Sophists

This last week has mostly been studying certain Sophists and their differences. We already know their similarities, after all, and the central one is that they were all sophists, and believed that truth is subjective and dependent on the individual. This is a belief I can get behind to a degree, though perhaps not to the degree that the Sophists believed.

I particularly was interested in Lysias, a Sophist who crafted his rhetoric speeches custom tailored to the audience. He studied at first under the famed Sophist Protagoras, and used his skills to prosecute the murderer of his brother. He became a speech writer, and was known for his understanding of each client’s circumstances, and ability to weave this into his rhetoric. He called his art ethopoeia, which we define as the art of discovering the exact lines of argument that will turn the case against the opponent.

It’s easy to see how Lysias’ tactics apply even today. He wrote speeches to be effective in the moment they were delivered, and used simple language that appealed directly to the audience, never confusing them with high or grandiose words. These techniques can be applied to things other than speeches as well. In literature, the vocabulary of a book or work is always aimed at a specific audience. Often, books are directed toward a certain age group, since age is an obvious divider, and is easy to adapt to.

Children’s literature is very simple, keeping the words and the message short and easy to understand. A particular series of books I read when I was younger, Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, is a good example of this. Redwall was written for children who were anywhere from ten on into their teen years. Each book features animal characters who must defeat an evil that threatens their peaceful woodland life. Jacques once said in an interview, when asked about why he always made villainous characters into animals like rats and weasels, never giving them a chance at redemption: “The bad creatures are those which are traditionally bad in European folk lore and have come to be regarded as sly or mean or evil.The good creatures are mostly small and defenceless, with the exception of the badgers.” (Source) Jacques wanted to keep his morality black and white for the sake of young readers, so they would have an easy time understanding what made someone good and what made them bad. In his later books, his black and white lines of morality blurred, because his readers also grew older, and their understandings expanded as the world changed.

This is an example of Lysias’ adaptation. Whether his clients were young or old, he knew how to adapt his work to them. It seems like a common sense idea for us, that we should adapt our work in a way that fits our audience. Lysias, in his time, was possibly the best rhetor who employed this strategy in his speech writing, and even today he is able to teach us how important his technique is. This is what made Lysias stand out among his fellow Sophists.

I’d ask all of you readers to think about how your favorite works are adapted to you, or perhaps to a different audience that may not include you. I’ve found it can be interesting and fun to notice all the details that would probably go unnoticed otherwise. I plan to be more observant of this from now on, since it gives me an extra, more detailed perspective.