## 1. Protagoras




A key figure in the emergence of this new type of sophist was Protagoras of Abdera, a subject
city of the Athenian empire on the north coast of the Aegean. Abdera was
also the birthplace of Democritus, whom some later sources represented
as the teacher of Protagoras. In all probability Democritus was the
younger of the two by about thirty years, and the only solid evidence
of intellectual relations between them is a statement by Plutarch
(*Against Colotes*. 1108F) that Democritus argued against Protagorean
subjectivism (see below), complemented by Sextus, who reports
(*Against the Mathematicians* VII.389-90) that Democritus' arguments included the
argument that Protagoras' subjectivism is self-refuting.
Protagoras was one of the earliest sophists; as presented in
Plato's *Protagoras* (one of our principal sources for
Protagoras' life and activities as a teacher) he says (317c) that
he is old enough to be the father of anyone present, who included rival
sophists Hippias and Prodicus, while another Plato passage
(*Meno* 91e) says that he practised as a sophist for over forty
years till his death at about seventy (probably about 420 BC). In the
*Protagoras* he also says (316d-317b) that while the activity of
sophistry has been practised by poets and other experts from ancient
times, he is the first person to have openly proclaimed himself a
"sophist" and claimed to teach people (sc. how to achieve
success in life); he thus claims for himself recognition of his
professional status in a role, that of teacher of human excellence as a
means to success in life, which was traditionally claimed by the
poets




Specifically, in the *Protagoras* he claims to teach
'the proper management of one's own affairs, how best to
run one's household, and the management of public affairs, how to
make the most effective contribution to the affairs of the city by word
and action', and he accepts Socrates' account of that
subject as 'the art of running a city', which he promises
will 'make men into good citizens' (319a). Can we form any
conception of the means by which this ambitious project of education in
self-improvement and good citizenship was to be put into effect? In his
'Great Speech' in the dialogue (320c-328d) Protagoras
presents an account of the development of human civilization, with the
aim of showing that the essence of good citizenship consists in justice
and self-restraint, which are natural to humans in that the
preservation of the social order, and ultimately the survival of the
species, depend on their being universally inculcated. It is at least
plausible that this complex of themes, including the development of
civilization from primitive beginnings, the nature of social virtue and
its foundation in human nature, represents some of the content of
Protagoras' actual teaching; the list of titles of his works
preserved by Diogenes Laertius (IX.55) includes 'On the
Virtues', 'On (the) Constitution' (*Peri
Politeias*) and 'On the State of Things in the
Beginning'. Later in the dialogue he provides a critical reading
of a poem of Simonides, saying that the ability to specify the good and
bad parts of a poem and to justify one's criticisms is a very
important part of education (338e-339a). Relevantly to this, he is
reported as a pioneer of some aspects of linguistic theory, and of its
application to literary criticism. He wrote on correctness in language
(*orthoepeia,* Plato, *Phaedrus* 267c): he is said to
have devised a taxonomy of speech acts into assertion, question,
answer, command etc. (Diogenes Laertius IX.53-4), and to have criticised the opening
of the *Iliad* 'Sing, goddess, of the wrath of
Achilles' on the ground that instead of a prayer, as it ought to
be, the phrase is a command (Aristotle *Poetics* 1456b15-16). He is
also said both to have classified grammatical genders (Aristotle
*Rhetoric* 1407b6-7) and to have suggested that gender should be
modified to fit the sense, so that 'wrath'
(*menis*) in the same line of Homer, which is a
grammatical feminine, should be masculine, since wrath is
characteristic of males rather than females (Aristotle *Sophistici
Elenchi* 173b19-20). It is unclear whether these topics and their
application to literary criticism are seen primarily as part of an
individual's cultural refinement, something valuable for its own
sake, or whether the aim is to be able to incorporate exegesis and
criticism of poets in forensic or political speeches, as one tactic in
argument and persuasion.




In any event, we do have some evidence for Protagoras'
teaching of techniques of argument. Diogenes Laertius' list of
titles includes one, 'The Technique of Eristics'
(*Techne Eristikon*) which certainly
designates a handbook of argumentative techniques, and another which
probably does. The literal title is 'On Wrestling', but it
is more likely that the wrestling in question is intellectual than
physical; there is nothing in our other evidence to suggest that
Protagoras set himself up as an athletic coach. (It is relevant that
Protagoras' celebrated work 'Truth', which began with
the famous 'Man the Measure' sentence (see below)
apparently had the alternative title 'Overthrowing' (sc.
Arguments) (*Kataballontes*).) So Protagoras taught
argumentative strategies, but we have comparatively little evidence of
what these actually were. The critique of Simonides' poem
mentioned above suggests that eliciting a contradiction from
one's opponent's statements was one such strategy, since
what Protagoras actually does is to seek to show that Simonides
contradicts himself in first asserting that it is hard to become good
and then in finding fault with Pittacus, one of the so-called
'Seven Sages', for saying that it hard to be good.
Socrates' description of the audience's loud applause
(339d10-e1) is one of the many indications that sophistic argumentative
contests had the status of a spectator sport, even to the extent of
figuring among the sideshows at the great athletic festivals; in
Plato's *Lesser Hippias* (363c-364a) Hippias
describes how he goes regularly to the Olympic Games to take part in
contests of question and answer and has never yet been beaten, and
similarly Protagoras says that he has had verbal contests with many
people, and that he would never have become celebrated if he had
allowed his opponents to dictate the rules of the contest
(*Prot*. 335a). According to Diogenes Laertius IX.52 Protagoras
was the first to institute such contests. The technique of adversarial
argument clearly has some connection with two specific claims for which
Protagoras was famous (or notorious). According to Diogenes Laertius he
was the first to maintain that on any matter there are two theses,
statements (or perhaps arguments) (*logoi*) opposed to one
another (IX.51 (=DK 80B6a)), and according to Aristotle he claimed
'to make the weaker (or inferior) *logos* stronger (or
superior) (*ton hetto logon
kreitto poiein*)' (*Rhetoric* 1402a23-5 (=DK
80B6b)), for which claim he was, Aristotle says (ibid.), rightly
censured. Investigation of what Protagoras may have meant by these
claims leads to consideration of his views on truth and reality, and
specifically to the 'Man the Measure' doctrine and the
issue of relativism.




