  Should we then think of Zeno as a sophist? Certainly Isocrates, the  rhetorician and contemporary of Plato, did not hesitate to lump  Gorgias, Zeno, and Melissus together as among the other  “sophists” flourishing in the era of Protagoras and all  producing tedious treatises advocating the most outrageous claims  (Isoc. Hel. [Orat. 10] 2–3). While there are  difficulties in giving precise definition to the term  “sophist,” one feature common to those normally classed  as such that Zeno lacks is an interest in the interrogation of  cultural norms and values. Zeno’s influence, however, on the great  sophists who were his contemporaries and, more generally, on the  techniques of argumentation promulgated among the sophists seems  undeniable. Protagoras’ development of the techniques of antilogic,  rooted in his claim that there are two opposed arguments on every  matter (D.L. 9.51), seems likely to have been inspired by Zeno’s  novel forms of argumentation as well as by his advocacy of the most  counter-intuitive of theses. Zeno’s influence is especially clear,  moreover, in Gorgias’ treatise, “On Nature, or On What Is  Not,” both in its penchant for argumentation via antithesis and reductio and in its use of premises drawn straight from Zeno himself (see [Arist.] MXG 979a23, b25, b37). It is even possible that the famous circle of  contemporary intellectuals the great Athenian statesman Pericles  gathered around himself provided a major conduit for Zeno’s impact on the first generation of sophists. Plutarch, at any rate, records that “Pericles heard Zeno of Elea discoursing on nature in the  manner of Parmenides, and practicing a kind of skill in  cross-examination and in driving one’s opponent into a corner by  means of contradictory argument” (Plu. Per. 4.5). The  skill Plutarch attributes to Zeno, still evident in the fragmentary  remains of his arguments, is just the kind of skill in argument  manifested in a great deal of sophistic practice. Although doubts  have been raised about the reliability of Plutarch’s report that  Zeno, like Damon and Anaxagoras, was one of the many contemporary  intellectuals whose company was avidly pursued by Pericles, there is  little that seriously tells against it. Thus George Kerferd has  argued both that the patronage of Pericles and his keen interest in  the intellectual developments of his day must have been critically  important to the sophistic movement and that Zeno’s paradoxes were a  profound influence on the development of the sophistic method of  antilogic, which he sees as “perhaps the most characteristic  feature of the thought of the whole period” (Kerferd 1981,  18–23, 59ff., 85).