Making the Worse Case Appear the Better: British Reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850

This essay surveys descriptions of the ancient Greek sophists written by British historians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At that time, most historians portrayed the sophists as representing the corrosive influence of populism and commercialism on the intellectual life of ancient Athens. Beginning in the 1820s, several Whig and Radical historians began to challenge the traditional interpretation. Just as before, the revisionist histories of the sophists were shaped as much by modern political, economic, and religious interests as by disagreements about the evidentiary status of textual fragments from antiquity. Among the authors discussed in this survey are William Mitford, Walter Anderson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Mitchell, John Forster, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, Connop Thirlwall, G. H. Lewes, and George Grote.