ABSTRACT
The activity of Socrates, in competition with the Sophists, began at a time when the success of the latter was already great, It was exercised in the same social environment, in answer to the same intellectual and moral needs. His methods were, at least outwardly, so like those of the Sophists that he seemed to Aristophanes, and doubtless to many other contemporaries, to embody the Sophistic spirit as well as anyone. Plato himself, when he tries to define the Sophist, notes an air of kinship between his manner of being and that of the true philosopher (Soph., 280 d ff.). Lastly, it was a school of Socratics, namely, the Megarics, who gave Aristotle some of his best specimens of sophisms.
