ably largely hostility to the Sophists that gave this character to his dialogues. One of the defects of
all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they
already know the conclusions to be reached.
It seems that there were men, in the Athens of the late fifth century, who taught political doctrines
which seemed immoral to their contemporaries, and seem so to the democratic nations of the
present day. Thrasymachus, in the first book of the Republic, argues that there is no justice except
the interest of the stronger; that laws are made by governments for their own advantage; and that
there is no impersonal standard to which to appeal in contests for power. Callicles, according to
Plato (in the Gorgias), maintained a similar doctrine. The law of nature, he said, is the law of the
stronger; but for convenience men have established institutions and moral precepts to restrain the
strong. Such doctrines have won much wider assent in our day than they did in antiquity. And
whatever may be thought of them, they are not characteristic of the Sophists.
During the fifth century--whatever part the Sophists may have had in the change--there was in
Athens a transformation from a certain stiff Puritan simplicity to a quick-witted and rather cruel
cynicism in conflict with a slow-witted and equally cruel defence of crumbling orthodoxy. At the
beginning of the century comes the Athenian championship of the cities of Ionia against the
Persians, and the victory of Marathon in 490 B.C. At the end comes the defeat of Athens by Sparta
in 404 B.C., and the execution of Socrates in 399 B.C. After this time Athens ceased to be
politically important, but acquired undoubted cultural supremacy, which it retained until the
victory of Christianity.
Something of the history of fifth-century Athens is essential to the understanding of Plato and of
all subsequent Greek thought. In the first Persian war, the chief glory went to the Athenians,
owing to the decisive victory at Marathon. In the second war, ten years later, the Athenians still
were the best of the Greeks at sea, but on land victory was mainly due to the Spartans, who were
the acknowledged leaders of the Hellenic world. The Spartans, however, were narrowly provincial
in their outlook, and ceased to oppose the Persians when they had been chased out of European
Greece. The championship of the Asiatic Greeks, and the liberation of the islands that had been
con-