Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates

By Robert C. Bartlett

One of the central challenges to contemporary political philosophy is the apparent impossibility of arriving at any commonly agreed upon “truths.” As Nietzsche observed in his Will to Power, the currents of relativism that have come to characterize modern thought can be said to have been born with ancient sophistry. If we seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary radical relativism, we must therefore look first to the sophists of antiquity—the most famous and challenging of whom is Protagoras.

With Sophistry and Political Philosophy, Robert C. Bartlett provides the first close reading of Plato’s two-part presentation of Protagoras. In the “Protagoras,” Plato sets out the sophist’s moral and political teachings, while the “Theaetetus,” offers a distillation of his theoretical and epistemological arguments. Taken together, the two dialogues demonstrate that Protagoras is attracted to one aspect of conventional morality—the nobility of courage, which in turn is connected to piety. This insight leads Bartlett to a consideration of the similarities and differences in the relationship of political philosophy and sophistry to pious faith. Bartlett’s superb exegesis offers a significant tool for understanding the history of philosophy, but, in tracing Socrates’s response to Protagoras’ teachings, Bartlett also builds toward a richer understanding of both ancient sophistry and what Socrates meant by “political philosophy.”
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226394312

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SOPHISTRY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

SOPHISTRY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates

ROBERT C. BARTLETT

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2016

Paperback edition 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39428-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63969-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39431-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226394312.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bartlett, Robert C., 1964–author.

Title: Sophistry and political philosophy : Protagoras’ challenge to Socrates / Robert C. Bartlett.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: lccn 2016002819| ISBN 9780226394282 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226394312 (e-book)

Subjects: lcsh: Plato. Protagoras. | Plato. Theaetetus. | Sophists (Greek philosophy) | Protagoras. | Political science—Philosophy. | Philosophy, Ancient.

Classification: LCC B382.B37 2016 | DDC 184—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002819

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: On the Protagoras

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two: On the Theaetetus (142a1–183c7)

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

INTRODUCTION

Political philosophy appears to have been supplanted in our time by the study of the history of political philosophy, on the one hand, and by self-described sophistry, on the other.¹ The laborious cataloguing of the thought of past masters or the creation of new discourses (narratives) that support a given moral-political agenda but expressly reject any claim to have discovered the eternal truth or to rest on any rock-solid metaphysical foundation—these seem to be the only serious alternatives available at present to a student of political thought. And sophistry may well be the weightier of them, for its practitioners—antifoundationalists, postmodernists of various stripes—are still sufficiently moved by their concern for the eternal truth to acknowledge fully and frankly that they can discern no such thing in the world. As for the historians, while understandably absorbed by the task of arriving at accurate interpretations of the books under study, they too often fail to ask whether those books are, as they claim to be, true.

The presence, and the challenge, of sophistry in our time indicates the need to understand it as precisely as possible. This difficult task is made somewhat easier by the fact that it is hardly a newcomer to the world. In addition to its appearance at the senescence of political philosophy, sophistry was also present at its birth or in its youth. This is so at least inasmuch as Socrates is famous, in the pages of Xenophon and Plato, for his confrontations with the sophists; and it is Socrates who is credited with founding what has come to be called political philosophy, because he was the first to have called philosophy down from the heaven and placed it in the cities and introduced it also into households and compelled it to inquire into life and mores and things good and bad (Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.4.10–11). What is more, sophistry was subjected in the time of Socrates to painstaking analysis, above all by Plato; the peculiar accomplishment of Socrates, his altogether new approach to understanding moral and political life, is contrasted in the dialogues of Plato not least with the activity of the sophists. Since Plato chose never to present the mature Socrates in conversation with another philosopher, Socrates’ encounters with the sophists are the closest thing we have to his engagement with his equals or peers, as distinguished from more or less promising youths. To begin to grapple with the phenomenon of sophistry, then, we put ourselves entirely under Plato’s tutelage. This means, among other things, that we do not seek to uncover the real or historical practice of sophistry apart from the information Plato himself thought it fit for us to have. For even if Plato should prove to have an ax to grind against sophistry or to be biased, we could not judge the worth of his case, for or against, without first seeing it as he intended it.

