A very wealthy citizen of Athens 500 years before the birth of Christ finds his the financial returns gained through a life of industrial labor and hard work crumbling into debt and sinking him into the throw of a poverty as the result of a son who chose not to emulate his father. Strepiades has reached the point where the hounding of his son Phidippides’s creditors have led him to consider drastic measures.
One of those measures is to investigate further into a new form of logical reasoning which is sweeping the city. A new school of philosophy known as the Sophists have set up classes to learn their new mode of thinking called Thoughteries or Thinking Schools. When father takes this idea to son, however, he is met with profound indifference. Phidippides believes that his time would be much better spent learning about horses on which to gamble than in schools teaching how to think. Faced with the kind of dead-end that many parents face under such circumstances, Strepiades does the only logical thing: he decides to enroll in the Thoughtery himself.
First he explains to the Sophist instructor exactly what those circumstances are that has brought him there. That teacher is none other than Socrates. Almost immediately, Socrates engages the distraught father into a dialogue which demonstrates the value of Sophist logic. The manifestations of logical conclusions has the effect of convincing Strepiades more than ever that he is on the right path and Socrates agrees to let him become a student.
Alas, Strepiades proves a failure as a student. The answers that Socrates receives from the older man when he puts forth a series of arguments requiring logical though on the subject of poetry prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to the philosopher that it would be useless to try to educate the ignorance man any further. Strepiades decides that the only logical course of action remaining comes down to a choice by his son: either Phidippides agrees to become a student himself or he will be tossed out of his father’s house and forced to subsist on his own meager abilities.
At first, the son puts up another fight, but ultimately can find no way out of being forced to attend the Thoughtery. When he later shows up to inquire about his son’s progress, Socrates has good news: his son is taking to Sophist thought much easier than his father. With this information in mind, the father leaves the school with the first real sense of hope for the future that he has experienced in some time. Everything is looking better through the lens of this revolution in rhetoric being introduced to Athens by the wise Socrates. So assured is that when Phidippides shows up, his father meets with his tears of joy and peals of laughter at the irony of being saved from ruin by the very same son who profligate past had brought him there.
When asked for a demonstration of his grasp of this new discipline, Phidippides’ quick learning floors his father. He is able to see the cunning of the logic in a way that escaped his own ability to reproduce it. Even better is the sudden appearance of one of those creditors that has been hounding him. He immediately informed the creditor of his refusal to pay anything even in the face of threats of being forced to show up in court. After all, he reasoned, with Phidippides there at his side, no merely lawyer stood a chance of outwitting his son who had so intuitively mastered the art of Sophist reasoning. When another creditor also appeared, Strepiades dismissed him as well. Everything seemed to be coming up Strepiades and he could not wait to get home so his son could show off his newfound knowledge.
That knowledge was demonstrated in an argument on the subject of why the father had sometimes beaten the son in the past. Strepiades argued that the beatings where his own good so that he would learn valuable and necessary lessons that would help him out later in life. The argument faltered immediately when the son began beating the father and using the exact same logical justification. Protests from Strepiades soon gave way to silence under the weight of the Sophist logic that Phidippides now brought to buffet his own original argument. When his son threatened to use the same logic and tactic against his mother, Strepiades attained a rather rude and entirely unwelcome awakening.
Sophist logic, intelligently applied, could quite easily be used to justify a nearly infinite set of possibilities for engaging in actions that would seem at the time to any rational individual to be nothing less than evil. The logic was irrefutable precisely because it was a trick. And a quite potentially disastrous trick at that. Words simple would never suffice to stop evil in the face of such perverse manipulation of logic so Strepiades realized that the only possible way to save Athens from this philosophic pestilence of Socrates and his followers was action.
He set out for the Thoughtery with a torch in hand and set fire to the school as its teacher and his acolytes watched in horror and impotently raised their voices in objection. The Thinking School was no match for the flames. As Strepiades triumphantly watched it burn into nothingness, he found himself once again at peace. The kind of peace that only comes with the full and complete assurance that one has eradicated an evil which had sought to do nothing less than blaspheme the very gods from the face of the land.
