The enemy of Sokrates is also the enemy of the sophists — Practical statesmen.
The enemy and accuser of Sokrates is here depicted as the bitter enemy of the Sophists also. And Plato takes pains to exhibit the enmity of Anytus to the Sophists as founded on no facts or experience. Without having seen or ascertained anything about them, Anytus hates them as violently as if he had sustained from them some personal injury; a sentiment which many Platonic critics and many historians of philosophy have inherited from him.[51] Whether the corruption which these Sophists were accused of bringing about in the minds of youth, was intentional or not intentional on their part — how such corruption could have been perpetually continued, while at the same time the eminent Sophists enjoyed long and unabated esteem from the youth themselves and from their relatives — are difficulties which Anytus does not attempt to explain, though they are started here by Sokrates. Indeed we find the same topics employed by Sokrates himself, in his defence before the Dikasts against the same charge.[52] Anytus has confidence in no one except the practical statesmen: and when a question is raised about their power to impart their own excellence to others, he presently takes offence against Sokrates also. The same causes which have determined his furious antipathy against the Sophists, make him ready to transfer the like antipathy to Sokrates. He is a man of plain sense, practical habits, and conservative patriotism — who worships what he finds accredited as virtue, and dislikes the talkers and theorisers about virtue in general: whether they debated in subtle interrogation and dialectics, like Sokrates — or lectured in eloquent continuous discourse, like Protagoras. He accuses the Sophists, in this dialogue, of corrupting the youth; just as he and Melêtus, before the Dikastery, accused Sokrates of the same offence. He understands the use of words, to discuss actual business before the assembly or dikastery; but he hates discourse on the generalities of ethics or philosophy. He is essentially μισόλογος. The point which he condemns in the Sophists, is that which they have in common with Sokrates.
[51] Upon the bitter antipathy here expressed by Anytus against the Sophists, whom nevertheless he admits that he does not at all know, Steinhart remarks as follows:— “Gerade so haben zu allen Zeiten Orthodoxe und Fanatiker aller Arten über ihre Gegner abgeurtheilt, ohne sie zu kennen oder auch nur kennen lernen zu wollen“ (Einleit. zum Menon, not. 15, p. 173).
Certainly orthodox and fanatical persons often do what is here imputed to them. But Steinhart might have found a still closer parallel with Anytus, in his own criticisms, and in those of many other Platonic critics on the Sophists; the same expressions of bitterness and severity, with the same slender knowledge of the persons upon whom they bear.
[52] Plato, Apol. Sokr. pp. 26 A, 33 D, 34 B.
The Menon brings forward the point of analogy between Sokrates and the Sophists, in which both were disliked by the practical statesmen.
In many of the Platonic dialogues we have the antithesis between Sokrates and the Sophists brought out, as to the different point of view from which the one and the other approached ethical questions. But in this portion of the Menon, we find exhibited the feature of analogy between them, in which both one and the other stood upon ground obnoxious to the merely practical politicians. Far from regarding hatred against the Sophists as a mark of virtue in Anytus, Sokrates deprecates it as unwarranted and as menacing to philosophy in all her manifestations. The last declaration ascribed to Anytus, coupled with the last speech of Sokrates in the dialogue, show us that Plato conceives the anti-Sophistic antipathy as being anti-Sokratic also, in its natural consequences. That Sokrates was in common parlance a Sophist, disliked by a large portion of the general public, and ridiculed by Aristophanes, on the same grounds as those whom Plato calls Sophists — is a point which I have noticed elsewhere.