a historical stage where there were no credible threats curtailing people’s secret injustice. At a bare minimum, our author had to expect that those who understood his message would be tempted to act like our ancestors in the second historical stage and secretly break the laws. And to whatever degree he endorsed the natural desire to get the better of one’s peers, he would have to see intelligent unjust behaviour as profitable and prudent.

A second and related consideration comes into view when we notice that recent research has connected the SF directly to a pernicious strand of Athenian atheism. Referring to Plato’s analysis of this atheistic movement in Book X of his Laws, David Sedley has noted (2013, 336): ‘Plato did have certain written texts in mind, since he refers to the sources as being both in prose and verse. It is a safe assumption that the Sisyphus fragment or a longer text—perhaps even an entire play—containing it, was one of the verse texts.’ Sedley goes on to argue that the core of the atheists’ cosmology and legal theory presented in Book X finds clear expression in SF. Establishing this connection is illuminating for many reasons, but especially because Plato is explicit about the sort of life the atheists of that movement advocated. We are told they claim that ‘whatever one wins through force’ is justified and that the natural life is ‘truly to rule over others, not to be a slave to others in accordance with the law’ (Leg. 890a2–3 and 8–9). Of course, Plato is presenting the atheists in a particularly unflattering light in his Laws. But even allowing for some hyperbole or distortion on Plato’s part, this is telling testimony. Assuming it is correct to connect SF with this atheist movement, we have independent evidence in favour of an interpretation of SF as endorsing, where desirable, the practice of injustice. It is certainly not hard to see how the intellectual elite described in the last two paragraphs might be thought to rule over those who are slaves to the laws.

This is, moreover, what one would expect from a text that is so obviously critical of the religious assumptions of WD. The debunking of religion and divine retribution in SF seems perfectly poised to pave the way for successful, profitable injustice. It is, then, only to be expected that the critical attitude our author held towards Hesiod would lead him to reject the fifth thesis of the Traditional View of Justice. And so he does. SF does not, however, reject everything in Hesiod. True, there is clearly no place in SF for real gods of any kind and, as a result, our text emphatically rejects the first and second thesis of the Traditional View. But SF’s attitude towards the third thesis is complicated. Our author does not claim that self-interested individuals have no reason to value justice. On the contrary, he plainly recognises that justice is beneficial to the extent that it secures a safe and functional society for all and, by implication, for the individual too. This is hardly the sort of ringing endorsement of justice found in WD. But it certainly counts as a qualified agreement that justice benefits the just individual. Still, as I have tried to argue above, this qualified agreement masks a profound point of disagreement about what sort of behaviour is best for an individual and most likely to lead to their prospering. For SF implies that savvy people would do better to reject the life of justice and instead practise a sort of calculated and hidden injustice. This is just another way of saying that our text rejects the fifth and final thesis of the Traditional View of Justice. All things being considered, injustice is more valuable for the intelligent individual than justice.

On Truth is a philosophical work written by the sophist Antiphon sometime in the late 5th century.¹² Though the vast majority of this work was lost for the better part of two millennia, one long fragment, now called B44 after its position in Diels and Kranz, was identified early in the 20th century ce when a group of manuscripts known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in Egypt. The fragment is quite lacunal and sadly broken into three chunks, the relationship between which is not totally clear. But we are still very fortunate that it was recovered, for the remains of OT contain the most sober-minded and sophisticated attack on justice contained in any extant 5th-century text. They are, therefore, hugely significant. In the fragment Antiphon argues, first, that following justice is often harmful to human nature and contrary to our self-interest and, second, that in addition to being harmful justice is—at least as it was conventionally understood—theoretically unstable. In the course of making these two criticisms, Antiphon states explicitly that the selective and intelligent practice of injustice is more beneficial for the individual than the scrupulous practice of justice. By openly endorsing the profitability and prudence of injustice, OT flatly rejects the fifth thesis of the Traditional View of Justice and, as we shall see, poses a full-frontal attack on it.

The text of the most important chunk of the fragment, 44(a), becomes legible at a point where Antiphon offers a statement about the nature of justice (DK87 B44 1.6–11):

… Justice, then, is to not transgress the laws

of the city in which one is a citizen.¹³

Antiphon characterises justice as not transgressing the laws and customs (νόμιμα) of one’s own city, an understanding of justice that was common in the late 5th and early 4th centuries.¹⁴ Its prominence and popularity presumably made it an attractive object of criticism.¹⁵ But the core of this understanding of justice extends back far beyond the 5th century. Here it is important to note that ‘νόμιμα’ not only refers to laws in the sense of written legal statutes but also includes the norms and conventions that govern appropriate or correct behaviour more generally.¹⁶ The target of Antiphon’s criticism is, in other words, an understanding of justice that demands that we both follow the written laws and treat one another appropriately as well. It is, therefore, similar in substance to the understanding of justice found earlier in WD and SF.¹⁷

The remainder of 44(a) makes the case for thinking that justice does not serve the intelligent individual’s self-interest. Antiphon’s first complaint is that νόμιμα often force us to do things that are contrary to our nature and, therefore, contrary to our well-being. His second complaint is that the νόμιμα also fail to protect us from the harm and injury we might receive from others. In short, justice demands that we frequently forgo the pursuit of our own self-interest for the sake of others, yet it is unable to stop others from harming us in the pursuit of their own naked self-interest.