While relativism, particularly in the area of morality, is popularly
seen as characteristic of sophists generally (see Bett 1989), in fact
Protagoras is the only sophist to whom ancient sources ascribe
relativistic views, and even in his case the evidence is ambiguous. A
key text is the famous 'Man the Measure' sentence, the
opening sentence of his work entitled 'Truth', which runs
'Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that
they are and of the things that are not that they are not'
(Plato, *Theaetetus* 151e, Sextus *Against the Mathematicians* VII.60 (=DK 80B1)). In
the *Theaetetus* (our principal source for this aspect of
Protagoras' teaching) this is interpreted as a claim of the
relativity of the truth of all judgments to the experience or belief of
the individual making the judgment, i.e., as subjectivism. On that
interpretation, the way things seem to an individual is the way they
are in fact for that individual. First illustrated by Socrates, who
quotes this sentence, as a claim concerning sensory appearances, e.g.,
that if the wind feels cold to me and warm to you then it is cold for
me and warm for you, in the course of the dialogue Socrates expands it
to apply to all judgments, including itself, yielding the result that
every belief is true for the person who holds it (and only for them),
and hence that there is no objective truth on any matter. That this
subjectivist interpretation was current in antiquity is shown by
Aristotle's attribution to Protagoras of the view that 'it
is equally possible to affirm and to deny anything of anything'
(*Metaphysics* 1007b20-22) and by Sextus' evidence of
Democritus' critique of Protagoras mentioned above; Sextus
reports Democritus (and Plato, see *Theaetetus* 170e-171c) as having
argued that, given Protagoras' thesis that every appearance
(*phantasia*) is true, the thesis that it is not the case that
every appearance is true, 'which is itself in accordance with
appearance (*kata phantasian huphistamenon*)' is
true; hence Protagoras' thesis is self-refuting. But elsewhere in
the *Theaetetus* (167c) Socrates explains Protagoras' view
by claiming on his behalf that 'whatever things seem to each city
to be fine and just are so for that city, so long as it maintains them
(*heos an auta
nomizei*)': i.e., the truth about what
is fine and just (which appears to indicate the truth of moral
judgments generally) is relative not to the judgment of the individual,
but to that of the society to which the individual belongs. If the wind
feels cold to me, and I consequently believe that it is cold, there is
no objective fact of the matter by reference to which that belief can
be false; but if I believe that infanticide is wrong, whereas
infanticide is sanctioned by the laws and customs of the state of which
I am a citizen, then my belief is straightforwardly false, though of
course it would come to be true if the state of which I am a citizen
changed its laws and customs so as to condemn infanticide. Within a
single Platonic dialogue, then, Protagoras is represented as
maintaining both universal subjectivism and limited social relativism,
though those two versions of relativism are mutually inconsistent. And
there is a further twist. In the very passage of the
*Theaetetus* where, according to Socrates, Protagoras maintains
the social relativity of moral judgments (167b-c), he gives a pragmatic
justification of the role of the expert, both in the individual and in
the social context. In the individual case, while no appearance is
truer than any other, some appearances are better than others, and it
is the role of the expert (for instance, the doctor) to produce better
appearances instead of worse (as those appearances are then judged even
by the patient); while in the case of cities, some judgments of what is
just etc. are better than others, and it is the role of the expert (in
this case the expert orator) to persuade the city to adopt the better
judgment. (He adds (167c7-d1) that the sophist improves those whom he
educates in the same way, implying that not merely collective judgments
but also individual judgments (about what?) may be better or worse.)
This account of the role of the expert may imply that there are matters
of fact of what is better and worse independent of the judgement of
those whom the expert persuades. E.g., a city might initially judge it
right to pursue its individual interest without any consideration of
obligations to other cities, but then be persuaded that it was more in
its long-term interest to respect treaties. That persuasion presupposes
that the question of what is in the city's long-term interest is
a matter of fact, not merely a matter of how it now seems to the
city.




The evidence of the *Theaetetus* on Protagorean relativism is
therefore ambiguous, since in that dialogue he is represented as
maintaining a) universal subjectivism, b) social relativism in morality
and c) objective realism on questions of advantage. The evidence of
Aristotle and Democritus (transmitted by Sextus) indicates that he did
in fact maintain a), but leaves it open whether the attribution to him
of b) and c) is historically accurate, thereby indicating inconsistency
on his part, or is due to misinterpretation, deliberate or inadvertent,
on the part of Plato. It should also be recognized that in the
*Theaetetus* Socrates only attributes b) and c) to Protagoras in
his overarching effort, on Theaetetus' behalf, to explicate and
defend as plausibly as possible the 'Man the measure'
doctrine before refuting it. The portrayal in the *Protagoras*
shows little trace of relativism, either individual or social; instead
he maintains that the essential social virtues are justice and
self-restraint, and that without universal inculcation of those virtues
the survival of society is impossible. These claims are presented as
universal truths; there is not the slightest suggestion that in making
them Protagoras is merely expressing a preference for these virtues
which happens to prevail, e.g., in Athens, but which might be absent from
the mores of some other city. It is clearly implied by his exposition
that no such city could exist. On the assumption, adopted above, that
the presentation of Protagoras' social teaching in the dialogue
is in essentials intended to be historically accurate, we must conclude
that Protagoras recognised certain objective truths, not merely on
questions of advantage, but in some fundamentals of morality, and
consequently that his basic position was inconsistent.




