ABSTRACT
We are used to thinking of Archytas of Tarentum in connection with Plato. After all, it was Archytas who, according to the Seventh Letter (350a), sent a trireme to rescue Plato from danger at the court of Dionysius II of Syracuse in 361. He is also the master mathematician, famed for his elegant solution to the problem of the duplication of the cube (DK A 14). Indeed, Gregory Vlastos paints him as the major influence leading to a marked increase in the role of mathematics in Platonic thought after Plato’s first visit to Magna Graecia in the early 380s (1991, p. 129). But what has this Archytas to do with the Sophists? If one scans the indices of the standard works on the Sophists, the name Archytas almost never appears. The same is true for all other members of the Pythagorean school.1 Of course Plato is recognized as a major, if problematic, source for our knowledge of the Sophists, and his responses to innovations in moral and political thought made by some of the sophists and others in the late fifth century are central to the development of his moral philosophy. It is less commonly known that there is evidence that Archytas too confronted some of these same trends in late fifth-and early fourthcentury thought. In particular there is evidence that he met head-on the glorification of pleonexia, the desire to have more than others, which figures prominently in Plato’s portrayal of Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic and that he also responded to the unmitigated hedonism which can be associated with this pleonexia.