To understand why following the laws, norms and conventions (hereafter just ‘laws’) can be detrimental to our interests, we must note the fundamental distinction Antiphon draws between nature (φύσις) and law or convention (νόμος). He insists that our nature as human beings, including what profits us and leads to our prospering, is both fixed and inescapable, while the laws and other social institutions are creations of convention and neither fixed nor necessary (1.23–2.1):

For while the things of the laws are imposed, the things of nature are necessary; and while the things of the laws are agreed upon but not born, the things of nature are born but not agreed upon.

Underlying this fundamental distinction is Antiphon’s presumption of a past contract made among human beings to establish laws. In his pioneering paper ‘The Origins of Social Contract Theory’, Charles Kahn evaluates the evidence for early Greek theories concerning the origin of society and, in particular, humanity’s heroic attempt to escape a disorderly state of nature through a mutual contract. Because the above text says laws were ‘agreed upon but not born’, Kahn finds this particularly strong evidence attesting to the existence of such an account in the 5th century.¹⁸ The upshot is that unlike our nature, which is fixed, unchanging and has existed for as long as human beings have, laws came into being at some point in the past, changed and are in no way fixed. Empirical support for this idea is presented in another chunk of the fragment, 44(b) 2.1–6, where we seem to be informed that although everyone shares the same physical make-up, different cultures have radically different laws.¹⁹ Antiphon shows himself to be very much aware of the Herodotean insight that there is a certain amount of contingency to the laws that one is born into. Had Antiphon been born in a different place, he would have been raised with different laws; and had he been born at an early enough time, there likely would not have been any laws at all.

The reader may perhaps realise that Antiphon is here presupposing a view about the origin and development of the laws that is similar to the historical account outlined in the opening lines of SF.²⁰ It seems to have been a shared assumption of the 5th-century Cynics (and, as we shall see in the next chapter, other sophists as well) that a satisfying historical and naturalistic explanation could be given for the existence and development of laws and justice. ‘Once upon a time, a group of our ancestors came together and created laws in order to regulate the behaviour of the people living in the earliest human communities …’ became preferable to ‘From time immemorable we have had laws that were given to us by Zeus …’. And as it was for SF, Antiphon’s preference for the naturalistic and historical explanation is obviously important for assessing his attitude towards the Traditional View of Justice. Because justice is, according to Antiphon, not transgressing the laws of one’s city, it follows that justice can come into being only with the creation of laws.²¹ And because laws are human inventions, justice is too. OT thus rejects the first thesis of the Traditional View. It was not Zeus who gave law and justice to humanity but humans themselves.

Unlike SF, however, which had much to say in favour of the laws, OT expresses many reservations about humanity’s self-legislated νόμιμα. Antiphon freely admits that he is pursuing his investigation because he finds most laws hostile to human nature (2.23–30):

This investigation is for the sake of all this: that many of the

things just according to the law are hostile to nature. ²²

Antiphon proceeds immediately to mention the many areas of our lives that are governed by these laws: rules have been established as to what the eyes should see, what the ears should hear, what the tongue should say, what the hands should do, where the feet should go and even what the mind should desire.²³ But what these rules order us to do is no more natural than what they prohibit us from doing (2.30–3.18). They therefore constitute restraints on the free expression of our nature (4.1–6). As a corollary to these claims, Antiphon draws his reader’s attention to a much more shocking fact: the laws often prevent us from doing what is pleasurable and sometimes even require that we suffer. We are told in no uncertain terms that among the things demanded by the laws, ‘one would find many hostile to nature. And in them is more pain when less is possible; less pleasure when more is possible; and suffering, when it is possible not to suffer’ (5.17–24).²⁴

At this point in 44(a) Antiphon takes himself to have shown that the laws often restrain the free exercise of our nature, demand that we take less pleasurable courses of actions than we otherwise might, and even demand that we positively incur pain and suffering. These disturbing facts are meant to support the conclusion that scrupulously following the laws and being just is not the best way to promote one’s prospering. At the end of B44(a), however, Antiphon appears to anticipate a natural objection to this train of thought and the conclusion to which it leads. Someone might reasonably point out that the laws’ demands are universal. Every citizen is required to refrain from pursuing their own selfish goals at least some of the time, and every citizen will on occasion need to make sacrifices for the common good. Though it may at times be legitimately frustrating to play by the rules, the objection continues, it is ultimately prudent to do so because the laws protect everyone from the selfishness of others as well as provide other benefits to all.