There are six Platonic writings that most obviously investigate sophists or sophistry and that would have to be treated in a comprehensive account of Plato’s understanding of sophistry: Protagoras, Theaetetus, Sophist, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and Euthydemus. Because a complete interpretation of all of these dialogues is well beyond the scope of the present study, which is necessarily introductory, some principle of selection is needed. A survey of the evidence suggests that, according to Plato, Protagoras is the sophist, at once the greatest and the most revealing embodiment of the type. The Euthydemus presents the comic displays of the brothers Dionysodorus and Euthydemus that are so outrageous as to be, at least to begin with, an obstacle rather than an aid to taking sophistry seriously. As for Hippias, who compares himself—favorably—to Protagoras as a sophist (Greater Hippias 282d6–e8), he proves to be a much less serious thinker than Protagoras; he is in his own way a comic figure. The Sophist is by no means a comedy, but it presents the Eleatic Stranger’s thoughts on the matter of sophistry, as distinguished from those of Socrates, and no sophist properly speaking appears there. The Sophist is in any event the sequel to the Theaetetus and so requires prior knowledge of it. The Theaetetus does deserve our attention, for it turns out that approximately half of it is devoted to Protagoras’ understanding of knowledge. It is thus of fundamental importance. But it too is a sort of sequel: it is set well after and presupposes familiarity with the Protagoras, which one may call the Platonic dialogue treating the sophist.

The present study, then, offers an exegesis of the whole of the Protagoras² before turning to consider the Theaetetus,³ from the beginning of it through to the conclusion of its extended consideration of the thought, the logos, of Protagoras (Theaetetus 142a1–183c7). Hence the present study is itself an exercise in the history of political philosophy. Yet it is undertaken in the hope that it may contribute not only to an adequate assessment of ancient sophistry but also, and by way of contrast, to a correct understanding of the achievement of Socrates or of the meaning of political philosophy as founded by him. Only once we achieve such an understanding could we consider eventually the possibility of political philosophy today. Perhaps the greatest observer of modern times, Friedrich Nietzsche, has discerned a kinship between the radical sophistry of antiquity and the moral-epistemologicalrelativism so characteristic of our era, which has evidently rendered impossible the practice of political philosophy understood as the attempt to grasp the (eternal) truths of moral-political life or its permanent questions. Nietzsche has discerned, in other words, a link between our reigning categories of thought and ancient sophistry as exemplified especially by Protagoras: Our contemporary way of thinking is to a great extent Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean: it suffices to say it is Protagorean, because Protagoras represented a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus (Nietzsche, Will to Power #428 = Nietzsche 1968, 233).

Because we are not in a position to grasp this kinship fully, the present study is limited to analyzing, as a necessary preliminary thereto, the evidence judged by Plato to be most important concerning Protagoras, [b]y far the most famous sophist of antiquity (Kerferd 1981, 42) and the senior and most celebrated member of the profession (Barney 2006, 78).⁴ This preliminary task is essential in part because the evidence in question has generally been treated either condescendingly or naïvely. It is not enough to say, for example, that sophistic teaching aimed, [b]y its very principle, at practical success or at opening careers in public speaking to all; we suspect that we are not yet at the heart of things if the intellectual content of ancient sophistry is understood to have consisted in a wisdom and experience born of the art of properly conducting one’s thoughts—that is, of knowing how, by means of arguments, to analyze a situation (Romilly 1988, 23–24). More helpful, once again, is the trenchant observation of Nietzsche in opposition to the scholar most responsible for the modern rehabilitation of sophistry, George Grote: "[T]he sophists verge upon the first critique of morality, the first insight into morality:—they juxtapose the multiplicity (the geographical relativity) of the moral value judgments;—they let it be known that every morality can be dialectically justified; i.e., they divine that all attempts to give reasons for morality are necessarily sophistical" (Will to Power #428, emphasis in original).⁵

This study seeks to uncover what lies at the heart of Protagoras’ teaching in both its moral-political and its theoretical concerns. It seeks to uncover also what Socrates, in responding to that teaching, begins to reveal of his own understanding and characteristic activity. However much respect each man proves to have for the other—and they clearly do respect one another—they lead manifestly different lives. In the case of thinkers of so high a rank, the difference in ways of life is a sure indication of a difference also in the understanding of things of fundamental importance (consider Aristotle Metaphysics 1004b24–25 and context). Our inquiry into sophistry, then, may help us begin to understand the phenomenon of philosophy as Socrates lived it.

