id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-2711		Sophist - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	5715	937	59	In the second half of the 5th century BC, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Protagoras argued that "man is the measure of all things", meaning man decides for himself what he is going to believe.[17] The works of Plato and Aristotle have had much influence on the modern view of the "sophist" as a greedy instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. This liberal attitude would naturally have made its way into the Athenian assembly as sophists began acquiring increasingly high-powered clients.[20] Continuous rhetorical training gave the citizens of Athens "the ability to create accounts of communal possibilities through persuasive speech".[21] This was important for the democracy, as it gave disparate and sometimes superficially unattractive views a chance to be heard in the Athenian assembly.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-2711.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-2711.txt