Antiphon will have none of this well-intentioned objection.²⁵ He thinks it is perfectly obvious that the laws cannot be trusted to ensure that anyone plays by the rules. To think they can is to naïvely misunderstand the laws and human society (5.25–6.9):

So if the laws provided some protection for those

submitting to these kinds of things,²⁶ and provided some loss

for those who do not submit but resist, then to obey the laws

would not be unprofitable. But now justice which derives

from the law appears to be incapable of coming to the aid

of those who submit to these kinds of things.

Antiphon’s point seems to be that the laws are totally impotent to stop anything on their own. Of course, the fear of punishments legislated by the laws may, as in SF, stop some criminal behaviour. But, as Antiphon goes on to point out, there are ways for those who violate the laws to escape punishment. People can commit crimes in secret, and even when caught or accused, there is no guarantee they will be formally convicted or penalised. Those with honeyed tongues might be able to sweet-talk their way out of their bitter deserts, for example (6.19–7.13).²⁷ And even if wrongdoers are eventually punished for their crimes, this does not change the fact that they caused harm in the first place (6.9–18). The laws are of little help to me if they punish my murderer after I am already six feet underground. It is, therefore, foolish to trust that the laws will prevent the bad behaviour of others or adequately punish those who are unjust.

By anticipating and responding to those who might wish to defend the laws, Antiphon buttresses his earlier argument and presents further considerations against their utility. Taken together, the considerations of 44(a) are supposed to show how thoroughly problematic the νόμιμα are from the perspective of the self-interested individual. And because justice is nothing other than not violating the laws of one’s city, we are being informed that justice is not especially valuable for us. The position of OT is thus more extreme than the one we found earlier in SF, for in that text justice was at least highlighted as a very useful principle for regulating human interaction. This is not obviously so for Antiphon, who has very little to say in favour of justice at all.²⁸ Given all this, a dispassionate reader of B44 should conclude that Antiphon largely rejected the third thesis of the Traditional View of Justice. Justice is not particularly useful for the individual.

It is clear that he rejected the fifth thesis as well (1.12–23):

Thus, a person would make use of justice most

beneficially for themselves if they considered the laws

as great when in the presence of witnesses and the

things of nature [as great] when bereft of witnesses.

Antiphon is explicit in this passage about how an individual would most beneficially ‘use’—that is to say, orient themselves towards—justice. It is not, all things considered, prudent to be just. Instead, one should consider the laws as great in public but the demands of nature, which are often incompatible with legal demands, in private. What Antiphon means by considering something as ‘great’ is that one should attach greater importance to that thing in one’s deliberations about what to do.²⁹ As we shall see below, this means that there may well be some circumstances in which it is advisable to follow the laws even when there are no witnesses around. Nevertheless, this passage clearly suggests that it is often more profitable to break the laws than to follow them.

Strictly speaking, of course, Antiphon here does not explicitly recommend an unjust course of action over a just one. He does not literally say the intelligent individual should ignore the laws when they are alone. He only says that doing so is generally beneficial. Jonathan Barnes (1996, 407) has argued that it would be wrong to see Antiphon as prescribing any sort of behaviour instead of merely expressing a theoretical truth: OT was written ‘as a statement of fact and not as a suggestion for action’.³⁰ In fairness to Barnes, Antiphon is making a statement of fact in the above passage. But in fairness to Antiphon, he should not have had to use prescriptive vocabulary to get his very obvious point across. It seems to me rather churlish to insist that Antiphon should have had to explicitly state that he endorses the practice of injustice after insisting that, and explaining why, breaking the laws is beneficial. The whole investigation of B44(a) is oriented towards the practical question of what benefits or harms us, and such investigations do not lend themselves to detached, descriptive conclusions. The reader should consider again Hesiod’s concluding ‘statement of fact’: ‘prosperous and blessed is the one who knows all these things …’. Are we really to believe that this is merely theoretical and is not meant to have any direct practical implications?

If we needed more convincing that Antiphon’s lessons are intended to inform behaviour, we find it in the following lines (2.3–10):

When a person transgresses the laws, then, they are free from

shame and punishment if they escape the notice of those

who agreed on them; but if not, then they are not.

Note that a literal interpretation of this passage entails that an individual will be free from all punishment and shame if their injustice escapes the notice of those who have agreed on the laws, which must mean their fellow citizens. No other punishments are mentioned in B44 aside from legal punishments. I take this to be decisive textual evidence that Antiphon rejected the possibility of divine punishment for unjust behaviour and, by implication, the possibility of divine reward as well. What we have here, then, is an explicit rejection of the second thesis of the Traditional View.

Now recall that in WD the threat of divine punishment is what recommends against the practice of injustice; similarly, SF took it for granted that many people would freely commit crimes and harm others if they were not stayed by the threat of legal or cosmic retribution. Early Greek ethical thinkers tended to assume that individuals would pursue their own material self-interest if they could do so without suffering any harm in turn. There is no reason to think OT was any different in this respect. Thus when Antiphon argues that following the laws is frequently harmful to us and, in addition, claims that those of us who break the laws will be free from punishment and shame if they cleverly commit their crimes in secret, he is inviting us to consider secretly breaking the laws. He trusts, in other words, that we will hear the call to action that Barnes has missed.

