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Concept
Thrasymachus
Summary
Thrasymachus (θræˈsɪməkəs; Θρασύμαχος Thrasýmachos; c. 459 – c. 400 BC) was a sophist of ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.
Thrasymachus was a citizen of Chalcedon, on the Bosphorus. His career appears to have been spent as a sophist at Athens, although the exact nature of his work and thought is unclear. He is credited with an increase in the rhythmic character of Greek oratory, especially the use of the paeonic rhythm in prose, and a greater appeal to the emotions through gesture.
Aristophanes makes what is the most precisely dateable of references to Thrasymachus, in a passing joke from a lost play dated to 427 BC. Nils Rauhut of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes from this passage that Thrasymachus must have been teaching in Athens for several years before this point. A fragment from Clement of Alexandria provides some further context by contrasting Thrasymachus with the Macedonian Archelaus. "And while Euripides says in the Telephus, 'Shall we who are Greeks be slaves to barbarians?', Thrasymachus says in his speech For the People of Larisa, 'Shall we become slaves to Archelaus, Greeks as we are, to a barbarian?'" Rauhut therefore declares it evident that Thrasymachus became most prominent in the last three decades of the 5th century. Dillon and Gergel posit the alternate possibility that the speech was composed by the 2nd-century AD Herodes Atticus, of whom we have extracts similar in spirit to Clement's fragment, which read as authentically 5th-century, exhibiting detailed knowledge of Thessalian politics.
There is a man by the same name mentioned in Aristotle's Politics who overthrew the democracy at Cyme, but nothing is known of this event, nor can it be said with any degree of certainty that they are the same man. Aristotle mentions a Thrasymachus again in his Sophistical Refutations, where he credits him with a pivotal role in the development of rhetorical theory. Quoting the W. A. Pickard-Cambridge text: "For it may be that in everything, as the saying is 'the first start is the main part'.
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