Thrasymachus c. 459 BC – c. 400 BC

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon was a Greek sophist of late fifth-century BC Athens and one of the most celebrated rhetoricians of his generation. His own writings on rhetoric and politics survive only in fragments, but he is best known as the spokesman of the famous thesis, presented in the first book of Plato's Republic, that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. The clarity, force, and discomfort of that argument made it the starting point of Plato's long inquiry into the nature of justice. Aristotle and later doxographers credit him with significant innovations in prose rhythm and the rhetoric of pity.