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Portions of the interpretation offered here found their first expression in two previously published writings: "Political Philosophy and Sophistry: An Introduction to Plato’s Protagoras" (in American Journal of Political Science 47 [4; October 2003]: 612–24) and Sophistry as a Way of Life (in Political Philosophy Cross-Examined, ed. Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], pp. 5–16). I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation and its officers, especially Montgomery Brown, for a summer research grant that permitted me the freedom to complete this study. I am indebted to my colleagues at Boston College—among them Alice Behnegar, Nasser Behnegar, Robert Faulkner, Christopher Kelly, and Susan Shell—for their invaluable aid and encouragement. With his customary good grace and generosity, Eric Buzzetti read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. Finally, I thank the Behrakis family for their philanthropic generosity that has made it possible for me to hold the Behrakis Professorship in Hellenic Political Studies at Boston College.

PART ONE

On the Protagoras

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction to the Protagoras

Of the thirty-five dialogues that have been handed down to us as Plato’s, the overwhelming majority—thirty—are performed dialogues in which two or more characters address each other directly, as in the text of a play. The remaining five dialogues are narrated either by Socrates (Republic, Lysis, Lovers, and Charmides) or by another (Parmenides). Yet this simple division into performed and narrated is misleading. Some of the so-called performed dialogues, in fact, feature only a performed beginning or frame that gives way to the narration of a single character, a sort of hybrid case. The Protagoras is one of these hybrids—as is, in a somewhat different way, the trilogy of which the Theaetetus forms the first part: the performed section with which the Theaetetus begins soon gives way to the narration of a single character, who reads aloud what has been written down as a series of dialogic exchanges in direct discourse.¹ (The other hybrids are Symposium, Euthydemus, and Phaedo, and perhaps also the Menexenus.) The first and most obvious puzzle that confronts the reader of the Protagoras is surely this: what is Plato’s intention in adding this brief performed section to Socrates’ extensive narration of the conversation he has just had—a conversation that is manifestly the core of the Protagoras and in comparison with which the opening exchanges may well seem slight or trivial? This brief scene, which takes place, as it were, before our very eyes, must add to our understanding of the long and complex conversation that succeeds it. In what sense, then, is this the appropriate and even necessary preface to the conversation that follows?

The opening dialogue features Socrates speaking directly to a man whose name we never learn (he is identified only by the vague title comrade or companion [hetairos]), together with a group of indeterminate size whose members are otherwise unidentified—except, of course, for the fact that they are in the company of the comrade, include in their number someone’s slave (310a3–4), and cannot include the twenty people who will be mentioned by name as being present at the home of Callias.² The setting of the dialogue is unclear. It is presumably a more or less public place accessible to a passerby like Socrates but one that nonetheless permits Socrates to narrate undisturbed a story that must have taken a good while to convey. The retelling of the main events of the dialogue takes place in a less private or secluded—indeed, closely guarded—place than did the events themselves, in the private home of Callias (311a1–2, 314c3 and following). In this way, the retelling is a more public act than the original conversation and even takes a step in the direction of publicity.

It is not Socrates but rather the comrade who initiates the conversation. Now clearly alone (compare 362a4), Socrates comes across the group apparently by chance: From where, Socrates, are you making your appearance? (309a1; consider also 310a2–3). If the comrade is not quite a friend of Socrates, with the closeness that the latter term may imply (consider Republic 450d10–11), he is nonetheless friendly toward him and even regards himself as being on strikingly familiar terms with Socrates: the comrade does not hesitate to speak of a quite personal matter just between ourselves (309a4), the presence of the others notwithstanding. And after posing his initial question to Socrates, he does not wait for an answer, because he has the strong hunch that Socrates must be returning from the hunt after Alcibiades in his bloom (309a1–2). On the one hand, the comrade regards this hunt as perfectly understandable—when he himself saw Alcibiades just the other day, he appeared to him a handsome man indeed (consider also 309c2–10)—but, on the other hand, Socrates really should desist from his pursuit now that Alcibiades is precisely a man and no longer a boy: he is already getting a full beard! The comrade thus assumes that Socrates’ interest in Alcibiades has nothing to do with either the heart or the head.

