This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

“The Sophists” generally refers to Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon, as well as to a few lesser-known fifth-century figures; but why it does so, and what holds these men together, has been a matter of debate from Plato’s time to our own. Neither of the two standard explanations fit all and only these figures – the philosophical one, that they share some revolutionary epistemological outlook (for instance, relativism or anti-realism), or the sociological one, that they are primarily teachers of virtue of pay. This Introduction proposes revisiting the Sophists as celebrated instances of their time, a period of energetic intellectual discovery, experimentation, and communication. Doing so opens new questions about their continuity with their background culture as well as any distinctive interests, methods, or beliefs they might have. The Introduction goes on to discuss all early uses of the term sophistês in the fifth century (from Pindar through Thucydides) and its dominant uses in the fourth century, allowing us to see the range of kinds of people it applied to and the force with which it was applied. Then it describes the heterogeneous evidence base for Sophists and cognate figures. It concludes with a summary of the volume’s chapters.

Fourth-century philosophy-aligned authors often present negative views of “sophistry” but more charitable views of those fifth-century individuals they call “Sophist” or include among “the Sophists.” This chapter attends to this often unacknowledged difference, giving evidence for it and offering several explanations. It reviews what fourth-century authors – Isocrates, Alcidamas, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle – said about the canonical fifth-century Sophists, Gorgias in particular but also Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. It then assesses what they said about “sophistry,” which they usually presented atemporally, not specifically a phenomenon of a previous generation. Along the way, the chapter discusses how this later generation posited what is now seen as a “Sophistic movement,” the rise of a coherent group of paid teachers of rhetoric and civically valuable skills. Plato, long held responsible for this position, does play an important role, but for reasons connected to his dramatic presentation of Socrates.

This chapter further develops the case for the novel's usefulness as a fictional reality by examining two claims of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography: that this novel-writing developed out of a paracosmic play practice he called ‘castle-building’, and that he made up his novel plots as he wrote them. Through an analysis of his and the De Quinceys’ games, I point out how the improvisational nature of play – the virtual world is ‘filled in’ and revised over time with little premeditation – as an obvious analogue to Trollope’s construction of the fictional Barsetshire, and to his plotting of individual novels. I argue that the characters of The Small House at Allington behave improvisationally, inventing, revising, and ‘filling in’ their personhoods as they go along, offering an alternative reading of the moral logic and psychology in Trollope’s realism. For Trollope, the novel is distinctive for providing this experience of fictional living, not as ‘mere’ escapism but as it contributes concretely to the reader’s experience of their own world.

This chapter considers how it might make sense to think of the allegorical fiction as philosophical. The unsettling figure at the heart of the Roman de la Rose Faux Semblant is a walking sophism, embodying the paradox sometimes known as the Cretan Liar’s paradox: he tells us that he is lying and that nothing that he says can be trusted. In a sense he represents an extreme case of the problem of all literary endeavours that claim to offer truth through falsehood. In his sermon on hypocrisy, Faux Sembant explicitly names Aristotle’s De sophisticis elenchis, implying a connection between the Rose’s hermeneutic problems and those considered as part of dialectical training in medieval schools. This chapter reads the Rose against the tradition of the De sophisticis and sophismata-literature to show the poem itself as offering an education in sophistry, taken in a broader sense than its use in language arts. Sophism and sophistry are used figuratively throughout the Rose to refer to hypocrisy and falseness of all kinds, including literary falseness. Rooted in the intellectual culture of the university, the Rose considers the value of lying and the benefits of reading a work that rarely means what it says.