Protagoras Study Resources

Protagoras THE major pre-Socratic doctrines that we have been discussing were met, in the later part of the fifth century, by a skeptical movement, in which the most prominent person was Protagoras, head of the Sophists. The name “Sophist” had originally no pejorative connotation; it signified, as closely as may be, what we mean by “professor.” A Sophist was a man who made his living by teaching young men certain things that, it was thought, would be valuable to them, in practical life. As there was no governmental provision for such education, the Sophists taught only those who had private resources, or whose parents had. This tended to give them a certain class bias, which was enhanced by the political realities of the moment. In Athens and many other towns, democracy was politically successful, but little had been done to lessen the riches of individuals who belonged to the ancient aristocratic families. It was, in the main, the affluent who personified what looks to us as Hellenic culture: they had education and leisure, travel had taken the edge off their old biases, and the time that they spent in conversation sharpened their minds. What was termed democracy did not disturb the system of slavery, which permitted the affluent to enjoy their money without oppressing free citizens. In many towns, however, and notably in Athens, the poorer inhabitants had against the affluent a twin enmity, that of envy, and that of traditionalism. The affluent were supposed—often with justification —to be impious and immoral; they were corrupting traditional ideals, and perhaps seeking to’ undermine democracy. It thus happened that political democracy was connected with cultural conservatism, while those who were cultural innovators tended to be political reactionaries. Somewhat the same position occurs in modern America, where Tammany, as a largely Catholic institution, is dedicated in defending old religious and ethical dogmas against the attacks of enlightenment. But the enlightened are politically weaker in America than they were in Athens, since they have failed to make common cause with the plutocracy. There is, however, one major and highly intelligent class which is preoccupied with the protection of the plutocracy, notably the class of company attorneys. at some areas, their tasks are comparable to those that were done at Athens by the Sophists. Athenian democracy, though it had the grave constraint of not incorporating slaves or women, was in some aspects more democratic than any modern form. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for brief periods; they were therefore typical citizens, like our jurymen, with the biases and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens. In general, there were a considerable number of judges to hear each case. The plaintiff and defendant, or prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not via professional attorneys. Naturally, success or failure hinged mainly on oratorical talent in appealing to common biases. Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he might hire an expert to compose the speech for him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for education in the arts essential for success in the law courts. These arts the Sophists were meant to teach. The period of Pericles is equivalent, in Athenian history, to the Victorian age in the history of England. Athens was affluent and strong, not greatly plagued by conflicts, and possessed of a democratic constitution controlled by aristocrats. As we have seen in connection with Anaxagoras, a democratic opposition to Pericles steadily gathered power, and attacked his allies one by one. The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 B.C.; * Athens (in common with many other towns) was destroyed by the plague; the population, which had been around 230,000, was substantially reduced, and never returned again to its previous level (Bury, History of Greece, I, p. 444). Pericles himself, in 430 B.C., was ousted from the post of general and penalized for theft of public money by a court consisted of 1501 judges. His two sons perished in the plague, and he himself died in the following year (429). Pheidias and Anaxagoras were sentenced; Aspasia was tried for impiety and for having a disorderly home, but acquitted. In such a community, it was inevitable that persons who were likely to incur the animosity of democratic politicians might seek to acquire forensic expertise. For Athens, though greatly addicted to persecution, was in one regard less illiberal than modern America, since those accused of impiety and corrupting the young were permitted to plead in their own defence. This explains the popularity of the Sophists with one class and their disfavor with another. But in their own minds they served more impersonal objectives, and it is apparent that many of them were sincerely interested with philosophy. Plato committed himself to caricaturing and vilifying them, but they must not be evaluated by his polemics. In a lighter mood, take the following excerpt from the Euthydemus, in which two Sophists, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus, begin to work to confound a simple minded person named Clesippus. Dionysodorus begins: You say that you have a dog? Yes, a villain of a one, remarked Clesippus. And he has puppies? Yes, and they are quite like himself. And the dog is the father of them? Yes, he responded, I surely saw him and the mother of the puppies come together. And is he not yours? To make sure he is. Then he is a father, and he is yours; thus, he is your father, and the pups are your brothers. In a more serious spirit, take the discussion dubbed The Sophist. This is a logical discussion on definition, which employs the sophist as an illustration. With its logic we are not at present concerned; the only thing I wish to mention at the moment as regards this dialogue is the final conclusion: “He, then, who traces the pedigree of his (the Sophist’s) art as follows—who, belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of imagemaking into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine—any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth.” There is a story about Protagoras, no doubt apocryphal, which illustrates the connection of the Sophists with the law-courts in the popular mind. It is reported that he taught a young man on the grounds that he should be paid his fee if the young man won his first law-suit, but not otherwise, and that the young man’s first lawsuit was one initiated by Protagoras for recovery of his money. However, it is time to leave these preliminaries and explore what is genuinely known about Protagoras. Protagoras was born approximately 500 B.C., at Abdera, the place from where Democritus came. He twice visited Athens, his second visit being not later than 432 B.C. He wrote a system of laws for the city of Thurii in 444-3 B.C. There is a tradition that he was prosecuted for impiety, but this seems to be untrue, in spite of the fact that he wrote a book On the Gods, which began: “With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.” His second visit to Athens is described somewhat satirically in Plato’s Protagoras, and his doctrines are discussed seriously in the Theaetetus. He is chiefly noted for his doctrine that “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.” This is interpreted as meaning that each man is the measure of all things, and that, when men differ, there is no objective truth in virtue of which one is right and the other wrong. The philosophy is inherently skeptical, and is apparently founded on the “deceitfulness” of the senses. One of the three founders of pragmatism, F.C.S. Schiller, was in the habit of calling himself a follower of Protagoras. This was, I assume, because Plato, in the Theaetetus, implies, as an interpretation of Protagoras, that one view might be better than another, while it cannot be truer. For example, when a guy gets jaundice everything seems yellow. There is no sense in claiming that things are truly not yellow, but the color they seem to a guy in health; we may add, however, that, as health is better than sickness, the view of the man in health is better than that of the man who has jaundice. This frame of view, clearly, is related to pragmatism. The unbelief in objective truth makes the majority, for practical purposes, the arbiters as to what to believe. Hence Protagoras was driven to a defence of law and convention and old morality. While, as we saw, he did not know whether the gods existed, he was confident they were to be worshipped. This point of view is certainly the proper one for a man whose theoretical skepticism is thoroughgoing and logical. Protagoras spent his adult life on a sort of permanent lecture tour across the towns of Greece, educating, for a price, “any one who desired practical efficiency and higher mental culture” (Zeller, p. 1299). Plato objects—somewhat snobbishly, according to current notions—to the Sophists’ practice of charging money for education. Plato himself had enough private means, and was unable, evidently, to grasp the requirements of people who had not his good fortune. It is remarkable that current academics, who see no reason to refuse a pay, have so repeatedly echoed Plato’s strictures. There was, however, another aspect in which the Sophists differed from other current philosophers. It was usual, except among the Sophists, for a teacher to found a school, which had some of the properties of a brotherhood; there was a greater or smaller amount of common life, there was often something analogous to a monastic rule, and there was usually an esoteric doctrine not proclaimed to the public. All this was inevitable wherever philosophy had grown out of Orphism. Among the Sophists there was none of this. What they had to teach was not, in their eyes, related with religion or virtue. They taught the skill of debating, and as much information as would aid in this art. Broadly speaking, they were prepared, like contemporary attorneys, to explain how to argue for or against any position, and were not anxious to propose conclusions of their own. Those to whom philosophy was a way of life, inextricably mixed up with religion, were understandably appalled; to them, the Sophists were frivolous and immoral. To some extent—though it is hard to determine how far—the odium which the Sophists incurred, not only with the general people, but with Plato and succeeding thinkers, was owing to their intellectual superiority. The search of truth, when it is whole hearted, must reject moral concerns; we cannot know in advance that the truth will turn out to be what is regarded edifying in a particular community. The Sophists were willing to pursue an argument wherever it would take them. Often it drove them to skepticism. One of them, Gorgias, contended that nothing exists; that if anything exists, it is unknown; that granted it even to exist and to be knowable by any one man, he could never impart it to others. We do not know what his arguments were, but I can well imagine that they had