Protagoras

Overview

Seventy pages, one morning, one house, and the liveliest cast Plato ever assembled. Socrates tells a friend what happened when young Hippocrates woke him before dawn, wild with excitement, because Protagoras of Abdera was in town.

The house belongs to Callias, the richest man in Athens, and it is full of sophists. Protagoras walks up and down the portico with a train of followers moving in formation behind him. Hippias sits in a chair answering questions about astronomy. Prodicus is still in bed, wrapped in blankets, in a converted storeroom, his deep voice booming so that no one can make out the words. Plato is enjoying himself.

The dramatic date is around 433 BCE, just before the Peloponnesian War, in the confident Athens that was about to destroy itself. Alcibiades is there, very young. Everyone present has a future the original audience knew about and the characters do not.

Of the early dialogues this is the one to read for pleasure. It is funny, the antagonist is formidable rather than a stooge, and the question underneath it is the one Plato never stopped asking.

What happens

The frame. Hippocrates wants Protagoras to teach him and has not considered what for. Socrates asks: if you went to a doctor, you would become a doctor; a sculptor, a sculptor. What will a sophist make you? Hippocrates blushes. Socrates presses the point that you are about to entrust your soul to a man without knowing what he sells, and you cannot sample teaching the way you sample food, because you take it into the soul as you learn it.

The question. At the house, Socrates asks Protagoras plainly what a student gains. Protagoras answers: good judgement in his own affairs and in the city’s, how to act and speak in politics. That is, the art of citizenship.

Socrates raises a difficulty, and it is a good one. Athenians think expertise is real: on shipbuilding they call shipwrights. But on questions of policy any citizen may speak, which suggests they do not think political virtue is an expertise. And the best men fail to pass it to their sons. Pericles, right there in the city, educated his sons well in everything teachable and they turned out mediocre. So it does not look like something that can be taught.

Protagoras’ reply: the myth and the argument. He asks whether to answer with a story or a speech, and the company votes for the story.

Epimetheus and Prometheus are given the job of equipping the mortal creatures. Epimetheus distributes the gifts, speed, strength, hides, wings, and being unwise uses them all up before reaching man, who is left naked and defenceless. Prometheus steals fire and the practical arts from Hephaestus and Athena to cover the gap, and is punished for it.

Men now have technology but no political art, so when they gather in cities they wrong each other and scatter. Zeus, afraid the race will be destroyed, sends Hermes with justice and shame, and gives a specific instruction: unlike the crafts, where one doctor serves many laymen, these are to be distributed to everyone, and a man who cannot share in them is to be put to death as a plague on the city.

That is the argument for Athenian practice. Everyone speaks about justice because everyone has some, and a city could not exist otherwise.

Then the speech. Protagoras argues that virtue is taught constantly and by everyone: by nurses, parents, teachers, the laws, punishment itself, which is corrective rather than retributive and would make no sense if character could not be changed. And the reason good men’s sons disappoint is that everyone teaches virtue, so the differences that remain are small, and natural gift decides them. A comparison seals it: if a city could only survive by everyone playing the flute, we would all play, and the best flute players’ sons would not reliably be the best.

It is a strong performance and Socrates says so.

The quarrel about method. Socrates asks whether the virtues are parts of one thing or genuinely different. Protagoras says different: a man can be brave and unjust. Socrates starts the short questions, Protagoras answers at increasing length, Socrates says he has a bad memory and cannot follow long speeches, and gets up to leave. The company intervenes. Callias grabs him. Alcibiades argues for him. Prodicus makes a speech distinguishing terms. Hippias proposes an umpire. They agree to continue with Protagoras questioning for a while.

This scene is usually skimmed and it is the centre of the dialogue: two conceptions of what discussion is for, display against examination, in a room where everyone has a stake.

The Simonides interlude. Protagoras, now questioner, quotes a poem by Simonides and claims it contradicts itself. Socrates replies with an interpretation of exquisite elaborateness, involving a claim that the Spartans are the true philosophers who conceal their wisdom, and a distinction between being good and becoming good, and the deployment of a single Greek particle as the hinge of the whole reading. It is a parody of literary criticism and it is meant to be absurd. Socrates ends it by saying that arguing about poems is like the entertainment at a vulgar drinking party, where the guests hire flute girls because they cannot talk to each other, and that educated men should use their own voices.

The hedonist argument. Back to questions, and now the serious part. Socrates gets agreement that the many believe a man can know what is best and do otherwise, overcome by pleasure.

He attacks this. Suppose good means pleasant and bad means painful, the view Socrates puts forward here and argues against elsewhere. Then to say a man is overcome by pleasure is to say he chooses greater pain over lesser, knowing it, which is incoherent. What actually happens is a distortion of perspective: nearby pleasures look larger, as near objects do, and what we need is an art of measurement that corrects for distance. So the failure is ignorance, and no one goes willingly toward the bad.

Courage then falls into place. The coward is not the man who feels fear and yields; he is the man who is wrong about what is fearful. Courage is knowledge of what is and is not to be feared, which makes it a form of wisdom after all.

The reversal. Socrates points out where they have arrived. He began doubting that virtue can be taught and has argued that it is knowledge, which would make it the most teachable thing there is. Protagoras began selling it as teachable and has ended resisting the claim that it is knowledge. Protagoras takes it gracefully, praises Socrates, and says he expects him to be famous. Socrates leaves.

How to read it

Do not break it up. The comedy depends on momentum, and an evening is enough.

Read the myth at 320c to 322d closely. It is the earliest full statement of the democratic argument that the capacity for politics is general, not specialist, and it is quoted constantly by people who have never read the dialogue around it.

Do not take the Simonides section seriously. It is a joke, sustained far past the point of comfort, and the joke is on the practice of settling questions by quoting authorities.

Watch the hedonism carefully. Socrates argues from the premise that the good is pleasure, which he rejects in the Gorgias and the Republic. Whether he is speaking for himself, reasoning from the many’s own premises to show they contradict themselves, or something else is a real interpretive dispute and it matters for what the dialogue proves.

Test the paradox against yourself. Everyone believes they have done what they knew was worse. Socrates says this never happens and that the description is confused. Before dismissing him, try giving an account of what does happen that does not smuggle in a moment where you judged rightly and chose otherwise.

Then read the Meno, which asks the same question and gets a different answer, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VII, where akrasia is analysed by someone who thinks Socrates was plainly wrong about the facts.

Questions it raises

• Can virtue be taught? Notice that neither man ends the dialogue holding the position he arrived with.
• Protagoras says everyone has a share of justice or the city could not exist. Is that a description of how societies work or a claim about human nature?
• Is weakness of will real, or is every failure a miscalculation, as Socrates argues?
• If courage is knowing what to fear, what is the difference between a brave man and a well-informed one?
• Socrates refuses to hear long speeches. Is the refusal a demand for rigour or a way of controlling the exchange?
• Protagoras taught for money and Socrates did not. Does that difference bear on the truth of anything either of them says?