A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
Socrates was lampooned by Aristophanes in The Clouds as a pedantic wordsmith who lived in a basket. Later philosophers such as Plato and Xenophon sought to distinguish Socrates' ethical teachings from this comic portrayal of a sophist.
Isocrates, one of the later sophists, was critical of the education practices of his predecessors
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse (trivium) along with grammar and logic/dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or writers use to inform, persuade, and motivate their audiences. Rhetoric also provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations.
Painting depicting a lecture in a knight academy, painted by Pieter Isaacsz or Reinhold Timm for Rosenborg Castle as part of a series of seven paintings depicting the seven independent arts. This painting illustrates rhetoric.
Jesus was a preacher in 1st-century Judea.
A marble bust of Aristotle
Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero
