 Sophists.    The Fifth Century saw an explosion of interest in traveling teachers, later known as sophists, who taught a number of subjects, including the art of words, later known as rhetoric. Although the art of words was widely used for entertainment, it also had applications in deliberative and forensic contexts, and the sophists were accused of teaching their pupils how to win on behalf of a bad cause—by making the worse argument into the stronger. Socrates is accused of this in the Clouds: a student emerges from his instruction with an argument that purports to justify a son’s whipping his father.