ABSTRACT
Aristotle seems to be a more objective and sympathetic witness to some particular views of sophists than Plato was. Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a sophist and natural scientist. Xenophon portrays him as a conventionally good man who was unjustifiably put to death. Plato portrays him as a complex, idiosyncratic, challenging genius, full of irony and overmastered desire. Most of the sophists who visited Athens were sponsored by wealthy patrons, such as Callias, son of Hipponicus, the inheritor of a fortune in silver who, Plato says, 'spent more money on sophists than everyone else put together'. Sophistic education, whether it covered music, grammar, astronomy, mathematics, oratory or statecraft, aimed at one ultimate outcome: success. Plato's Callicles openly expresses what many of the critics of nomos were thinking, namely that conventional values have no authority over the powerful; that in reality power is all the justification one needs to do whatever one pleases.