Here we may pause to note that this indication of Alcibiades’ approximate age (together with several other clues) permits one to date the action of the dialogue to 433–432 BCE, when Socrates would have been thirty-six or so.³ And this means, in turn, that the Protagoras offers us one of the earliest portraits of Socrates the political philosopher given to us by Plato (consider 314b5; 317c1–3), with only the Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II clearly having an earlier dramatic date.⁴ To be sure, the narrator of the Parmenides presents to us a Socrates who was very young (127c5)—perhaps not twenty—but the narration proper occurs many years later and, in any case, sets forth a Socrates before he had made his famous turn from the inquiry into nature to the examination of the human concerns characteristic of moral and political life. That is, as Socrates himself indicates in the Phaedo, which takes place on the day of his execution and is the last of the sequence of dialogues that begins with the Theaetetus, there came a time when his extraordinary interest in the inquiry concerning nature, characteristic of his youth, gave way to—or, at any rate, took the form of—a new interest in the speeches. This turn to the speeches, or to certain opinions his fellow human beings expressed in speech, is fully compatible with the most striking features of the portrait of Socrates that we receive in all or almost all the dialogues of Plato—that of a man who, because he knows that he himself knows nothing, repeatedly asks others, in the marketplace and elsewhere, the what is . . . ? questions for which he became, in time, notorious (e.g., Meno 79e7–80b7). If he himself did not know the answers to those questions, Socrates was nonetheless able to demonstrate to himself and to at least some of his interlocutors that they too were ignorant about the character of virtue and nobility, for example, to which the what is . . . ? questions typically point.

All this amounts to saying that Socrates’ turn from natural philosophy or science to what has come to be called moral and political philosophy—to the most important of the human things as expressed in our guiding opinions about them—seems to have taken place at some point prior to the Protagoras and perhaps very shortly before it. What may be even more important for the present purpose, this new interest in the speeches goes together with, and may well be the chief motive behind, his keen interest in the young—in Alcibiades above all, at least early on, and also in Charmides at about this time (consider Charmides 153a1–2: the conversation recorded there takes place around 429 BCE, i.e., not long after the one presented in the Protagoras; also Protagoras 315a1–2).⁵ As we learn from the Alcibiades I and II, Socrates has indeed been pursuing, and testing and unsettling, Alcibiades—so much so that his interest in the young man is evidently now a byword among some in Athens: Or is it indeed clear that you’re back from the hunt for Alcibiades in his bloom? And to look ahead a little, young Hippocrates, whom Socrates regards as no more than a comrade (313b1, c8), feels remarkably chummy with Socrates; for example, he assumes that Socrates has a lively interest in the details of his domestic affairs (310c3–5), and he feels not the slightest compunction in waking Socrates up before dawn to get him to introduce him to Protagoras, who alone is wise (310d5–6).

The comrade assumes that Socrates’ interest in Alcibiades accords with the conventional Greek practice, and it is on the basis of this convention that he chides Socrates as he does. Yet in the Symposium, which is the next (the fourth) and final installment in the story of Socrates’ relations with Alcibiades, Plato permits us to see the falsity of the comrade’s assumption. There, the mature Alcibiades confesses, in a state likely to induce frankness, that it was he who came to pursue Socrates and that Socrates was amazingly, gallingly indifferent to his charms. At the peak of that would-be courtship, in fact, when Alcibiades finally managed to be together with Socrates, Socrates behaved toward Alcibiades as a father or elder brother would have done (Symposium 219c6–d2 and context). Yet in the Protagoras, Socrates declines to make the obvious rejoinder to the comrade’s chastisement or the assumption underlying it. Far from asserting outright that his pursuit has nothing whatsoever to do with the usual Greek convention, Socrates implicitly grants that it does (by failing to deny it) but appeals for approval of such deviation as he is apparently guilty of to the conventional authority, Homer: Aren’t you a praiser of Homer, who asserted that the most gracious [gratifying] time of life belongs to one who is getting his beard, the age Alcibiades is now? (309a6–b2). And this appeal works. The comrade ceases to criticize Socrates (however playfully), and he alters not so much his understanding of the conventional rule as the facts to be judged in light of that rule: if the liaison is licit, then Alcibiades must be not a man but a young fellow or lad still (compare 309a3 with b4). And so the comrade proceeds to pursue his general line of inquiry by asking how things stand between the two as he understands them: lover and beloved, pursuer and pursued. Socrates is willing to leave this misunderstanding intact (compare Theaetetus 143e6–144a1 and context), perhaps because the truth of the matter would be less intelligible, or less acceptable, to the comrade.