This is enough to conclude that Antiphon rejected the fifth thesis of the Traditional View. On his view, behaving justly is frequently harmful to one’s interest and the prudent way to live one’s life is to selectively and intelligently violate the νόμιμα of one’s polis—or to be selectively and intelligently unjust. This view sounds radical, and it surely was. But it bears reminding that Antiphon says only that one should consider the things of nature as great in private. Moreover, OT never claims that following the laws is always hostile to our nature or detrimental to our prospering. It claims only that most (τὰ πολλὰ) of the laws are. Presumably, Antiphon would not encourage anyone to violate the few sanguine νόμιμα, even if they could do so without getting caught. Finally, it is worth recalling that the reason to avoid breaking the laws in public is that one will incur painful punishments or shame when one’s violation is recognised. But sometimes private wrongdoing is later discovered through forensic investigations or confessions. In such cases the wrongdoing is typically punished in just the same way as if it occurred in public. Antiphon’s point is not that we should break the laws of our city as much as possible but that—as a general principle—we should think about what will ultimately be in our interest, where this is understood in terms of what is beneficial to our nature.³¹ For most of us, this may well mean that we should carefully follow the laws whenever we are in public and even some of the time we are alone.

To conclude our discussion of 44(a), consider again 5.25–6.9. In this passage Antiphon concedes that it would be profitable to follow the laws—and, therefore, be just—if the laws were able to protect their citizens and if those who broke the laws suffered some loss. It is worth noting that this concession is almost a mirror image of the concession Hesiod makes near the end of his own discussion of δίκη. Recall that at WD 270–3 Hesiod admits it would be better to practise injustice if doing so resulted in more good things and fewer bad things than injustice. Of course, because the pious poet thinks the gods will intervene to set things straight, he does not believe that injustice could ever reliably result in more good things than justice. But, as I argued above, Hesiod’s concession is important because it shows that profit and prospering should guide our behaviour.

Antiphon agrees about what should guide our behaviour, but he rejects almost everything else in WD. OT clearly rejects the first and second theses of the Traditional View of Justice. The gods do not give justice to humans nor do they punish unjust behaviour or reward just behaviour. In truth, humans created laws for themselves, and only they are around to enforce them. But, sadly, the laws that were made in the past are not particularly beneficial to our nature nor are they enforced in a way that effectively protects citizens from the mistreatment of others. They don’t even effectively punish violators after they have committed their crimes. Justice could perhaps be beneficial if the laws were effective at punishing those who cause suffering and came to the aid of those who suffer. But Antiphon seems about as confident of that happening as Hesiod was in Zeus abandoning humanity. Antiphon’s argument in OT thus sets the Hesiodic view on its head and advances the opposite position. Justice could be valuable for humans if it actually protected them and punished violators, but it does not and cannot. Intelligent injustice is far more prudent.

A lack of space prevents me from discussing the final chunk of the fragment, 44(c), in detail, but in it Antiphon advances the remarkable idea that justice is not only harmful but also theoretically unstable.³² He argues for this by offering several case studies that highlight two νόμιμα and then by interrogating what these νόμιμα demand of citizens in particular situations. In a rather Socratic-looking argument, Antiphon presents three examples in which two apparently genuine principles of justice demand of an agent that they both φ and ~φ at the same time.³³ Assuming that no tolerable account of justice will contain laws that demand contradictory behaviour of the same person at the same time, Antiphon says of each of these pairs of principles: ‘it is necessary that either one of them be just, or that both be unjust’ (2.22–5). But in all three of the examples both are ex hypothesi genuine principles of justice. The reader is left perplexed and lost. Absolutely no help is given within the fragment for resolving the contradiction in which these local demands of justice result. Antiphon’s point seems to be that the whole system of justice is internally inconsistent.³⁴

The argument in 44(c) should be understood as the theoretical sidekick to the prudential argument of 44(a). In 44(a) we learn that scrupulously following justice and obeying the νόμιμα of one’s city is not prudent. It is often harmful to our true interests and should not be countenanced by the rational deliberator. In 44(c) we are told that, in addition, justice is internally incoherent and collapses from its own contradictions. At the end of Antiphon’s fragments the reader is left with the distinct impression that justice is a bad bargain: sold at too dear a price and thoroughly broken. The intelligent individual ought to reject it and pursue calculated, intelligent injustice instead.

