ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates all of the most recent scholarship about the historical personages that Plato grouped together as Sophists. What this research exposes is that the mendicant philosophers known as Sophists were not, historically, the heinous, duplicitous, ‘teachers of evil’ as Plato feeds us. His representation of them, rather, was propaganda – a case of disinformation that has come down to all of us as historical fact. The second intermission presents Plato’s conspiracy to defame the Sophists, examines the reasons that motivated his deeds, and probes into why it is that Plato’s partial account has emerged as the dominant historical and philosophical paradigm.
