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Before dawn, an excited young Athenian, Hippocrates, wakes Socrates to take him to meet Protagoras, the most famous of the sophists, the paid teachers of…
Before dawn, an excited young Athenian, Hippocrates, wakes Socrates to take him to meet Protagoras, the most famous of the sophists, the paid teachers of wisdom, who has just arrived in Athens. In the house of the rich Callias, crowded with thinkers, Socrates and Protagoras debate whether virtue can be taught and whether the virtues are many or one, in a lively, sometimes comic contest of argument at the end of which each has, strangely, changed sides.
Context and significance
Plato wrote the dialogue in the early fourth century BC; it is one of his most dramatic, a brilliant picture of Athenian intellectual life, and it includes Protagoras's myth of how Zeus gave human beings shame and justice so that they could live together. Benjamin Jowett's translation, first published in 1871 in his Dialogues of Plato, is used here. Read Gorgias and Meno.
About the author
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was born into an aristocratic family in Athens and became the devoted student of Socrates. After his teacher's trial and execution in 399 BC, he travelled, returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that lasted for centuries and counted Aristotle among its students.
Almost all his writings are dialogues in which Socrates questions his fellow citizens about justice, love, knowledge and the soul, from the Apology to the Symposium and the Republic. Known to Arab philosophers as Aflatun, he was read closely by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, and Western philosophy has been called a series of footnotes to him.