To understand Plato’s intention in beginning the Protagoras as he has, we must try to take our measure of the comrade. On the one hand, the comrade is certainly friendly toward Socrates, he is excited to learn of Protagoras’ presence in Athens, and he is eager indeed to hear of Socrates’ just-concluded get-together with him. One might then say that the comrade not only is well disposed to the philosopher Socrates but also has, himself, a certain interest in things theoretical. He is surely no rube. On the other hand, the comrade’s principal interest in Socrates does not rise above the level of gossip, he is thoroughly conventional in his deference to Homer and in his preference for the homegrown over the foreign (309c9–10), and he is the last here to learn of Protagoras’ stay in Athens, now in its third day: even young Hippocrates found out the news before he did (compare 309d3–5 with 310b7–c7).⁶ Since neither the comrade nor anyone else present ever interrupts the narrative or comments at its conclusion (compare Euthydemus 290e1–293a9 and 304c6–307c4; Phaedo 88c8–89a8), we cannot know whether the comrade’s initial enthusiasm survived or, more generally, what impression the narration of it made on him (or on the others).

What, then, is the source of Socrates’ interest in recounting all that he does to the comrade and the rest? It is undeniable that he has such an interest. He readily agrees to relate the conversation he has just now had, a conversation that must have taken a good many hours to unfold and hence would take a good many more to repeat—and this despite the fact that Socrates was denied a full night’s sleep and, for all we know, has yet to eat (310a8–b3). And although it is indeed the comrade who begins the conversation, it is not impossible that Socrates saw the assembled group and headed over to them. There is certainly no indication that they needed to call him over or otherwise constrain him (compare, e.g., Charmides 153a6–b6, to say nothing of Republic 327b2–8; Protagoras 335c8–d1); Socrates states that he would be grateful to the group if they should listen to him tell his story (310a5). Could it be that the very qualities of the comrade’s character one can detect in these opening pages make of him not indeed an excellent interlocutor, but an excellent audience? By way of contrast, Socrates shows no independent interest in seeing Protagoras—whose arrival in Athens two days ago was, of course, known to Socrates immediately (310b8–9 and context)—and is prompted to visit him only on account of Hippocrates’ reckless desire to study with the famed sophist. Yet, to repeat, Socrates clearly is willing to comply with the comrade’s request to relate the event thus brought about, and who would deny that Socrates could have skirted that request if he had wished to do so? We return to our question: what is the source of Socrates’ willingness to act as a dutiful reporter?

A simple summary of the action of the Protagoras suggests an answer. Socrates accompanies young Hippocrates to the home of Callias, apparently to see about bringing student and sophist together but as it turns out to subject Protagoras to a devastating cross-examination concerning the very subject—virtue—in which he claims expertise; in so doing, Socrates saps any desire of the young people present, Hippocrates among them, to pay handsomely for the privilege of studying with Protagoras. If we accept for now the common view that the sophists as a class are of dubious worth and even uprightness—a view the Protagoras does much to promote—we can conclude that, far from corrupting the young, Socrates saves them from corruption.⁷ As the mention of Alcibiades at the beginning of the dialogue also serves to underscore, the Protagoras is concerned from the very beginning with the question of the education or corruption of the young; the Protagoras is concerned in particular with Socrates’ involvement with young people, which seemed to have something not quite right about it (as the comrade in his way indicates) and which was, in any case, to bring him so much trouble, not least in his associations with Critias and Alcibiades (consider, e.g., Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12–47; Alcibiades enters the home of Callias in the company of Critias: Protagoras 316a4–5). Because the comrade is both well disposed toward Socrates and gossipy, he makes an excellent conduit to relate to others the story of Socrates’ intervention on behalf of Hippocrates that took the form of his spectacular combat with Protagoras before the (sons of the) cream of Athenian society, in which the aged and renowned sophist got very much the worst of it at the hands of the relatively young Socrates, whose prominence is clearly on the rise (361e2–5) but far from its zenith. And in permitting us to witness this brief drama, Plato encourages us to reflect on the concern Socrates had for his reputation and the steps he sometimes took to secure a good (or better) one; the dialogue as a whole evinces some such concern (consider 343b7–c3 and p. 213 below). In writing the Protagoras, of course, Plato also took an active part in carrying out that same task.

