One day

Odradek

A sycophantic, salaried, pedophiliac, flute-playing, Athenian sophist and acclaimed rhetorician was teaching a class on Gorgias, known nihilist.

“By Zeus! Before the class begins, you must all get on your knees and pay your respects to Gorgias, and accept that he was the most demonic being the world has ever known, even greater than that of Heraclitus!”

At this moment, a wise, ironic, pro-Spartan disciple of Socrates who had courted 1500 young boys and understood the necessity of free education and fully supported all intellectual writings made by the Academy stood up and held up a rock.

“I say to you, does this rock exist on the true plane of reality and being, dear teacher?”

The arrogant sophist smirked quite relativistically and smugly replied “Certainly, for how else could you bring it into being here, you foolish foreigner?”

“Wrong. The Forms are the only true reality and exist beyond this realm of material perception. If it was real, and being, as you say, is contingent to our realm of perception…then it should be identical to all other rocks in ‘existence’.”

The sophist was visibly shaken, and dropped his stylus and copy of On the Non-Existent. He stormed out of the room crying those ironic sophist tears. The same tears sophists cry for the “learned” (who today live in such a state of ignorance that most think they ‘have knowledge’ of what is pious) when they jealously try to claw justly earned true knowledge from the deserving philosophers. There is no doubt that at this point our sophist, Hypocrites, wished he had pulled himself up by his sandal straps and become more than a sophist, paid-for-hire teacher. He wished so much that he had a sense of objective truth to console himself from embarrassment, but he himself had argued against it!

The students applauded and all enrolled into the Academy that day and accepted The One as the incarnation of truth and the Good. An owl named “The Socratic Method” flew into the room and perched atop the Priestess of Delphi and shed a tear on the stylus. Plato’s Republic was read several times, and Socrates himself showed up and claimed that he knew nothing.

The sophist lost his standing with the Athenian wealthy and was left homeless the next day. He died in the Thirty Tyrants’ Rebellion and reincarnated as a Bronze soul for all eternity.