Protagoras

Summary

Socrates tells an unnamed companion about the morning he spent at the house of Callias, the richest patron of the sophists in Athens. Before dawn the young Hippocrates had pounded on his door, wild to become a pupil of Protagoras of Abdera, newly arrived in the city. On the walk over Socrates asks him what he expects to become by studying with a sophist, and offers a warning that governs the whole dialogue: knowledge is the food of the soul, and unlike meat bought at market it cannot be carried home in a jar and inspected before it is swallowed. Whatever one learns goes straight into the soul. At Callias' house the visitors find Protagoras pacing a cloister with a train of admirers, Hippias of Elis lecturing on astronomy from a high chair, and Prodicus of Ceos still in bed, wrapped in sheepskins. Protagoras claims openly to be a sophist and promises that a pupil will go home a better man each day, skilled in managing his household and the affairs of the city. Socrates doubts that such civic excellence can be taught: the Athenian Assembly takes advice on ships from shipwrights but lets any citizen speak on justice, and Pericles could not make his own sons good. Protagoras answers with his celebrated myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, in which Zeus sends reverence and justice to all human beings, and then with an argument from punishment, schooling and the laws: the whole city is a teacher of virtue, as it is a teacher of Greek. Socrates then asks whether justice, temperance, holiness, wisdom and courage are parts of one virtue or names for one thing. The questioning grows tense, Protagoras answers with a long speech about how a thing good for one creature is bad for another, and Socrates threatens to leave unless answers become short. The company brokers a truce. Protagoras turns to the interpretation of a poem by Simonides, and Socrates replies with a mischievous reading of his own before dismissing poetry-quarrels as entertainment for people who cannot converse. In the last movement Socrates leads Protagoras, under the assumption that the pleasant is the good, to the conclusion that being "overcome by pleasure" is really ignorance, that right living needs an art of measurement, and that courage is knowledge of what is and is not to be feared. The dialogue ends with the two men having changed places: Socrates, who doubted that virtue could be taught, has argued that it is knowledge and so teachable, while Protagoras, who promised to teach it, has resisted calling it knowledge. Socrates imagines the argument itself laughing at them. For students the work is a vivid model of disputation and a sobering one: brilliance, reputation and fees settle nothing about whether a teacher can make the soul better, and the question of whether knowing the good is enough to do it remains open at the close.

Top Lessons

• Ask what a teacher will make of you

  Before Hippocrates hands himself over, Socrates asks what he will become. Learning is not a neutral purchase: whatever is taught enters the soul and shapes it, so a student needs some judgment of good and evil before choosing a master.

• Reverence and justice are given to all

  Protagoras' myth claims that every citizen shares in reverence and justice, which is why the Assembly hears anyone on public questions; the city teaches virtue through parents, schools, poets, laws and punishment. It is a strong defence of moral education carried by a whole community, even if Socrates doubts its account of what virtue is.

• Short answers and the duty to be examined

  The near-collapse of the conversation shows that method is a moral matter. Long speeches can win applause while escaping refutation; question and answer exposes a claim to testing. Socrates' complaint about poets who cannot be questioned extends to any authority we quote but cannot cross-examine.

• Can knowledge be dragged about like a slave?

  Socrates argues that no one does what he believes worse when the better is available, so 'giving in to pleasure' is a mismeasurement of near and distant goods. Students should follow the argument carefully, notice that it runs on the premise that the pleasant is the good, and weigh it against the experience Paul describes in Romans 7, of seeing the good and not doing it.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is Plato's recurring model of an expert craft in this dialogue: Socrates imagines a 'physician of the soul' who could judge a sophist's wares, Zeus distributes medicine to a few but justice to all, Protagoras cites physicians' dietary rules about oil, and the hedonist argument treats burning, cutting, drugging and starving as painful goods justified by later health. The final argument about being 'overcome by pleasure' is often read alongside modern discussions of impulsivity and addiction, but that is an interpretive bridge; the dialogue itself analyses ordinary choices among pleasures and pains, not a disease.

• Stephanus 311b-c and 313c-e

  Socrates asks what Hippocrates would become by paying his namesake Hippocrates of Cos, and answers 'a physician'; he then contrasts trainers and physicians, who can judge food for the body, with the rare physician of the soul who can judge teaching.

• Stephanus 322c-d (the Great Speech)

  Hermes asks whether justice should be distributed like medicine, one skilled practitioner serving many laymen; Zeus answers that justice must be shared by all.

• Stephanus 334a-c

  Protagoras' speech on the relativity of benefit: manure helps roots and harms shoots, oil is good for human skin and hair but bad inwardly, so physicians forbid more than a little oil in a patient's food.

• Stephanus 353c-354b

  Socrates lists pleasures that are bad because they later cause disease and poverty, and painful goods such as gymnastics and the physician's burning, cutting, drugging and starving that bring health afterward.