> Nietzsche liked the Sophists for their anti-authoritarian stance,
> their championing of rhetoric, and their opposition to the dogmatic
> thinking of the Socratic schools.
In this context, the ideas at issue are those Thucydides attributes to the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue. <http://www.wellesley.edu/ClassicalStudies/CLCV102/Thucydides-- MelianDialogue.html>
"you [the Melians] know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
"Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do."
According to Foucault in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (<http:// www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ngh.pdf>), these ideas are also Nietzsche's.
“In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non– place’ [the ‘non-place’ of the ‘emergence’ of ‘the concept of goodness’] the endlessly repeated play of dominations.” p. 150
“the universe of rules … is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it.” p. 150
“Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.” p. 151
“‘guilt, conscience, and duty had their threshold of emergence in the right to secure obligations; and their inception, like that of any major event on earth, was saturated in blood.’ Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” p. 151
Ted