Protagoras · Philosophy
Protagoras was the first professional sophist - a paid teacher who promised to make young men <em>better</em>: more excellent in managing their households and their city. He taught rhetoric, the art of argument on both sides, and the skill of ‘making the weaker argument the stronger,’ claims that made him admired and feared in equal measure.
Protagoras was not only a thinker but the inventor of a profession. He was, the ancient sources agree, the first man to call himself a sophistēs - a ‘sophist,’ a teacher of wisdom - and the first to charge fees, large ones, for his instruction. This was a genuine innovation in fifth-century Greece. The earlier philosophers had been independent sages, aristocrats or recluses who pursued wisdom for its own sake and gathered disciples informally. Protagoras turned the pursuit of wisdom into a marketable service: he travelled from city to city, especially to wealthy, democratic Athens, and offered, for payment, to make young men excellent. His success was spectacular. Plato reports that he earned more from his teaching than the great sculptor Phidias and ten other sculptors combined, and that the ambitious youth of Greece flocked to study with him. He was a celebrity of the mind, received with honour wherever he went.
What exactly did he promise to teach? Not abstract cosmology or mathematics, but something intensely practical: aretē, usually translated ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence,’ understood as the capacity to manage one’s own affairs and the affairs of the city well - to speak persuasively in the assembly and the courts, to deliberate wisely, to rise and lead in a democracy where success depended on the spoken word. In an Athens governed by public debate, where a citizen’s fortune could turn on his ability to argue a case before the assembly or defend himself before a jury, the skills Protagoras offered were the keys to power and advancement. He was, in effect, the first teacher of the art of public life - and the first to grasp that in a democracy, the ability to persuade is the supreme political skill.
At the technical heart of Protagoras’ teaching lay the art of antilogic - arguing on both sides of a question - which followed directly from his principle that ‘on every matter there are two opposed arguments.’ He trained his students to construct a persuasive case for any position, and to construct the opposing case with equal skill. This was a powerful intellectual discipline: to understand a question fully, one must see how it looks from both sides, and to argue effectively in court or assembly, one must anticipate and answer the opposition. The ability to argue any side was, for Protagoras and his defenders, simply the mark of a fully trained mind and an essential tool of fair deliberation - for how can citizens decide wisely unless every measure is argued both for and against before them?
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Protagoras was the first to call himself a sophist and to charge fees for teaching practical excellence ( aretē ) - the skill of managing one’s household and city well, especially through rhetoric and persuasion. He claimed to teach virtue, to argue both sides of any question, and even to ‘make the we…
Leads to Socrates.
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