The presence of the comrade can serve, then, as an aid to seeing Socrates’ (and Plato’s) concern with his reputation as a corrupter of the young. But it may also be an obstacle to our access to the conversation Socrates had with Protagoras. This is so for a simple reason. Socrates followed with the greatest consistency and self-awareness the ordinary principle, adopted perhaps unawares by most of us most of the time, that it is only reasonable to adapt what we say and how we say it to the audience with whom we are speaking, whether we do so for the sake of those whom we are addressing or for our own sake or for some combination of these reasons. In any case, it is certain that Socrates spoke differently to different audiences, partly in the manner of that wily man to whom he will soon compare himself, Odysseus (Xenophon Memorabilia 4.6.13–15 and Protagoras 315b9, c8 and context; consider also Republic 450d10–11 as well as Protagoras’ sensitivity, from the very beginning, to the question of the audience to be addressed: Protagoras 316b3–4). And Plato insists that we witness Socrates relating his adventure to the comrade—that is, to a man of a certain character or type. We do no injustice to the man in saying that, on the basis of the evidence Plato chose to put before us, the comrade does not have the finest character and is not the most outstanding human type. It is only to be expected, then, that Socrates stressed some features of the conversation, and of the actions relating to it, likely to be of interest to or to make the greatest impression on the comrade, for example, while omitting some things altogether: on three occasions, Socrates notes that he made additional arguments, but he declines to state what they were (314c3–7, 316a6–7, 348b1), just as he declines also to convey Protagoras’ remarks in their entirety (e.g., 333d1–3). And Socrates’ occasional editorial comments are, of course, directed in the first place to the comrade (see, above all, 339e3–4)—his impressions of Hippocrates’ courage and impetuosity (310d3), for example, and Protagoras’ dramatic shifts of mood as his fortunes rise and fall in the course of the conversation (e.g., 333e2–5 and 335a9–b2).

The Protagoras falls into three parts of uneven length. In the first and shortest, we witness Socrates addressing himself to the comrade and the others (309a1–310a7); in the second and somewhat longer section, Socrates relates his early morning encounter with Hippocrates (310a8–314e2); in the third and longest section by far, Socrates details his conversation with Protagoras in the home of Callias (314e3–362a4). Thus the Hippocrates section is literally central. And just as one cannot understand Socrates’ interest in speaking to the comrade without having recourse to Hippocrates, so one cannot understand Socrates’ interest in speaking with Protagoras without again having recourse to Hippocrates: Socrates wishes to save Hippocrates from the clutches of the sophist, and he is eager to repeat and have repeated his success in so doing. Let us therefore turn to consider Hippocrates.

The Beginning of the Narration (310a8–314c2)