In this section, I discuss two other texts that attest to the existence, power and influence of the sophistic challenge to justice. Though the authors of these texts are not themselves sophists, their works include characters who express radical yet familiar criticisms of conventional morality and who are, through either subtle hints or explicit suggestions, associated with the sophists. Several of the arguments put into these characters’ mouths appear to draw on or parody specific features of the Moral Cynics’ attack on the Traditional View of Justice. Attending to these arguments and their context is important for at least three reasons. Firstly, they provide us with fresh new insight into how and why some 5th-century sophists endorsed the life of injustice as (in one form or another) more profitable and prudent than the life of justice, thereby augmenting the investigation in the central sections of this chapter. Attending to these texts will also reveal just how impactful the Cynics’ challenge really was. As we shall see, their ideas became sufficiently mainstream to find their way into one of the most disturbing passages of history and one of the most brilliant comedies from the Classical period. And finally, by looking through the eyes of Aristophanes and Thucydides, we shall get a non-sophistic perspective on how the ideas in SF or OT were thought to operate in practice as well as the sort of nefarious purposes for which they might have been deployed. Examining these other texts will, therefore, help us appreciate how dangerous the Cynics’ ideas were thought to be and why it was so important for others to respond to them.

The first text to be considered is our comedy, Aristophanes’ Clouds. About two-thirds of the way through the play, two personified λόγοι come on stage and engage in a verbal battle over the appropriate way to educate youths and, more generally, the appropriate way to live. The first λόγος advocates a traditional education and endorses a noble if outdated caricature of an aristocratic lifestyle. The other is said to offer new and exciting, albeit corrupting, arguments on the same topics. We will turn to some of these arguments in a moment, but first a note about the identities of these λόγοι. While conversing with one another, they call themselves the stronger argument (ὁ κρείττων λόγος) and the weaker argument (ὁ ἥττων λόγος, Cl. 893, 990 and 1038). Their reputation, however, very much precedes them, and before they come on stage they are referred to by different names. Strepsiades, the miserly father who sends his son to be instructed by the λόγοι, apparently knows of the weaker argument as the unjust argument (τὸν ἄδικον τοῦτον λόγον, 116).³⁵ Given the lessons this λόγος goes on to teach Strepsiades’ son, Pheidippides, this appellation is fitting, for its arguments very much do encourage injustice. This is presumably why scholiasts have long preferred to refer to the weaker argument as the unjust argument and its counterpart as the just argument.³⁶ Following Dover’s magisterial edition of the text (1989, lvii), I shall refer to the two as the ‘Right Argument’ and the ‘Wrong Argument’. But the reader should bear in mind that the Wrong Argument is associated with injustice and an unjust way of life.

One must also note that the Wrong Argument ultimately triumphs in the verbal battle and becomes the primary educator of Pheidippides. Aristophanes thus literally makes the weaker (and unjust) argument stronger, thereby marking the whole contest as highly sophistic.³⁷ Sophistic influence can be seen from the form of the dramatised confrontation as well. Offering contrasting arguments on one topic or question—particularly one of ethical moment—was a common practice among the sophists.³⁸ There are particularly strong formal similarities to Prodicus’ speech ‘The Choice of Heracles’, in which personifications of virtue and vice argue with one another about what sort of education Heracles ought to receive and how he ought to live.³⁹ It therefore comes as no surprise when Socrates explicitly suggests that the Wrong Argument possesses the sophist’s skill by reassuring Strepsiades that his son will become a clever sophist after studying with it (1111). We may conclude that Aristophanes’ presentation of the Wrong Argument was written with the sophists in mind. Of course, this does not mean that Aristophanes attempted to faithfully represent the arguments of a particular sophist. The Wrong Argument is ridiculous and grotesquely hilarious. It would be unreasonable to think it faithfully represented the arguments of any historical figure. Yet Aristophanes was surely parodying genuine sophistic doctrines and positions. And by evaluating his text we may extract information about the Cynics’ arguments.

I will mention just a few arguments made by the Wrong Argument and its eventual student, Pheidippides. Near the outset of the confrontation between the two λόγοι, the Right Argument boasts that it will speak honourably about good and just things and with this strategy triumph over its opponent. To this, the Wrong Argument replies that relying on justice would be a huge mistake, ‘for I say that justice in no way exists’ (902). In response to the indignant protests of its more decent counterpart, the Wrong Argument elaborates by way of a short argument (904–6):

If Justice exists, how, then, was Zeus not destroyed after binding his own father?⁴⁰

Although much of the reasoning is here left implicit, we are in a position to unpack the Wrong Argument’s train of thought. It is assuming a traditional conception of justice and the gods—who, as we have seen, were thought to punish injustice—in order to expose that very conception as problematic. The Wrong Argument’s question evidently presumes that severe violations of justice are supposed to be punished. It then draws on the well-known story of Zeus overthrowing and imprisoning his father in Tartarus.⁴¹ To attack and imprison one’s father was highly objectionable in ancient Greece, and it would have counted as hugely problematic.⁴² But Zeus is never punished for his violation—on the contrary, he later becomes the de facto ruler of the gods. The conspicuous absence of any punishment for his unjust violation is supposed to show that the Right Argument’s presumptions about justice do not correspond to anything that really exists in nature. Presumably, the fact that Zeus committed an injustice is supposed to be additionally problematic for the Right Argument and its convictions. For, as we saw in WD, Zeus is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of justice. But why would we trust him to uphold justice if he himself violates it?

