Let's keep the chronology straight. Socrates' collaboration with the White Terror preceded the treatment you refer to.
> And
>
> > Plato libeled the Sophists, but stands at
> >the beginning of our philsophical tradition.
This is totally wrong. The debate between the Sophists and Plato was the debate between democracy and a ruthless aristocracy. The point of departure for sophist theory was the proposition that virtue (that is, capacity to engage in public life) could be taught. The political implication was that peasants had a right to a voice in the state. For this argument in defense of the mob they have been savagely misinterpreted and slandered for 2500 years. Plato slipped up in the *Protagoras* and actually wrote a speech for Protagoras that does not (more or less deliberately) distort the speaker's position. Were it not for that slip-up it might be more difficult to penetrate what has been one of the most successful repressions of thought in the history of the west. Plato (in what still remains my favorite book) was utterly dishonest in the speeches he gave to the sophist Thrasymachus.
> The Sophists - or what we call lawyers - had it coming (sorry - it was a
> cheap shot all you lawyers out there). His statement of the dialectical
> mode of explication in the Republic, remains un-bested.
In the Anti-Duhring Marx (yes Marx -- for all you Engels-baiters, Marx contributed one chapter to the Anti-Duhring) defended Plato vigorously and savaged Duhring for daring to attack Plato.
Carrol