Protagoras (PDF)

10 PRoTAGoIs I 316b—317c 11
22 So when we were inside and had spent a little more
aeschrus.
b time looking at everything, we went up to Protagoras, and
I said, “Protagoras, Hippocrates here and I have come to
see you.”
“Do you want to talk with me alone or with others present?”
he said.
“It doesn’t make any difference to us,” I said. “Listen to what
we’ve come for, and decide for yourself.”
“Well, then, what have you come for?” he asked.
“Hippocrates is from here, a son of Apollodoros and a mem
c ber of a great and well-to-do family. His own natural ability
ranks him with the best of anyone his age. It’s my impression
that he wants to be a man of respect in the city, and he thinks
this is most likely to happen if he associates himself with you.
So now you must decide. Should we talk about this alone or in
the presence of others?”
“Your discretion on my behalf is appropriate, Socrates. Cau
tion is in order for a foreigner who goes into the great cities and
tries to persuade the best of the young men in them to abandon
d their associations with others, relatives and acquaintances,
young and old alike, and to associate with him instead on the
grounds that they will be improved by this association. Jealousy,
hostility, and intrigue on a large scale are aroused by such ac
tivity. Now, I maintain that the sophist art is an ancient one,
but that the men who practiced it in ancient times, fearing the
odium attached to it, disguised it, masking it sometimes as po
24 did, or as mystery
26 and, in our own time, Herodicus of Selymbria (orig
entum
inally of Megara), as great a sophist as any. Your own Agatho
27 a great sophist, used music as a front, as did Pythocleides
des,
23 and Simonides
etry, as Homer and Hesiod
25 and
religions and prophecy, witness Orpheus and Musaeus,
e occasionally, I’ve noticed, even as athletics, as with Iccus of Tar
22. Critias (c. 460-403), Athenian and cousin to Platos mother. Critias was an
accomplished intellectual and writer of prose and poetry. Like Charmides, he
was a leader in the oligarchic tyranny of 404 and was killed in the restoration of
the democracy of 403. Critias has a major role in Plato’s Char,nides, and Plato
named a dialogue after him.
23. Hesiod was a didactic poet active in the eighth century B.C. His two princi
pal works, Theogony and Works and Days, were fundamental texts in Greek
education and culture. Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks
their gods.
24. Simomdes (c. 556—468 B.C.): a lyric and elegiac poet best known now for his
epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae.
25. Orpheus and Musaeus, two names associated with religious cults and prac
tices at this period. Musaeus is considered to be wholly mythical. Orpheus,
of Ceos, and many others. All of them, as I say, used these
various arts as screens out of fear of ill will. And this is where I
part company with them all, for I do not believe that they ac
complished their end; I believe they failed, in fact, to conceal
from the powerful men in the cities the true purpose of their
disguises. The masses, needless to say, perceive nothing, but
merely sing the tune their leaders announce. Now, for a runa
way not to succeed in running away, but to be caught in the
open, is sheer folly from the start and inevitably makes men
even more hostile than they were before, for on top of every
thing else they perceive him as a real rogue. So I have come
down the completely opposite road. I admit that I am a sophist
and that I educate men, and consider this admission be I to a
better precaution than denial. And have given thought other
I to
precautions as well, so as to avoid, God willing, suffering any ill
from admitting I am a sophist. I have been in the profession
many years now, and I’m old enough to be the father of any of
perhaps historical, perhaps only mythical, was the famed singer whose beloved
wife Eurydice died from the bite of a snake. Orpheus went to the underworld
and pleaded with its ruler to allow her to live again. He was granted his plea on
the condition that as he left Hades he would not turn around to look at her. He
was unable to keep his promise and thence lost her forever, to his despair.
Another tradition was that Orpheus was torn limb from limb by Thracian
women (maenads) in a Dionysiac frenzy; yet despite this, he still lived, his
severed ragged head floating down the rivei singing forever sweetly.
These stories contributed to a religious cult tradition involving a cluster of
beliefs, among the most prominent of which were the following: the soul was
valued over the body; the body was considered as the tomb or prison of the
soul; the killing of animals for food was considered as an unclean practice; such
killing was also proscribed due to belief in transmigration of souls, including the
souls of animals; and undergoing rites of purification (including practices of
intellectual discipline) was urged for the sake of securing the good opinion of
the gods and a happy existence for the soul after the separation from the body
at death. These beliefs were associated also with the gods Apollo and Dionysus,
as well as with the sixth-century philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras.
Plato is perhaps the first and most reliable source of information about the
beliefs of these cults, and he refers (favorably) to some of their doctrines in two
of his dialogues, Meno and Phaedo.
26. Iccus, a sixth-century-B.C. athlete and trainer of athletes from southern Italy;
Herodicus, also a famous athletic trainer, who was a physician as well.
27. Agathocles and Pythocleides, prominent musicians and music teachers.
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b
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