Dialogue

 1 Intro|     tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage
 2 Intro|     Plato is not justifying the Sophists in the passage just quoted,
 3 Intro|      lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the Sophist is the
 4 Intro|       itself.~Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic
 5 Intro|           3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters
 6 Intro|        philosophers were called Sophists in the fifth century before
 7 Intro|     under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must
 8 Intro|     import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a separate
 9 Intro|    Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates,
10 Intro|        been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain
11 Intro|       nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that,
12 Intro|       that he may have done the Sophists the same kind of disservice
13 Intro| disbelieving that the principal Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus,
14 Intro|        corruption of youth, the Sophists were one among many signs;—
15 Intro|        sense, and therefore the Sophists could not have corrupted
16 Intro|        usual description of the Sophists, who in the early dialogues,
17 Intro|        now as statesmen, now as sophists, and are often deemed madmen. ‘
18 Intro|  ministers of the purification? Sophists I may not call them. Yet
19 Intro|      about the same likeness to Sophists as the dog, who is the gentlest
20  Soph|     statesmen, and sometimes as sophists; and then, again, to many
21  Soph|    definition. Now the tribe of Sophists which we are investigating
22  Soph|        I know that the tribe of Sophists is troublesome and hard
23  Soph|          I am afraid to say the Sophists.~THEAETETUS: Why?~STRANGER:
24  Soph|          let us assume that the Sophists are the men. I say this
25  Soph|     refer?~STRANGER: How do the Sophists make young men believe in