Yet a further epistemological position is attributed to Protagoras in
a papyrus fragment of the biblical commentator Didymus the Blind
(fourth century CE), published in 1968. In this he appears neither as
a subjectivist nor as a social relativist, but as a sceptic. In the
fragment he is represented as saying 'To you who are present I
appear to be sitting, but to someone who is not present I do not
appear to be sitting. It is unclear whether I am sitting or
not'. On this account there is an objective fact of the matter,
which is undiscoverable because different individuals have different
appearances of what is the case, whereas given subjectivism there is
no fact of the matter over and above the individual appearances which
establish how each thing is for the one being appeared to. This might
be yet another inconsistency on the part of Protagoras, but if so it
is one which has no confirmation from any other source. It is more
likely that what the fragment presents is a garbled instance of
Protagorean subjectivism. Instead of the genuinely Protagorean
argument 'It seems to *A* that I am sitting and
to *B* that I am not sitting, so I am sitting for *A*
and I am not sitting for *B*' we have the argument given
in the fragment. Since the subjectivist thesis is that every belief is
true for the person who has it, from the premisses that *A*
believes that I am sitting and *B* does not believe that I am
sitting (because *B* has no belief one way or the other), the
correct Protagorean conclusion is not that it is unclear whether I am
sitting or not sitting, but that it is true for *A* that I am
sitting and that it is neither true for *B* that I am sitting
nor true for *B* that I am not sitting.




All of this leaves it unclear what we are to make of the assertion
that on every matter there are two *logoi* opposed to one
another, and the claim to make the weaker *logos* (the)
stronger. The former cannot be understood as the assertion of universal
subjectivism, since it is in fact inconsistent with it. Given universal
subjectivism, the claim that the wind is cold for me is not opposed to
the claim that it is warm for you, since both are (relatively) true.
Nor, for the same reason, can it be understood as an assertion of
social relativism: the assertion that for girls to exercise naked is
shameful in Athens is not opposed to the claim that it is not shameful
in Sparta. Perhaps we should not try to tie this claim tightly to any
general metaphysical position, but interpret it more loosely as the
claim that that on a great many matters there are two sides to the
question. What this might involve is perhaps indicated by the so-called
*Dissoi Logoi* (i.e., *Arguments on Either Side*), a short
text found appended to some manuscripts of Sextus, generally dated to
the end of the fifth century. This text consists for the most part of a
series of short discussions of pairs of standardly opposed moral
properties, e.g., the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the
most general pattern being a series of arguments to show on the one
hand that the opposed properties are in fact identical, followed by a
series to show that on the other they are non-identical. Mostly the
arguments for identity depend on the relativity of the application of
the property, e.g., the bad is the same as the good because disease is
bad for the patient but good for the doctor, while the arguments for
non-identity rely on the absence of relativity, e.g., doing what is good
for one's parents is not the same thing as doing what is bad for
one's parents. Plainly, there is no inconsistency between the
theses of identity and of non-identity, and it is not clear that the
reader is supposed to be required to choose one rather than the other.
Perhaps the point is simply to see that, given the appropriate
distinctions, there is something to be said either way, with the
implication that the correct answer to the question 'Is the good
the same as the bad, or different?' is 'In one way (i.e.,
relative to different things) the same, in another (i.e., relative to
the same thing) different' (see *Protagoras* 334a-c.).
That could be a useful tactic to employ against an opponent who
insisted on a 'Yes or No' answer.




Similarly, the claim to make the weaker *logos* the stronger
has nothing to do with relativism, either individual or social. Since,
as we have seen, relativized beliefs are not in conflict with one
another, arguments in favor of them are not in conflict either, and
hence neither the beliefs themselves nor the arguments in favor of them
can be weaker or stronger than one another. Aristotle's evidence
in the *Rhetoric* passage cited above indicates that the context
of the claim is that of forensic oratory, and specifically that the
arguments in question are arguments from what is likely or plausible,
e.g., on the one side that it is not likely that a weakling would
assault a strong man, since he would expect to be beaten up himself
instead, and on the other side that it is not likely that a strong man
would assault a weakling, since everyone would assume precisely that it
was likely that he would do so, hence he would know that he would
almost certainly be found guilty, hence in those circumstances it is
*unlikely* that he would actually commit the crime. In any case
of this kind, where it is assumed that the facts cannot be established
with certainty, considerations of what is plausible may, given
sufficient ingenuity, be adduced on either side, and similar arguments
can be adduced in the context of political deliberation, where the
future outcome cannot be certain and the decision has to turn on the
balance of probabilities. It is likely, then, that this slogan was a
sales pitch for Protagoras as a teacher of forensic and deliberative
rhetoric. How ambitious the claim was is hard to determine. It is hard
to believe that he ventured to claim always to make the prima facie
weaker case carry the day (which is equivalent to the claim to make
every case whatever carry the day), but equally implausible that he
merely claimed to make the weaker case stronger than it was before he
devised arguments in its favor. Perhaps he simply claimed that he was
capable, in the appropriate circumstances, of devising arguments which
would turn the weaker case into the stronger one. If so, the claim was
both reasonable and, despite Aristotle's strictures, not
necessarily morally discreditable. E.g., the prosecution may have a
strong case that Leon committed a theft, since a number of
eye-witnesses identified him as the thief, but if the defence can show
that he has an identical twin brother, Pantaleon, who was in the
vicinity, and further that Pantaleon is a known thief, whereas Leon has
an unblemished record, the case that Leon is innocent, which was
previously the weaker, is now the stronger, and the defence is not
necessarily guilty of any sharp practice (even if Leon was in fact
guilty of the crime). (Of course, a defence counsel who secured an
acquittal on these grounds while knowing independently that Leon was
guilty would deserve Aristotle's disapproval.)




