theories from Aristotle.38 Their systems will be discussed in a following chapter.
The Sophists, true to their character as philosophers of extreme individualism, developed a new theory of the origin of society.
The already current term φύσις, “nature,” which had been accepted as a sufficient reason for the state’s existence, was now opposed to “law,” νόμος, as natural to artificial. The Sophists argued that, in a primitive state of nature, perfect individualism was the rule. Men did injustice without restraint. The weaker, however, being in the majority, and finding it to their disadvantage to compete with the strong, agreed neither to do nor to suffer injustice, and constrained the stronger minority to co-operate in their decision. Thus arose the social contract whereby nature gave up its real instinct for an artificial convention (συνθήκη), and thus society came into being.39
The theory, at first, though untrue, was not intended to be destructive of moral foundations, but was opposed rather to the traditional idea of the laws of a state as the “decrees of a divinely inspired lawgiver.”40
In the hands of men like Thrasymachus41 and Callicles,42 however, it became a means of denying that the life according to nature was bound by any laws which the strong need observe, and that might was the only final law.
In line with their radical individualism, the Sophists were also pioneers in the more cosmopolitan spirit that characterized the Cynics and Stoics. They taught the doctrine of the fundamental worth and relationship of men,43 and thus, with the Cynics, started the attack upon the theory that upheld slavery as a natural institution.44 Little further is known of their other social or economic ideas. Protagoras wrote a work on “wages,” but it was probably an argument