For the Greeks, the sophists were a sort of traveling show where the speaker seemed to command power over true and false. They could call me forward, ask me a question, and then make any answer false:
Can a sitting person be standing?
If I say “yes” then they’ll point out that there is no posture that is both sitting and standing, and if I pivot and say “no” then they’ll point out that this means that everyone who sits is paralyzed.
Do the police protect citizens?
If I say “yes” then they’ll object that some citizens get shot and not protected; if I say no they’ll point out that then those who protect do not protect.
The tricks seem facile from safe distance, but in the heat of the moment, and with enough audience pressure, the sophist could easily seem brilliant, and many of them were in fact seen this way.
The temptation of sophistry is to the power to make anything true or false, and to seem to win any argument. Once one gets the hang of looking for sophistical dialectical places, they are easy to discover and apply in arguments. This power looks a lot like wisdom since you know the answers and everyone else doesn’t.
One of the best negative accounts of Greek thought from Socrates to Aristotle is to see it as the total repudiation of this sort of wisdom, and the repurposing of the sophistical questions from tools one uses to look wise to opportunities for true wisdom to distinguish and order things falsely united. Absent this context of being responses to sophistical puzzles, the Greek tradition risks looking like the answer to a question no one is asking.
Though the puzzles seem innocent, and perhaps even silly, in the sophistical way of looking at things, they are tools that make truth whatever the sophist wants it to be. What Gorgias, for example, offers his students is the power to make anything good or correct, and the attraction to such power is not innocent.
Just Thomism 