Much like SF and OT, the Wrong Argument sees that once the gods are out of the picture, the only credible deterrents against unjust behaviour are the laws and one’s fellow citizens. Yet it also recognises that the laws are far from perfect and can be circumvented in several ways, including through crafty argumentation. It is for this reason that the λόγος boasts that if Pheidippides learns how to argue effectively he will be able to illicitly pursue his self-interest with impunity. In what reads as a sort of exaggerated caricature of the closing lines of 44(a), the Wrong Argument encourages Pheidippides to follow the necessities of nature (τὰς τῆς φύσεως ἀνάγκας, 1075) and recognise nothing—however extreme—as shameful, even if his pursuits should lead him to unjust behaviour.⁴³ There will always be a cunning means of escape. For example, if a husband should discover Pheidippides in bed with his wife, he is advised to defend himself by noting that not even Zeus can control his lust around women. How, then, can a mere mortal!? Those with quick wits and sophistic arguments need not fear suffering on account of their crimes (1075–82).

Finally, we note that the speech promotes gross hedonistic and egoistic behaviour (1071–4):

Consider, oh lad, all the things that go into being temperate

and how many pleasures you will give up: boys, women,

drinking games, delicacies, boozing, and laughing. And yet

what good is life to you, if you are robbed of these things?

The Wrong Argument thus offers a rather succinct, if exaggerated, challenge to the Traditional View of Justice. It casts doubt both over whether the gods gave justice to humans and over whether the gods will punish us for our unjust behaviour. This comes close to rejecting the first and second theses of the Traditional View. Moreover, to the extent that it exists, justice is presented by the Wrong Argument as an obstacle to the satisfaction of our true natural desires. And at least for those who can cleverly argue their way out of trouble, the more prudent way to live one’s life is to take advantage of others by unjust means. For the prosperous life is the life spent luxuriating in sex, drink and delicacies, and the best way to get these things is through unjust behaviour. This, in turn, looks like a rejection of the third and fifth theses of the Traditional View. The only possible point of agreement with WD is the unjust λόγος’ assumption that pleasures and External Goods are truly valuable and important for human prospering. But even here, the tenor of the goods highlighted differs considerably. Hesiod praises hard work, a simplistic enjoyment of wealth and a fine reputation. The prosperous life according to the Wrong Argument seems instead to consist in lascivious luxury and the enjoyment of base pleasures.

Two arguments later made by Pheidippides must be mentioned here. After the student develops his own argumentative acumen, he, full of bravado from the new sophistic thinking, dares to strike his father for ridiculing Euripides. Strepsiades rebukes his son by invoking the law that prohibits children from assaulting their parents. We then get a very interesting two-part response (1421–4):

Was it not a man—just like you and me—who was

the first to establish the law, and by his speaking

persuade our ancestors? Is it, then, any less permissible

for me in turn to establish a new law for sons in the

future, that they return their father’s beatings?

This is not likely to impress anyone as a response to a father’s well-intentioned attempt to discipline his child. But Pheidippides’ questions point towards a rather sophisticated philosophical insight. Recall that, according to Hesiod in WD, Zeus himself gave laws to human beings. Believing that the laws derived (either in part or in their entirety) from the father of the gods no doubt had the effect of bestowing a certain dignity and authority onto these laws, not least because it implies that all people are everywhere permanently subject to them. Pheidippides should be understood as attempting to strip the laws of their sham dignity and authority by pointing out that the regulations governing human behaviour were in fact created by some person or persons in the past. This attempt raises the question of what normative force such laws have and why they should not be replaced at a later time by someone else—perhaps even by someone like you or me.

Pheidippides then concludes his defence of father-flogging as follows (1427–9):

Consider how the roosters and these other animals

repay their fathers: and yet in what way do they differ

from us, except of course that they don’t write laws?

Here the son provocatively offers an example from the animal kingdom and uses it as a potential model to inform human behaviour. Roosters attack their fathers, so why shouldn’t we?⁴⁴ This question would have flabbergasted Hesiod. In WD, he takes it for granted that humans are importantly distinct from animals and that we are better off for it. Recall that the lack of justice and the presence of violence among the animals was presented as highly pernicious—indeed, it was the feature of their lives that we should be most anxious to eliminate. Pheidippides questions this. He puts pressure on the idea that humans are ethically distinct from animals and should avoid beast-like behaviour for that reason. By citing roosters and other animals as a model for human behaviour, he, like SF, narrows the gap that Hesiod placed between us and the animals.

Again, I am not suggesting that any 5th-century sophist ever used these particular arguments to justify the maltreatment of their father (though some past scholars have linked the argument at 1427–9 very closely to Antiphon’s On Truth).⁴⁵ I hope it is clear by now that the actual sophists had far more serious concerns than this. We must assume, instead, that Aristophanes is parodying arguments he thought were particularly pernicious and—by putting them into the mouth of Pheidippides, a childish and outrageous horse-lover—running them through a dramatic reductio ad absurdum. Nevertheless, a nuanced interpretation of these arguments reveals some notable ways in which they resonate with the texts discussed earlier in the chapter and, I think, offer insight into the method of argumentation used by the Cynics. Firstly, note that both Antiphon and the author of SF assume that humans made the laws that we all follow. This challenges the idea that the laws have some divine authority or dignity, and it raises the question of whether they are normatively absolute or can be broken or changed. Some such line of thought lies in the background of the first part of Pheidippides’ challenge to his father. By asking why the laws shouldn’t be broken or remade, he cleverly shifts the burden of responsibility to the defenders of justice and challenges them to demonstrate and justify the authority of the laws. This is an eminently reasonable challenge if one assumes that the laws are merely one among many human creations (and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it was a challenge to which at least one defender of justice felt compelled to rise).

Secondly, when removed from the ridiculous context in which Aristophanes has placed them, these arguments—and particularly the second, with its appeal to animal behaviour—exhibit a rather ingenious philosophical strategy. Witness that after Pheidippides highlights the humble status of the laws in the first of the two passages, he then appeals to the behaviour of animals to provide some empirical evidence that it may be appropriate for humans to do what convention now prohibits. In conjunction with one another, these two moves are philosophically powerful. For how else does one intelligently respond to someone who says ‘god has established these ethical norms and they must be followed’ than by first pointing out that, in fact, it was not god but humans who created those norms sometime in the past, and then by appealing to some natural model in order to argue that those norms are anyhow not appropriate for the sort of creatures that we are? These kinds of considerations remain powerful in combatting prejudiced beliefs, even today.⁴⁶ My own suspicion is that Pheidippides’ appeal to the animal world was inspired by genuine sophistic attempts to offer empirical evidence about what humans are naturally like, free from the education and customs with which they were inundated in Classical Greece.

The final text we must address is the famous Melian Dialogue. In one of the more captivating pieces of Classical literature, Thucydides dramatises an encounter between the leaders of the small island-polis of Melos and a group of envoys who represent Athens, the imperial maritime power that intends to make Melos part of its empire. Athens’ conquest of Melos was a real historical event occurring in 416/415, but the dialogue reproduced in Thucydides’ History may have been a largely fictionalised creation. Thucydides would not have been present for any of the discussions on Melos, and he may not have written his version of the dialogue until the war ended in 404, or even later, when any detailed memory of the events in question would have been long lost.⁴⁷

The dialogue found in our text begins with the Melians objecting to the overwhelming military force that the Athenians have brought to their doorstep. They politely hint that the army’s advanced preparations suggest that the envoys will not be receptive to considerations of justice which, the Melians believe, demand that they be left alone. The envoys respond that they have not journeyed to Melos to talk justice: they will only discuss what is expedient for both cities and how Melos might save itself from complete destruction (5.86–7). Though the Melians agree to set aside high-minded considerations about morality and focus on what is advantageous for both cities, they nevertheless go on to argue that it is not in Athens’ self-interest to be unjust. To this argument the Athenians respond with shocking honesty. The discussion that follows includes, among other things, a debate about whether it is profitable for a city to be just. Notably, the whole discussion takes place in private, a fact remarkable enough that Thucydides feels the need to comment on it. The Melian leaders were worried that if the envoys spoke before the entire city, the citizens might be swayed by the envoys’ seductive and unrefuted arguments (ἐπαγωγὰ καὶ ἀνέλεγκτα, 5.85.1). The mention of seductive arguments is, I think, a hint that the envoys are expected to argue like a sophist and make the morally weaker argument the stronger one.⁴⁸

Once the rules of conversational engagement have been established, the envoys tell the Melians they must choose between submitting to Athens’ yoke and being annihilated. The Melians initially reject both options as unjust and ask to be left alone. They have done nothing to harm the Athenians and do not deserve either misfortune.⁴⁹ All the same, they are informed that remaining neutral is not an option: their only choice is to live as tributary subjects of Athens or to die as their enemies. The Melians then claim that it is actually in the Athenians’ interest to respect the demands of justice. They point out that when the Athenian empire falls, as it must eventually, justice may be the only thing to save them from the vengeance of those they now threaten (5.90). When this and other argumentative Hail Marys fail, the Melians resort to claiming that the gods may punish Athens in battle: ‘We trust we shall have no less fortune from the gods, because we stand as god-fearing people (ὅσιοι) against unjust people (οὐ δικαίους), and that what we lack in power will be made up by the allegiance of the Spartans, who are bound, if only for shame, to come to the aid of their kindred’ (5.104).⁵⁰ To this, the Athenians offer a surprisingly candid response (5.105.2):

