communion, we discover 'Not-being' to be the other of 'Being.'
Transferring this to language and thought, we have no difficulty in
apprehending that a proposition may be false as well as true. The Sophist,
drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian paradoxes have
temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler and juggler with
words.

The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character
attributed to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature
of the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers: (V)
the relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.

I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the
charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who is
not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the
opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal
representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and
intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost equally
ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now
boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more
akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until
the final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the
disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose that Plato intended by such
a description to depict Protagoras or Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who
all turn out to be 'very good sort of people when we know them,' and all of
them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as
imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose character varies in
different dialogues. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to
personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a
fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the