To complete our account of Protagoras' views on language and
reality we need to mention the thesis that it is impossible to say what
is false, which occurs in three Platonic passages, *Euthydemus*
284a-c, *Theaetetus* 188d-189a and *Sophist* 236e-237e. According
to this argument falsehood is impossible, since to say what is false is
to say what is not (*legein to me on*),
whereas anyone who speaks has to say something that is (*on
ti*); hence saying what is not is saying what is not anything, i.e.,
not saying anything. Hence, since of contradictory statements one must
be false, it is not possible to contradict (*ouk estin
antilegein*  (*Euthydemus* 286b)). This argument has its origin
in Parmenides' claim (DK 28B2) that 'You could not know
what is not ... nor could you say it', and its application
to falsehood and the impossibility of contradiction is ascribed to
various fifth-century figures, including 'Protagoras and his
associates and even earlier people' (*hoi amphi
Protagoran ... kai hoi eti palaioteroi*
(*Euthydemus* 286c2-3)), Prodicus (in another fragment of Didymus,
published in 1966), Cratylus (*Cratylus* 429d) and Antisthenes (Aristotle
*Metaphysics* 1024b32-4). In the case of the latter two the
thesis connects with other more general theses about language which
they are reported to have held. Thus Cratylus has attributed to him by
Plato the thesis that each thing has its own proper name, which
expresses, through its etymology, the nature of the things it names,
and which has significance only when correctly applied, but is
otherwise a mere empty sound. Hence there can no such thing as the
misapplication of a name (since a misapplied name is not a name, but a
mere sound), and hence no such thing as a false statement, since (it is
assumed) every false statement involves the misapplication of some
name. Similarly Antisthenes held that each thing has its own proper
definition or description, which cannot be applied to anything else,
from which again the impossibility of falsehood follows. In the case of
Protagoras it is hard to find any such connection. On the most
plausible construal of subjectivism no one's belief can
contradict anyone else's belief, but that does not appear to rule
out an individual's having inconsistent beliefs. Further,
subjectivism does not rule out false statements; I can falsely assert
'The wind is cold for me' when in fact it is not cold for
me. Though Protagoras seems to have had a fairly high tolerance
threshold for inconsistency, it is hard to see how one and the same
person could assert both that it is impossible to contradict and that
on every matter there are two opposed *logoi.* The wording of
the attribution to Protagoras in the *Euthydemus* is
suspiciously vague, suggesting that Plato is attributing to Socrates a
vague memory of Protagorean subjectivism, rather than precise recall of
any particular doctrine.


