Grote opens his analysis of the Sophist by foregrounding a logical puzzle: the Sophist deals in phantasms, yet to accuse him of passing off phantasms for realities presupposes that Non-Ens can be spoken of—a position the dialogue itself has declared impossible. Grote tracks the Eleatic Stranger’s shift from Non-Ens to Ens, noting that the same contradictions reappear when philosophers try to define what exists. The passage is typical of Grote’s method: he lets the Platonic text generate its own difficulties, then presses them with a historian’s eye for unresolved tension.

Grote’s Use of Greek Quotations

Throughout the volume, Grote inserts Greek phrases from Plato’s text—often in footnotes, but sometimes in the main argument. In the Sophist discussion, he quotes καταγελάσεταί σου τῶν λόγων (p. 239–240) to show how the Stranger imagines his opponent mocking a purely verbal argument. These quotations are not decorative; Grote uses them to anchor his interpretation in specific wording, and to demonstrate where translation loses nuance. For instance, he highlights the phrase τῷ γὰρ μὴ ὄντι τὸ ὂν προσάπτειν (p. 241 B) to underline the self-contradiction involved in false statement. Readers unfamiliar with Greek can follow the argument, but the presence of the original signals Grote’s philological rigor.

The Paradox of Non-Ens and Ens

Grote devotes sustained attention to the logical knot at the heart of the Sophist: how can we speak of falsehood or illusion if Non-Ens cannot be combined with Ens? He traces the Eleatic Stranger’s initial impasse—where accusing the Sophist of producing phantasms seems to require the impossible act of joining Being to Not-Being. Grote then follows the turn to Ens, where the same difficulties recur: philosophers who posit two or three elements cannot explain what “existence” itself means. The argument, Grote notes, leaves both Ens and Non-Ens equally problematic. He does not resolve the puzzle, but instead emphasizes that Plato’s dialogue deliberately exposes the inadequacy of earlier metaphysical theories.

Grote’s Stance on the Eleatic Stranger

Grote refers to the main speaker of the Sophist and Statesman simply as “the Eleate” or “the Eleatic spokesman of Plato.” He does not treat the Stranger as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views; rather, he presents him as a character whose arguments unfold dialectically. This is consistent with Grote’s broader approach in the volume: he resists reading Plato’s dialogues as doctrinal treatises. When the Eleate confesses that as a young man he thought he understood Ens and Non-Ens but now finds he understands neither, Grote takes this as a genuine moment of perplexity, not a rhetorical feint. The effect is to keep the dialogue’s philosophical tensions alive.

Comparison with Earlier Philosophers

In the Sophist section, Grote catalogs the physical philosophers whose views the Eleate reviews: those who posit three elements, those who posit two (hot and cold, wet and dry), the Eleatics who affirm One, Herakleitus who blends many and one, and Empedokles who alternates. Grote’s treatment is brisk but precise: he notes that Herakleitus’s “always” is dropped by Empedokles, who makes disjunction and conjunction alternate. This attention to fine doctrinal differences is characteristic of Grote’s historical method. He does not evaluate these theories for truth, but uses them to show how the Sophist sets up a crisis in ontology that the dialogue will only partially resolve.

Grote’s volume rewards readers who attend to his footnotes and his habit of juxtaposing Platonic arguments with their pre-Socratic antecedents. The Sophist and Statesman are treated not as finished doctrines but as works-in-progress that expose real logical difficulties. Grote’s own voice—skeptical, precise, historically informed—shapes every page, making this a distinctive contribution to Victorian Plato scholarship.