In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Protagoras

  • Introduction
  • Collections of Essays
  • Protagoras’s Life and Career
  • Protagoras the “Sophist”
  • Protagoras’s Writing and Books
  • Protagoras as a Teacher
  • Protagorean Wisdom
  • Protagoras and Technê
  • Protagoras and Language
  • Protagoras and Religion
  • Protagoras’s Ethical and Political Theory (in Plato’s Protagoras)
  • Protagoras on Justice and Politeia
  • Protagoras and Democritus
  • The New Fragment in Didymus the Blind

Classics Protagoras
by
Mi-Kyoung Lee
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0424

Introduction

Protagoras of Abdera was the most important and famous of the Greek Sophists of the fifth century BCE. Though it is difficult to establish his dates with certainty, given the unreliable state of the doxographic tradition for pre-Platonic philosophers, it seems that Protagoras lived from c. 492 to 421 BCE, making him about twenty years older than Socrates. Plato says in the Meno (91de = DK 80A8) that Protagoras was famous throughout Greece for forty years, and that he was seventy when he died. It is a tribute to Protagoras that Plato singled him out for repeated treatment and discussion in his dialogues—in particular, the Protagoras, the Theaetetus, and, to a lesser extent, the Sophist. Protagoras is known for his declaration of a human-centered philosophy (“man is the measure of all things”), for his skepticism or agnosticism about the gods, for his defense of democratic institutions, for his interest in language and logos, and for his formidable skill in argumentation, rivaling Socrates when it came to debate. Because so few fragments and ipsissima verba of Protagoras’s writings remain, we have to rely on testimony from a variety of sources, some more friendly than others. Plato is the most important of these, and as a consequence, much of the scholarly literature on Protagoras is literature on Plato as well; this entry will include many papers and books on Plato’s Protagoras and Theaetetus that are particularly relevant to the historical Protagoras. As to whether Plato is reliable, questions of source criticism unfortunately arise everywhere, not just with Plato, when it comes to Protagoras and the other Sophists, and those are dealt with in much of the scholarship on Protagoras and our sources for his thinking.

General Overviews

Many of the best overviews of Protagoras can be found in books and articles on the Sophists in general, most of which contain a section or chapter on individual Sophists like Protagoras. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “The Sophists.” Early on, scholars recognized that the critical and occasionally hostile discussion of the Sophists contained in Plato needed to be handled with care—two influential attempts to “rehabilitate” the Sophists are Hegel 2006 and Grote 1969. Two of the most valuable scholarly treatments of the Sophists are contained in Guthrie 1969 and Kerferd 1981. De Romilly 1992 is a seminal work by a historian of classical Athens on the contributions of the Sophists to the intellectual enlightenment of the fifth century BCE (see also, more recently, Billings 2023). Three of the best introductions to Protagoras can be found in the following recent treatments of the Sophists, in order of length: Barney 2006, Bonazzi 2020a, Bonazzi 2020b.

  • Barney, Rachel. 2006. The Sophistic movement. In A companion to ancient philosophy. Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin, 77–97. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    DOI: 10.1111/b.9780631210610.2006.00010.x

    A lively and philosophically informative introduction to the Sophists.

  • Billings, Joshua. 2023. The Sophists in the fifth-century enlightenment. In Cambridge companion to the Sophists. Edited by Christopher Moore and Joshua Billings, 124–156. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    Defends the idea that the Sophistic culture of the fifth century BCE can be characterized by the term “enlightenment.”

  • Bonazzi, Mauro. 2020a. Protagoras. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ.

    Excellent introduction to Protagoras, with an overview of all the main topics and issues.

  • Bonazzi, Mauro. 2020b. The Sophists. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    A short 156-page introduction to the Sophists, organized thematically like Kerferd’s The Sophistic Movement. Protagoras is discussed extensively throughout; it discusses recent literature since 1981. Translation and update of Bonazzi’s I sofisti, 2d ed. (Rome: Carocci 2013).

  • de Romilly, Jacqueline. 1992. The great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198242345.001.0001

    Argues for the historical and cultural importance of the Sophists in 5th-century Athens. Originally Les Grands Sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périklès (Paris: Fallois, 1988).

  • Grote, G. 1969. A history of Greece. 2d ed. London.

    Chapter 67 presents a powerful defense of the Sophists as liberal and progressive thinkers and teachers of the Greek enlightenment. Originally published in 1846–1856.

  • Guthrie, W. K. C. 1969. History of Greek philosophy. Vol. 3, The fifth-century enlightenment, Part 1. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    Chapter 3, “What Is a Sophist?” is still an excellent introduction to the question of who the Sophists were, what kind of professionals they were, and the meaning of the label “Sophist.” Also published separately as The Sophists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press 1971).

  • Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2006. Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6. Edited by Robert F. Brown. Translated by J. M. Stewart, H. S. Harris, and Robert F. Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Originally published in German in 1833–36. See pp. 111–123 on the Sophists and Protagoras in particular.

  • Kerferd, G. B. 1981. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    Landmark treatment of the Sophists by topic—Protagoras is discussed throughout. Early chapters deal with topics such as “The Sophists as a Social Phenomenon” and “The Meaning of the Term Sophist”; later chapters deal with specific areas, such as “Dialectic, Antilogic and Eristic,” “The Theory of Language,” etc., which are excellent starting points for further study.

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