coheeman1's comments

coheeman1 | 6 years ago | on: The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit

This is pretty much what the Sophists did professionally.

In the city state of Athens there were no such things as 'lawyers' to represent you. If you had a legal problem and it was brought up to court (typically consisting of dozens, sometimes hundreds of judges) you argued your case yourself. Those who were better orators had a better chance of winning, so the nobility and rich often went to schools where they practiced rhetoric.

This obviously meant having to argue over the dumbest and inane things possible, some of these discourses we've managed to preserve over the millennia.