The events of the day begin in darkness. Only after his conversation with Socrates is well under way does young Hippocrates begin to appear in the light (310a8, 312a2–3). It is tempting to say that Hippocrates knows that he is in the dark and that he is, as a result, eager for enlightenment; it is tempting to say that he seeks out an education with such admirable zeal because he knows or senses that he is deeply in need of one. And so he turns to the one man among his acquaintances who seems to hold the key to an education worthy of the name: Socrates. It is truer to the facts to say that Hippocrates regards Socrates more as a friendly fellow than as an actual or potential teacher—he surely does not regard him as wise (consider again 310d5–6)—and he is pursuing less an education than the acquisition of a certain technical skill; he seeks not, in fact, wisdom but the capacity to speak cleverly (compare 310d5–6 with 312d6–7). Hippocrates knows of Protagoras only that all praise the man and (or inasmuch as) they assert that he is wisest at speaking. By his own admission, Hippocrates has neither seen nor heard the man, since he himself was too young the last time the great sophist visited Athens (on which occasion Protagoras evidently made Socrates’ acquaintance: 310e3–5 and 361e2–5). As is clear from his comic entrance into Socrates’ household before dawn—the first words out of his mouth are the silliest question one can ask a sleeping man—Hippocrates acts before he thinks; he is indeed courageous [or manly] and impetuous, as Socrates reports to the comrade. One might go so far as to say, in anticipation of what is to come, that Hippocrates has as his patron saint Epimetheus, the After-thinker, for when pressed by Socrates to explain what precisely he hopes to learn from Protagoras the sophist, Hippocrates is soon at a loss; he cannot specify even the subject matter about which he might learn to speak cleverly (312e5–6 and context). Hippocrates is less interested in the substance of the speeches he might make or in their content than he is in their effect: according to Socrates’ initial introduction of the boy to Protagoras, Hippocrates "desires to become renowned [ellogimos] in the city" (316b10–c1). In the grip of a strong political ambition, then, Hippocrates seeks to use Socrates as a means to enter the circle of that wise or clever speaker Protagoras so as to gain the prized skill of persuasive speech making that is itself the prerequisite of an impressive political career in democratic Athens.

Socrates’ tough rebuke of Hippocrates’ desire to learn from the sophist (311a8–314b4) includes a broader and deeper statement about the dangers inherent in the search for an education, for the learnings by which a soul is reared or nourished (313c6–7), not just from a Protagoras but also from anyone else whatever (313e5). In contrast to various foods or drinks that are sold on the promise that they will improve the body—substances that may be carried off in some container other than the body—the learning we take in in the course of an education can be held in nothing other than the soul itself, at which point we have already been helped or harmed thereby. Nowhere in this account of the risks of seeking an education does Socrates contend that the goodness or badness, the usefulness (chrēston) or worthlessness (ponēron), of the learnings we may acquire is dependent on their truth or falsity (313d2, d8, e3–4). This fact is at least compatible with the thought that there may be truths that are useless or do some harm and falsehoods that are useful or convey some benefit. It is possible in principle, then, that Hippocrates might learn a truth or truths, from Protagoras or others, that would harm him, just as it is possible that he might acquire a falsehood that would do him some good.

It is difficult in our time to take seriously this possibility, perhaps because we hold that the truth will set us free, for example, or—to limit the consideration to its political dimension—because we hold deeply to the conviction that there is a perfect harmony between the truth in its entirety and the requirements of a healthy political order: the discovery and perforce dissemination of every genuine insight into human beings and the world can only accrue to the advantage of each and hence of all together. Yet howevermuch Socrates and Protagoras will prove to differ over fundamental things, they agree as to the riskiness involved in seeking an education—although Socrates characteristically stresses here the danger posed to the student, Protagoras the danger posed to the teacher, that is, to Protagoras himself (316c5–317c5). It is impossible to enter into the heart of the Protagoras without becoming at least open to the thought that an enlightenment deserving of the name may find its fullest expression in an individual only and not in a community (to set aside the danger posed by education to the individual as such). Hippocrates, by contrast, seems to assume that whatever he may learn from Protagoras will only redound to the benefit of his political career; he is unaware of the fact that there are students in the sophist’s circle—indeed, the best of them—who are studying so as to take up the art of sophistry themselves. Antimoerus the Mendaean may hail from Mende (in Chalcidice), but he is no longer of it; he is, like his itinerant teacher in whose train he takes his place, a perpetual foreigner. In fact, the majority of Protagoras’ students or followers are foreigners, bewitched by his Orpheus-like voice into following him from town to town and hence into abandoning kith and kin. Because Socrates scarcely left Athens, he had no such effect abroad; but, as Xenophon indicates clearly enough, Socrates did have a comparable effect on young people in Athens