## 2. *Nomos* and *Phusis*




Protagoras' account of social morality in the Great Speech,
according to which the universal acceptance of justice and
self-restraint is necessary for the perpetuation of society, and
thereby for the preservation of the human species, places Protagoras
firmly on one side (the conservative side, we should note) of the
debate about the relation between law and convention (*nomos*)
on the one hand and nature or reality (*phusis*) on the other,
which was central to moral and social thought in the fifth and fourth
centuries. The debate was fundamentally about the status of moral and
other social norms; were such norms ever in some sense part of or
grounded in the reality of things, or were they in every case mere
products of human customs, conventions or beliefs? The question was
crucial to the perceived authority of norms; both sides agreed in
seeing nature as authoritative for correct human behavior, and as the
ultimate source of true value. Critics of traditional morality argued
that since that morality was nothing more than a human invention it
thereby lacked genuine authority (which belonged to the realm of
nature), thus sanctioning violation of traditional moral norms if the
violator could escape punishment or other bad consequences (while
'following nature'), while the upholders of morality sought
to show that morality, as reflected in traditional norms, was itself in
some sense a part or product of nature. We find examples of the
critical stance both in some Platonic dialogues and in some sophistic
writings. The starkest expression of the opposition between
*nomos* and *phusis* is that expressed in the
*Gorgias* by Callicles, a pupil of Gorgias (though there is no
suggestion in the dialogue or elsewhere that Gorgias himself held that
position): Callicles holds that conventional morality is a contrivance
devised by the weak and unintelligent to inhibit the strong and
intelligent from doing what they are entitled by nature to do, viz.
exploit their inferiors for their own advantage. He is thus an inverted
moralist, who holds that what it is really right to do is what it is
conventionally wrong to do. The true, authoritative norms are those
which prevail in nature, as shown by the behavior of non-human animals
such as beasts of prey; those who act in accordance with these norms
'do these things in accordance with the nature of justice and
... the law of nature, but perhaps not in accordance with this one
which we lay down' (Plato, *Gorgias*, 483e). The sophist Thrasymachus maintains a
similar position in Book I of the *Republic*, though without
Callicles' daring inversion of values. He agrees with Callicles
in praising the ruthless individual (above all the tyrant) who is
capable of overcoming the restraints of morality, but whereas Callicles
calls such self-assertion naturally just, Thrasymachus abides by
conventional morality in calling it unjust. Both agree that a
successful life of ruthless self-assertion is supreme happiness, and
that that is what nature prompts us to seek; both, then, accept the
normative authority of nature over *nomos*. The difference
between them is that Callicles takes the further step of identifying
the authority of nature with that of real, as opposed to conventional
morality, whereas for Thrasymachus there is only one kind of morality,
conventional morality, which has no authority. In Book II Glaucon
presents a modified version of Thrasymachus' position; while
maintaining, as Protagoras does in the Great Speech, that humans adopt
moral conventions as a necessary survival strategy in a hostile world,
he insists that this involves a stunting of human nature, since people
are obliged for self-protection to abandon the goal of
self-satisfaction to which nature, as Thrasymachus insists, prompts
them. This assertion of egoism is supported by the thought-experiment
of Gyges' ring; if, like the legendary Gyges, we had a magic ring
which rendered us invisible, and hence immune from sanctions, we would
all seek our own interest without restraint. We find a similar
down-grading of convention in favor of nature (though one lacking the
immoralist conclusions) in Hippias' speech in the
*Protagoras* (337c-d), where he urges that intellectuals
such as are gathered in the house of Callias ought not to quarrel,
since, though according to artificial political conventions they are
citizens of many different cities, by nature they are all akin. The
conventions which make them treat each other as strangers distort the
reality by which they are all alike; hence they should recognise that
reality by treating each other as friends and members of the same
family, not as strangers. (The vignette gains added point from the
fact that Hippias, speaking in Athens, is a citizen of Elis, a
Peloponnesian state allied to Sparta in the war against Athens.)
Outside Plato the most extended and explicit expression of the
'antinomian' stance is a well-known papyrus fragment of
Antiphon (DK 87B44), which presents a number of contrasts between the
requirements of conventional morality and those of nature, to the
disadvantage of the former. Nature prompts us to do only what is
advantageous to us, and if we try to act contrary to its promptings we
inevitably suffer for it as a natural consequence, whereas morality
typically restrains us from doing what is advantageous to ourselves
and requires us to do what is disadvantageous, and if we violate the
requirements of morality we come to harm only if we are found
out. Legal remedies are insufficient to prevent the law-abiding person
from harm, since they are applicable only after the harm has been
done, and there is always the chance that the law-abiding person will
lose his case anyway. Another part of the papyrus (fragment B)
suggests that some legal norms are self-contradictory; it is just to
bear true witness in court, and unjust to wrong someone who has not
wronged you. So someone who bears true witness against someone who has
not wronged him (e.g., witness *A* who truly testifies that he
saw *B* murder *C*) wrongs the person against whom he
bears witness, and therefore acts both justly and unjustly. (The
argument here depends on an illicit assimilation of harming with
wronging: the witness certainly harms the murderer by his true
testimony, assuming that it leads to his conviction and execution, but
there is no reason to agree that in giving that testimony the witness
wrongs the murderer.) Moreover, he thereby puts himself in danger of
retaliation by the person whom he has wronged; so once again obedience
to *nomos* is disadvantageous.




On the other side of the debate, as we have seen, we have
Protagoras' contention in the Great Speech that law and morality
are themselves natural developments, necessary for human survival and
the growth of civilization. Protagoras agrees with Glaucon that moral
and legal conventions arise ultimately from the need for cooperation in
a hostile world, but rejects the latter's Thrasymachean egoism,
with its implication that morality is merely a second-best, to be
rejected if circumstances allow the individual to pursue his natural
goal of unrestrained self-interest. Morality, for Protagoras, consists
in justice and self-restraint, dispositions which involve the
replacement of Thrasymachean egoism by genuine regard for others as of
equal moral status with oneself, and the crucial lesson of the Great
Speech is that those dispositions, so far from requiring the stunting
of human nature as Glaucon maintains, in fact constitute the perfection
of that nature. The idea that law and morality arise from the
exigencies of human nature is also found in some fragments of
Democritus and in the so-called 'Anonymous Iamblichi' (DK
89), a fragmentary text from the late fifth or early fourth century BCE
preserved by the neo-Platonist Iamblichus (third-fourth century CE: see
Taylor 2007). This defence of the authority of *nomos* rests on
the idea that *nomos* itself, in the sense of legal and moral
convention, arises from *phusis*. A different, though related,
defence of *nomos* assumes a distinction between on the one hand
the moral and legal conventions of particular societies, assumed to be
the product of human agreement, and on the other certain fundamental
moral norms, alleged to be common to all societies, whose origin is to
be traced, not to any agreement, but to the original constitution of
human nature, traditionally attributed to the creation of humans by the
gods; these norms were generally agreed to include the obligations to
respect one's parents and to worship the gods. The conception of
natural or unwritten law is frequently appealed to in oratory and
drama, notably Sophocles' *Antigone* (see Guthrie 1969 pp.
77-9, 117-31 and Taylor 2008); one of its most extended expressions
occurs in Xenophon's *Memorabilia* IV.4.14-25, where in
conversation with Socrates the sophist Hippias is represented as saying
that since the unwritten laws are common to all countries, they cannot
have arisen from agreement among humans who spoke different languages,
and as being persuaded by Socrates that breach of such laws inevitably
leads to bad consequences, thus guaranteeing the rationality of this
divine legislation. There is, then, no uniform sophistic position in
the *nomos-phusis* debate; different sophists, or associates of
sophists, are found among the disputants on either side.