a logical force which compelled his opponents to take refuge in edification. Plato is constantly concerned to support beliefs that would make people what he deems virtuous; he is virtually ever intellectually honest, since he permits himself to measure doctrines by their social implications. Ever about this, he is not honest; he claims to follow the argument and to be evaluating by simply theoretical criteria, whereas in fact he is manipulating the topic so as to lead to a virtuous outcome. He introduced this fault into philosophy, where it has flourished ever since. It was probably primarily hatred to the Sophists that gave this aspect to his discussions. One of the flaws of all philosophers since Plato is that their studies into ethics commence on the premise that they already know the conclusions to be reached. It seems that there were persons, in the Athens of the late fifth century, who preached political beliefs which sounded immoral to their contemporaries, and seem so to the democratic countries of the current day. Thrasymachus, in the first book of the Republic, argues that there is no justice but the interest of the stronger; that laws are formed by governments for their own profit; and that there is no impersonal standard to which to resort in conflicts for power. Callicles, according to Plato (in the Gorgias), advocated a similar doctrine. The law of nature, he remarked, is the law of the stronger; but for convenience mankind have constructed institutions and moral precepts to constrain the strong. Such theories have achieved far greater support in our day than they did in antiquity. And whatever may be thought of them, they are not indicative of the Sophists. During the fifth century—whatever influence the Sophists may have played in the change—there occurred at Athens a transition from a certain stiff Puritan simplicity to a quick-witted and rather brutal cynicism in struggle with a slow-witted and equally ruthless defence of decaying orthodoxy. At the beginning of the century comes the Athenian championship of the towns of Ionia against the Persians, and the triumph at Marathon in 490 B.C. At the conclusion comes the defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 B.C., and the death of Socrates in 399 B.C. After this period Athens ceased to be politically powerful, but earned unquestionable cultural superiority, which it kept until the victory of Christianity. Something of the history of fifth-century Athens is vital to the understanding of Plato and of all subsequent Greek ideas. In the first Persian war, the greatest honor went to the Athenians, thanks to the decisive victory at Marathon. In the second battle, ten years later, the Athenians still were the greatest of the Greeks at sea, but on land success was primarily owing to the Spartans, who were the acknowledged leaders of the Hellenic world. The Spartans, however, were strictly provincial in their vision, and ceased to fight the Persians when they had been forced out of European Greece. The advocacy of the Asiatic Greeks, and the rescue of the islands that had been seized by the Persians, was undertaken, with great success, by Athens. Athens became the major naval power, and achieved a large imperialist influence over the Ionian islands. Under the leadership of Pericles, who was a moderate democrat and a moderate imperialist, Athens thrived. The enormous temples, whose ruins are now the glory of Athens, were erected under his initiative, to replace those destroyed by Xerxes. The city developed extremely fast in riches, and also in culture, and, as often happened at such periods, particularly when prosperity is attributable to foreign business, conventional morals and traditional beliefs faded. There was at this period in Athens an extremely great number of persons of intellect. The three great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all belong to the fifth century. Aeschylus fought at Marathon and watched the battle of Salamis. Sophocles was still religiously orthodox. But Euripides was influenced by Protagoras and by the free-thinking atmosphere of the time, and his interpretation of the stories is skeptical and subversive. Aristophanes, the comedic poet, poked fun of Socrates, Sophists, and philosophers, but yet belonged to their company; in the Symposium Plato describes him as on extremely friendly terms with Socrates. Pheidias the sculptor, as we have seen, belonged to the circle of Pericles. The excellence of Athens, during this age, was artistic rather than intellectual. None of the famous mathematicians or philosophers of the fifth century were Athenians, with the exception of Socrates; and Socrates was not a writer, but a man who devoted himself to oral conversation. The commencement of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. and the death of Pericles in 429 B.C. introduced a darker phase in Athenian history. The Athenians were powerful at sea, but the Spartans held superiority on latid, and regularly invaded Attica (save Athens) throughout the summer. The upshot was that Athens was overcrowded, and suffered greatly from the plague. In 414 B.C. the Athenians despatched a massive expedition to Sicily, with the aim of taking Syracuse, which was allied with Sparta; however the venture was a disaster. War made the Athenians furious and persecuting. In 416 B.C. they captured the island of Melos, put to death all males of military age, and enslaved the rest residents. The Trojan Women of Euripides is a protest against such savagery. The struggle had an ideological side, as Sparta