We believe of the gods and we know of humans that at all

times they, by a natural necessity, rule⁵¹ wherever they can.⁵²

‘Words to make the blood of any Greek run cold’, Francis Cornford remarked long ago (1907, 182). The envoys’ position is truly shocking. Not only do they reject the idea that gods might intervene to defend the Melians, but they also appear to maintain that it is not even in Athens’ own power to refrain from unjust conquest. A necessity of nature forces the Athenians’ power-hungry hands towards rule, just as it may well force the gods’ too, who would, therefore, condone any mortal’s unjust plans to rule over others. Note that—as was true for Antiphon and the Wrong Argument—the necessities of nature are here presented as essentially at odds with justice. But whereas Antiphon had suggested that it causes some harm to our nature to follow justice, the Athenians go further in holding that there is no realistic possibility of betraying nature to act justly. Justice, as the envoys elsewhere tell us, is something that can only exist between equals. In all other relationships, the strong will do what they want and the weak will suffer what they must.⁵³

The Athenians later provide a plausible reason why nature is opposed to justice and prevents any city or person from being just in similar circumstances: ‘Benefit is found with security, but to practise justice and honour comes with danger’ (5.107.1). Nature compels us to forgo just behaviour because it is not ultimately beneficial—that is to say, not in our self-interest. The prudent course is to strive for security, which, at least in the case of Athens (and, one gets the feeling from the envoys’ presentation, in many other cases as well), means unjustly subduing as many cities as possible. The envoys therefore flatly reject the fifth thesis of the Traditional View of Justice and staunchly champion the prudence of injustice. Of course, the Melian Dialogue is a dialogue, and there are two sides to the discussion. But the naïve trust that the leaders of Melos place in traditional ideas about gods and their allies does little to help them. Thucydides ends Book 5 with the almost appallingly matter-of-fact statement that, after putting up a mostly futile resistance, ‘the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves’ (5.116.3–4). No god or Spartan came to their aid.

Unlike Aristophanes’ Clouds, the sophists are not mentioned in these passages. It is not for nothing, however, that one recent authority concludes his discussion of the Melian Dialogue by noting that Thucydides was ‘a writer deeply influenced by the sophists’.⁵⁴ We have already observed that the envoys were thought to have seductive arguments at their disposal, a skill associated with the sophists. More telling than this is the sharp distinction they draw between the demands of nature and the precepts of justice. This is a hallmark of the Cynics’ challenge to justice, and it could almost have been taken directly from OT. It is also worth mentioning that Thucydides is said to have studied with both Gorgias and Antiphon and was certainly familiar with sophistic thought.⁵⁵ This has led some to claim that the form and literary presentation of the Melian Dialogue were influenced by the sophists’ practice.⁵⁶ If the considerations adduced here are correct, the substance of the Melian Dialogue was influenced by the thought of the sophists as well.⁵⁷

Though much could be said in the way of analysing Clouds and Thucydides’ History, I will limit myself to the observation that in both texts the characters making Cynic-style arguments are depicted as emphatically rejecting traditional ideas about the gods. Fewer than twenty short lines into the discussion between the Right and Wrong Arguments, the latter responds to the former’s pious suggestion that justice resides with the gods by pointing out that Zeus himself shunned justice and by further implying that the gods are at best unconcerned with humanity’s attitude towards justice (904–6; cf. 818–19). And crucially, it is only because the gods do not punish violations of justice that the unjust λόγος can advise Pheidippides to act unjustly in the pursuit of a grossly hedonistic life. Similarly, the Athenian envoys respond to the Melians’ naïve hope that the justice-loving gods will come to their aid by explaining that the gods are subject to the same natural necessity to rule as humans and do not, therefore, begrudge us our unjust conquests. These views about the gods are a significant part of the envoys’ presentation, and Thucydides leaves little doubt that they play a decisive role in explaining the arguments and behaviour that follow (5.112–13). It is, therefore, clear that Aristophanes and Thucydides associate the dangerous arguments of the Wrong Argument and the Athenian envoys with a rejection of the traditional, interventionist gods. To the extent that we can trust that these characters express sophistic ideas—and, at least on several big-picture issues, I have suggested that we can—they help to confirm the interpretation of the Cynics’ texts offered above. For those texts explore what radical consequences the rejection of traditional, interventionist gods have for the value of justice and its contribution to human prospering.

Other texts could be mentioned, but enough has been said to confirm that there was a distinctive sophistic challenge to conventional morality in the 5th century which began, at least in part, with a rejection of the traditional gods but extended to a rejection of the central theses of the Traditional View of Justice. The authors of this challenge accepted Hesiod’s presumption that individuals should be concerned with their own prospering, but they argued that in a world without interventionist gods injustice often promotes the intelligent individual’s prospering more than justice. By posing their challenge through an engagement with traditional ideas and views, the Cynics were able to expose real weaknesses in conventional ideas about justice. And they evidently struck a nerve. One of the most telling facts about their challenge is just how much opposition it elicited. Many people who learned about the Cynics’ radical ideas regarded them with apprehension and recognised the growing need to respond to them. Yet while some may have been content to do this by mocking their arguments, as Aristophanes did, and while others may have fallen back onto their pious faith in the interventionist gods, such as the Melian leaders, still others took a more direct approach. Indeed, another group of sophists felt compelled to respond to the Cynics by arguing on similarly secular and naturalistic grounds that justice and virtue contribute to human prospering more than injustice and vice. They offered a defence of justice and its value.