## 3. Religion




From its beginnings, Greek speculations about the origin and nature
of the cosmos had a theological dimension, in that various early
thinkers attributed divinity either to the cosmos as a whole (as in
Heraclitus' 'ever-living fire' (DK 31B30)) or to the
fundamental cosmic principle or principles (so Anaximander is reported
as regarding the Infinite (DK 12A15 (Aristotle)) and Anaximenes air (DK
13A10 (Aetius, Cicero)) as divine, that is, eternal and intelligent).
Such speculations were not without their implications for the
traditional Olympian pantheon; Xenophanes clearly intends to mock the
cultural relativity of anthropomorphism, pointing out that different
races of humans depict their gods in their own image, and suggesting
that if horses and cattle could draw they would do the same (DK
21B15-16). On the positive side he proclaims a single supreme
non-anthropomorphic divinity, which appears to be identified either
with the cosmos itself or with its intelligent directive force (DK
21B23-6). This type of theology is naturalistic, but non-reductive;
Heraclitus is not saying that God is nothing but cosmic fire, implying
that that fire is not really divine, but rather that divinity, or the
divinities that matter, is not a super-hero like Apollo, but the
everlasting, intelligent, self-directing cosmos itself. In the fifth
century the naturalistic approach to religion exhibits a more reductive
aspect, with a consequent move towards a world-view which is not merely
naturalistic, but in the modern sense secular. Some sophists
contributed to that process of secularisation.




It is convenient to start with Anaxagoras, who, though not generally
counted as a sophist, in that he did not offer instruction in how to
live or teach rhetoric, nevertheless shared the scientific interests of
sophists such as Hippias, and personified the growing rationalistic
approach to natural phenomena. When he said that the sun was a molten
rock, larger than the Peloponnese (Diogenes Laertius II.8, cf. Plato, *Apology*
26d), he did mean that it was nothing other than a rock, i.e., not a
divine being, and he was rightly considered as challenging traditional
views of natural phenomena as divinely significant. Plutarch's
story (*Life of Pericles* 6) of the one-horned ram neatly
encapsulates the opposed world-views: a ram with one horn in the middle
of its forehead was brought to Pericles, and the soothsayer Lampon
interpreted it as a portent signifying the forthcoming triumph of
Pericles in his political struggle with his rival Thucydides.
Anaxagoras dissected the animal's skull and showed that the
single horn grew naturally out of a deformity of the brain. So,
Plutarch reports, the people admired Anaxagoras (but admired Lampon
even more when Thucydides was ostracized soon afterwards). The
naturalistic approach to meteorology etc. is not as such inconsistent
with belief in divinities, and though Anaxagoras does not explicitly
describe his cosmic *Nous* as divine, his description of it as
knowing, controlling and organizing everything (DK 59B12) strongly
suggests that he thought that it was. Among the phenomena for which
reductive explanations were offered in the fifth century was the origin
of religious belief itself. There is an indication of this in
Democritus DK 68B30 (preserved by Clement of Alexandria): 'A few
learned people, holding up their hands towards what we Greeks now call
the air, said "Zeus thinks of all things and he knows all things
and gives and takes away, and he is king of all things" ',
which is supported by the testimony of Sextus (*Against the Mathematicians* IX.24) that
Democritus said that belief in gods arose when primitive people were
frightened by thunder, lightning and other celestial phenomena. An
alternative account, or rather two accounts, equally reductive, of the
origin of religion is attributed to Prodicus, who is reported by
various sources as holding that the names of gods were originally
applied either to things which are particularly important in human
life, such as the sun, rivers, kinds of crops etc., or else to the
people who had originally discovered things of that kind (DK 84B5). It
was presumably on the basis of this that Prodicus was counted as an
atheist in antiquity (Aetius I.7.1, Cicero *De Natura Deorum* I.42.117); he
was understood, probably rightly, as meaning that in fact Demeter is
nothing but corn, Dionysus nothing but wine, and so on. Most commentators agree that Prodicus was an atheist of some kind (for a dissenting view see Sedley 2013, at 329-331), but there is some division of opinion on whether the atheism which he espoused was radical atheism, i.e. denial of the existence of divine beings of any kind, or a more moderate version which denied the existence of the gods of popular and poetic tradition while allowing the divinity of cosmic items such as the heavenly bodies, water etc. (on the issue see Mayhew 2011, xvii, 183-4). (For more recent discussions of Prodicus' views on religion, and of their connection with his views on cosmology and language see Kouloumentas 2018, Lebedev 2019 and Vassallo 2018.)