was the defender of oligarchy and Athens of democracy. The Athenians had grounds to accuse some of their own aristocracy of treason, which was generally regarded to have had a part in the decisive naval loss in the battle of Aegospotami in 405 B.C. At the end of the conflict, the Spartans installed in Athens an oligarchial administration, known as the Thirty Tyrants. Some of the Thirty, notably Critias, their head, had been disciples of Socrates. They were rightfully unpopular, and were deposed within a year. With the acquiescence of Sparta, democracy was restored, but it was an embittered democracy, prevented by an amnesty from direct revenge against its internal adversaries, but eager of any excuse, not covered by the amnesty, for prosecuting them. It was in this climate that the trial and death of Socrates took place (399 B.C.). * Arithmetic and some geometry existed among the Egyptians and Babylonians, although mostly in the form of rules of thumb. Deductive reasoning from universal premisses was a Greek invention. * Diana was the Latin equivalent of Artemis. It is Artemis who is referenced in the Greek Testament while our translation talks of Diana. * She has a male twin or consort, the “Master of Animals,” although he is less famous. It was at a later era that Artemis was linked with the Great Mother of Asia Minor. * See The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion by Martin P. Nilsson, p. IIff. * See P. N. Ure, The Origin of Tyranny. * For instance, “Gimel,” the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, means “camel,” and the sign for it is a conventionalized representation of a camel. † Beloch, Griechísche Geschichte, Chap. XII. † Rostovtseff, History of the Ancient World, Vol. I, p. 399. * Five Stages of Greek Religion, p. 67. * Primitive Culture in Greece, H. J. Rose, 1925, p. 193. * Zoroaster’s date, however, is quite conjectural. Some place it as early as 1000 B.C. See Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. IV, p. 207. † As a result of the loss of Athens by Sparta, the Persians recaptured the whole coast of Asia Minor, to which their right was acknowledged in the Peace of Antalcidas (387-86 B.C.). About fifty years later, they were absorbed in Alexander’s kingdom. * Rose, Primitive Greece, p. 65 ff. † J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena for the Study of Greek Religion, p. 651. * I mean mental intoxication, not drunkenness by drink. * The verse translations in this chapter are by Professor Gilbert Murray. * Mystically connected with Bacchus. † One of the various names of Bacchus. * Rostovtseff, History of the Ancient World, Vol. I, p. 204. * Burnet (Early Greek Philosophy, p. 51) doubts this final phrase. * The Greek cities of Sicily were under danger from the Carthaginians, but in Italy this danger was not thought to be immediate. * Aristotle claims of him that he “first worked at mathematics and arithmetic, and afterwards, at one time, condescended to the wonder-working practised by Pherecydes.” † Clown: What is the view of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl? Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam could haply inhabit a bird. Clown: What thinkest thou about his opinion? Malvolio : I believe nobly of the soul, and no manner endorse his opinion. Clown: Fare thee well; dwell thou yet in darkness: thou shall accept the view of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy brains. (Twelfth Night) * Quoted from Burner’s Early Greek Philosophy. † Cornford, op. cit., p. 201. * Early Greek Philosophy, p. 108. * But not by Euclid. See Heath, Greek Mathematics. The foregoing proof was presumably known to Plato. † was replaced by Franklin for Jefferson’s “sacred and undeniable.” * Quoted from Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, Oxford, 1913, p. 121. * Cornford, op. cit. (p. 184), underlines this, I think properly. Heraclitus is often misinterpreted via being assimilated to other Ionians. * But cf. “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are, and are not.” * Burnet’s note: “The meaning, I think, is this…. There can be no thinking matching to a name that is not the name of anything real.” * It does not appear who “they” are, but one may assume that they are those who have preserved purity. * Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, reckons that he flourished circa 430 B.C. maybe a little early. * From Thaïes to Plato, p. 193. † Greek Mathematics, Vol. I, p. 176. † On Generation and Corruption, 326 a. * This view is endorsed by Burnet, and also, as least as concerns Leucippus, by Bailey (op. cit. p. 83). * See Bailey, op. cit., p. 121, on the determinism of Democritus. * On the logical and mathematical bases for the doctrines of the atomists, see Gaston Milhaud, Les Philosophes Géomètres de la Grèce, Ch. IV. * On Generation and Corruption, 325 a. * Bailey (op. cit. p. 75) contends, on the contrary, that Leucippus had a solution, which was “extremely subtle.” It consisted simply in accepting the presence of something (the void) which was not physical. Similarly Burnet says: “It is a curious fact that the Atomists, who are commonly regarded as the great materialists of antiquity, were actually the first to say distinctly that a thing might be real without being a body.” * On the way in which this was supposed to happen, see Bailey, op. cit., p. 138 ff. * “Poverty in a democracy is as much to be preferred to what is called prosperity under despots as freedom is to slavery,” he argues. * It ended in 404 B.C. with the complete overthrow of Athens.