Lycophron was a sophist of Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

. He is known for his statement (reproduced by Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

, in the latter's Politics

Politics (Aristotle)

Aristotle's Politics is a work of political philosophy. The end of the Nicomachean Ethics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the...

, 1280b10), that "law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

 is only a convention, a surety to another of justice". This means that he treats law as a mere means, in the context of a (perhaps primitive) social contract

Social contract

The social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept...

 theory, without considering it as something special, in contradistinction to, e.g., Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 but similar to both Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus was a sophist of Ancient Greece best known as a character in Plato's Republic.-Life, date, and career:...

 and Callicles

Callicles

Callicles is a character in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. He is an Athenian citizen, who is a student of the sophist Gorgias. In the dialogue, he argues the position of an oligarchic, proto-"Nietzschean" amoralism: it is natural and just for the strong to dominate the weak and that it is unfair for...

, albeit that their theories have – as far as can be ascertained from the information available about them – more specific characteristics.

Literature

• Richard G. Mulgan, 'Lycophron and Greek Theories of Social Contract'. Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1), 1979: 121 – 128.