 Atheism is more overt in the account of the origin of religion in a passage from a play
called *Sisyphus* (DK 88B25), quoted by Sextus (*Against the Mathematicians*
IX.54), attributed by DK and others on the authority of Sextus to the
Athenian poet and oligarchic politician Critias, but now more usually
thought to be by Euripides. The speaker (apparently Sisyphus himself)
begins with the picture of primitive human origins familiar from
Protagoras' Great Speech: at first human life was bestial,
unregulated by law, so humans invented laws to restrain mutual
aggression. But since legal sanctions were effective only when the
crime was discovered, someone 'stalwart and wise in his
mind' invented the fiction that there are gods who live in the
heavens, who see everything and punish evil-doing, even when it is
secret. Atheism is explicit; the stalwart and wise man 'concealed
the truth with a false account' (line 26). Of course atheism
expressed by a character in a play cannot be directly attributed to the
author, whoever he was; this is merely one of the expressions in
fifth-century drama of a wide range of attitudes to religion, ranging
from outright atheism (e.g., Euripides Fragments 7, 286, 'Does then anyone say
there are gods in heaven? There are not, there are not, if a man is
willing not to give foolish credence to the ancient story') to
pious declaration of faith (Euripides Fragments 8, 912b, 'See, all you who think
the gods do not exist, how you are doubly in error with your poor
judgment. They exist indeed, they exist'). The significance of the
*Sisyphus* fragment is rather as further evidence of the fact
that in the late fifth century the rationalistic approach to the
natural world, including human nature, provided the intellectual
foundation of a range of views hostile to traditional religion,
including explicit atheism. From Protagoras himself we have a
first-person declaration, not of atheism, but of agnosticism, in what
was apparently the opening of his work *On the Gods*:
'Concerning the gods I am not able to know either that they exist
or that they do not exist or what their nature is; for there are many
things which prevent one from knowing, both the unclarity (sc. of the
subject) and the short span of human life' (DK 80B4). According
to some sources the outrage occasioned by this work led to his books
being publicly burned and his being forced to flee from Athens to
escape prosecution, and he is said by some to have drowned while trying
to escape by sea (DK 80A1-4, 12). That story suggests that he was seen
as a threat to traditional religion, much as Anaxagoras (and later
Socrates) was, but the evidence of Plato's *Meno* 91e (see
above) gives an altogether different picture, since in that
passage Socrates describes him as having had an unblemished reputation
during forty years of activity as a sophist, a reputation, moreover,
which has lasted from his death till the present day, i.e., till the
dramatic date of the dialogue in the last few years of the century.
Protagoras' avowed agnosticism did not, then, provoke public
outrage or even bring him into ill-repute, and it is worth considering
why not. The answer may lie in his social relativism on matters of
morality (see above); it is probable that among the things which
'seem right and fine for each city' and which therefore
'are so for that city so long as it maintains them'
(*Theaetetus* 167c) are the prescriptions that it is right to honour
the gods by the traditional observances. (The verb *nomizein*,
here translated 'maintain', is regularly used to apply,
among other things, both to religious belief and to ritual practice:
the wording of the accusation against Socrates, that 'he does not
*nomizei* the gods whom the city *nomizei*' implies
that he neither believes in nor worships the gods of the city.) It is
probable, then, that Protagoras was supportive of traditional religious
practice, while the wording of his proclamation of agnosticism does not
even offer a direct challenge to conventional belief. He cannot know
whether or not the gods exist or what they are like; this presumably
(though in the light of Protagorean subjectivism the inference is not
as secure as it would otherwise be) implies that no-one can know these
things, but lack of knowledge is no bar to belief, particularly if that
belief is socially useful, as Protagoras probably thought it was.
Overall, it is likely that Protagoras' position on religious
belief and practice was as conservative as his general social and moral
views. If Xenophon's portrayal of Hippias' moral stance
(see above) is historically accurate, then he held a deeply traditional
view of the gods as authors of the unwritten law.


## 4. Other sophists




At *Apology* 19e-20c Plato represents Socrates as naming
four individuals who undertake to teach or educate people
(*paideuein anthropous*) in return for fees; they are
Gorgias (from Leontinoi in Sicily), Hippias (from Elis, in the
north-western Peloponnese, Prodicus (from Ceos, off the southern tip
of Attica) and Euenus (from Paros, in the southern Aegean). Of the
four only Euenus is expressly said to teach 'human and political
excellence' (*tes ... aretes ...
anthropines te kai politikes*, i.e., success in the
running of one's life and in public affairs), but the context strongly
suggests that the other three are seen as offering the same kind of
instruction. Euenus is otherwise known chiefly as a poet (though Plato
*Phaedrus* 267a mentions some contributions to rhetorical
theory), and his appearance in this context indicates the continuation
into the sophistic era of the older tradition of the poet as moral
teacher (see above). If Gorgias is included in this context among the
teachers of excellence, there is a difficulty in that at *Meno*
95c Meno, a pupil of Gorgias, says that what he most admires about him
is that not only does he never claim to teach excellence, but that he
makes fun of those who do. Consistently with that, in the dialogue
named after him he begins by claiming that what he has to teach is not
any system of values, but a technique of persuasion, which is in itself
value-free, but is capable of being employed for whatever purposes,
good or bad, are adopted by the person who has mastered it, just as
skill in martial arts can be used for good ends or bad (456a-457c). But
in fact the distinction is not so clear, since Gorgias is readily
induced to agree that a political orator has to know what is right and
wrong, and that he (Gorgias) will teach his pupil those things if he
happens not to know them already (460a-c). Perhaps it is assumed that
normally the pupil will know in advance what is right and wrong, so
Gorgias will not have to teach him that, and can concentrate on the
essential skill of persuasion. But the point of learning to persuade
will be to gain power over others, and thereby to achieve personal and
political success. So Gorgias will rightly be counted among the
teachers of excellence; what is distinctive about his teaching is the
prominence of persuasion in the achievement of excellence. But
persuasion, though central, was not everything. At the opening of the
dialogue (447d-448a) Gorgias claims to be able to answer any question
anyone puts to him, and says that for many years no-one has asked him
anything new, which seems to mean 'asked me any question to which
I didn't already know the answer' (see also *Meno*
70b). Making this claim seems to commit him to the kind of encyclopedic
knowledge which we find Hippias displaying (see below). His extant
writings include display speeches, purportedly in defence of Helen and
Palamedes against charges of treachery (DK 82B11 and 11a); they seem to
be intended partly as examples of stylistic brilliance for its own sake
and partly as demonstration of skill in adversarial argument,
'making the weaker argument the stronger' (see above). In
addition, we have a philosophical essay 'On Non-Being or On
Nature' (DK 82B3), purporting to be a rebuttal of Parmenides, in
which he maintains that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it
could not be known and that if anything could be known it could not be
communicated. Scholarly opinion has been and remains divided as to
whether this was intended as a parody of Eleatic writing or as a
serious piece of philosophy. What can definitely be said is that it
shows some knowledge of Parmenides, that it at least raises serious
philosophical questions, such as the relation of thought to reality and
the possibility of referring to things which do not exist, that no
question which it raises is developed to any significant extent and
that most of its arguments are extremely feeble. It reads like a piece
written by a clever man with no real interest in philosophy, but it is
doubtful whether we shall ever know why he wrote it.




