Alcidamas (from Elaea) was a pupil of Gorgias who taught in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth centuries. Although his writings are probably later than those of the other sophists, we include his writings in this anthology because he shows little or no influence from Socrates or Plato, his concerns are an extension of the fifth-century debates on several issues, and the works are not readily available in English. In addition to these, Alcidamas also wrote a work on Homer, a few papyrus fragments of which have recently been discovered. This was apparently the main source for a later work entitled The Contest of Homer and Hesiod.

(Scholiast on Aristotle, Rhetoric 1373b6)

God set all people free; nature has made no one a slave.

On Those who Write Speeches, or On Sophists

This essay may be a response to Isocrates' Against the Sophists (Isoc. 13), written c. 391. Isocrates (436–338) was the leading teacher of rhetoric at Athens in the fourth century, but was a notoriously poor speaker himself. There may be a degree of irony in some of the arguments Alcidamas uses to attack writing – an attack that is itself (as he acknowledges) written.

[1] Some of those who are called sophists are not concerned with inquiry (historia) or general education (paideia), and they are just as inexperienced in the practice of speaking as ordinary men; but they are proud and boastful about their practice of writing speeches and displaying their own intelligence through their books.