Sophist once meant a master craftsman before it became an insult
Calling someone a sophist today accuses them of slippery, dishonest argument. In ancient Greek the root word praised skill: charioteers and sculptors could be called wise in their trades. The sour meaning came later, largely from Plato and Aristotle, who attacked the travelling teachers who charged for lessons in persuasion.
The word grows from sophós, a wise or skilled person, related to sophía, wisdom. From Homer onwards it described an expert in any craft, and gradually it came to mean practical wisdom in politics, ethics and running a household, the sense applied to the Seven Sages such as Solon and Thales. A verb meaning to instruct produced sophistḗs, first a master of a craft and later a prudent or learned man. Greek even built compounds from it: a gymnosophist, or naked sophist, was an Indian philosopher, and a deipnosophist was a learned dinner guest.
By the second half of the 5th century BC the term described a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught subjects from rhetoric and mathematics to music, athletics and virtue, chiefly to young aristocrats and aspiring politicians. Athens drew them because it was prospering and because its new democracy ran on speech. With few texts and no mass media, citizens had to argue in juries, assemblies and councils, and teachers of persuasion found eager customers. One account holds that the earliest of them came from Sicily.
Protagoras is usually counted as the first professional sophist. His most famous saying made the human being the yardstick for everything, and he was notorious for promising to make the weaker argument the stronger. Others included Gorgias, Prodicus and Thrasymachus. The scholar Nicholas Denyer observes that whatever else divided them, they shared a keen sense of which words would entertain or sway an audience.
Judging them fairly is difficult. Most are known mainly through the writings of their critics, above all Plato and Aristotle, often in hostile fragments stripped of context. Gorgias is an exception, since some of his speeches survive and can be read on their own terms. The critics' charge, that sophists prized cleverness over truth, is the one that stuck, which is why sophistry now names a deliberately misleading argument.
Source: Sophist