Hippias was above all a polymath. He first appears in the
*Protagoras* (315c) sitting in a professorial chair giving
detailed answers to questions on science generally and astronomy in
particular, and later (318e) Protagoras in effect accuses him of
defrauding his pupils by making them study arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and *mousike* (music and poetry) instead
of concentrating on teaching excellence. In the *Greater
Hippias* (285b-e) he describes how he lectured at Sparta on
genealogy and all aspects of ancient history, and he is variously
reported as lecturing on painting and sculpture, as having developed a
mnemonic technique which enabled him to repeat a list of fifty names
after a single hearing (both DK 86A2 (Philostratus)), and as appearing
at the Olympic Games wearing and carrying nothing which he had not made
himself, down to his signet-ring (*Lesser Hippias* 368b). His
writings included a list of Olympic victors and a work entitled
*Synagoge*, 'Collection' or
'Miscellany', which seems to have been a compendium of
miscellaneous information collected from the poets and other sources,
both Greek and foreign (DK 86B6 (Clement)). At the Olympic Games he
gave speeches on any subject anyone proposed, and like Gorgias,
answered any question anyone put to him (*Lesser Hippias*
363c), and in the same dialogue (346a) he says that since he began
competing (*agonizesthai*) at the games he has never been
beaten. Presumably the competitions were eristic contests (see
above). Like Protagoras and Prodicus he taught the correct use of
language (*Lesser Hippias* 368d), and despite Protagoras'
stricture, he also offered the standard sophistic fare of poetic
exegesis (*Protagoras* 347b, *Lesser Hippias passim*) and
moral and practical instruction (*Greater Hippias*  286a-c). We
saw above that his moral and religious stance was conservative, and
his championing of *phusis* against
*nomos* (see above) is rather an appeal to cosmopolitan elitism
than any kind of challenge to conventional morality. Perhaps more than
any other single person he encapsulates the complexity of the sophistic
phenomenon.




Prodicus' position on religion was discussed earlier. Apart
from it he is best known for his insistence on the correct use of
language (Plato, *Euthydemus* 277e), in particular fine
discriminations of the senses of near-synonyms, a topic in which he
seems to have specialised. Plato gives numerous examples in the
*Protagoras* (especially 337a-c) and in other dialogues (for
details see DK 84A13-18), and Socrates says (*Cratylus* 384b)
that he has attended Prodicus' 'one-drachma' lecture
on names, but was unfortunately unable to afford the full course, for
which the fee was fifty drachmas (a drachma being a day's wage
for a skilled craftsman at this period). He is reported as having had
some interest in natural philosophy, including astronomy (DK 84AI
(Suda), A5 (Aristophanes) and B3 (Galen)), and as having applied his
linguistic theory to medical terminology (DK 84B4 (Galen)). All that
has survived of his writings is a paraphrase by Xenophon
(*Memorabilia* II.1.21-34) of his moral fable of the choice of
Heracles between Virtue and Vice. In this story Heracles is approached
at a cross-road by two female figures representing Virtue and Vice,
each of whom tries to persuade him to follow her by describing the
attractions of a life with her. Both base their appeal on pleasure,
Vice stressing the meretricious allurements of the voluptuous life,
while Virtue offers the genuine and lasting pleasures of the life of
honesty and sobriety, including good reputation and the favor of the
gods, an appeal which wins the day. In contrast to his radical views on
religion, the moral stance expressed here is thoroughly
conventional. (Mayhew 2011 xiv-xvii gives a useful summary of the basics of Prodicus' treatment of language.)



For information on other sophists see Guthrie 1969, ch. 11, and (in
German) Kerferd & Flashar 1998 (secs. 5, Thrasymachus; 8,
Antiphon; and 11, minor sophists).




The major sophists were considerable celebrities, and were active in
public affairs. The *Protagoras* captures the excitement which
they engendered on arriving in a city, the cosmopolitan clientele who
accompanied them and their associations with the rich and powerful.
Some made a great deal of money; Hippias boasts (*Greater
Hippias* 282e) of making, in a single visit to Sicily, more
than a hundred and fifty minas, i.e., fifteen thousand drachmas,
something in the region of thirty years' wages for a skilled
craftsman, and Socrates says (*Meno* 91d) that Protagoras earned
more than ten sculptors, including the celebrated Phidias. Protagoras
drew up the law-code for the foundation of the Athenian colony of
Thurii in 444/3 (Diogenes Laertius IX.50), and Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus and
possibly also Thrasymachus acted as diplomatic representatives of their
respective cities. But their wealth and celebrity status has to be set
against the negative reaction they aroused in those of conservative
views, e.g. Anytus in *Meno* 89e-94e, who saw them (to
a considerable extent unfairly, as we have seen) as subversive of
morality and religion and a bad influence on the young. According to
Plato in the *Apology,* it was that climate of opinion, most
strikingly expressed in Aristophanes' *Clouds*, which had
led eventually to the condemnation of Socrates on grounds of irreligion
and the corruption of the young. Consequently, his rehabilitation of
Socrates leads him to contrast the genuine philosopher with the
sophists, whom he depicts predominantly as charlatans. That hostile
portrait was the historical foundation of the conception of the sophist
as a dishonest argumentative trickster, a conception which remains the
primary sense of the word in modern usage, but which considerably
distorts what can be recovered of the historical reality.