The Sophist Antiphon taught that the commands of physis are necessary and inexorable, but those of the nomos stem from human arbitrariness and are nothing but casual, artificial arrangements changing with the time, men, and circumstances, i.e. one who violates a law of the state does not suffer either punishment of dishonor if the violation remains undetected.
The other Sophist Callicles proclaimed the “right of the strong” as a basic postulate of “natural” as contrasted with “conventional” law. Nature rests on the innate superiority of the strong over the weak; human legal enactments, on the other hand, are made by the weak and the many, because they are always in majority.