This lecture course will focus on Plato’s philosophical and political battle against the Sophists and their influence on Athenian politics and education. In the first part of the course we will read fragments and extant works by Antiphon, Critias, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Protagoras, and discuss the Sophists’ contribution to the secularization of Athenian politics and the debate concerning the relation between discourse and truth, rhetoric and virtue, nature and convention. In the second part of the course we will examine Plato’s critiques to the Sophists in the dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias.