plato’s protagoras and the frontier of genre research: a ...plato’s protagoras and the frontier...

Plato’s Protagoras and the Frontier of Genre Research: A Reconnaissance Report from the Field

Jonathan LaveryPhilosophy and Contemporary Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford)

Abstract After a review of some general issues surrounding the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues, I consider in detail the reception of Plato’s Protagoras in English scholarship since 1956, that is, during the last half century. That scholarship falls into three periods. At first (1956–82) there was a sharp division between analytic philosophy commentators and other commentators, but near-unanimity in adopting a “Democritean” conception of the text as composed of discrete, separable parts. In the second period (1983–92), an “Aristotelian” conception of the text, in which func-tionally distinct parts coordinate with each other within a whole, became a serious rival to the Democritean one. Since 1992, several Aristotelian strategies have been developed. I diagnose these trends as an indication of growing sensitivity to the unity of Protagoras and its integration of literature and theory. I use this review to draw some morals about exegesis and scholarly specialization.

1. Plato’s Dialogues, Dialogue as a Genre

1.1. General RemarksPlato’s dialogues have earned an enduring place in Western intellectual history because of their power to charm and provoke readers simulta-

I want to thank Louis Groarke, and Evan Habkirk for timely assistance. An early version of the essay benefited also from comments from members of the audience at the University of Guelph in November 2005 (as part of a conference in honour of Kenneth Dorter). And, finally, I must thank Meir Sternberg and anonymous referees of Poetics Today for invaluable feedback on the penultimate draft.

Poetics Today 28:2 (Summer 2007) doi 10.1215/03335372-2006-021© 2007 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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neously. Not only are they our earliest set of complete primary sources in the history of philosophy, but several of them are among the greatest works of literature in the Western tradition. When reading Phaedo, Sympo-sium, Theaetetus, or Protagoras, for example, it is difficult not to be impressed by either the argumentation or the dramatic construction. But if we con-sider these two dimensions of Platonic dialogue together and observe how thoroughly they are interlaced, it becomes virtually impossible to separate the subtle theorizing and logic from the literary artistry. Doubtless, few readers would dispute this characterization of the works that have fasci-nated readers since antiquity. Still, it is only recently that professional scholars have begun to learn how to deal with some of the deepest con-nections between the theoretical questions around which Plato’s dialogues are oriented and the literary form in which these questions are formulated, clarified, examined, answered, and reformulated. The question, “Why did Plato write dialogues?” has come to occupy a central place in the secondary literature over the past forty years.� Some-times it is asked quite generally, without regard to any particular dialogue.� More often, exegesis of a single dialogue is accompanied by circumspect metacriticism about the special interpretive challenges implicit in the links between the dialectic and the drama.� In a few cases, questions about the dialogue form are raised in connection with the attempt to read across all of the dialogues or a group of them.� Finally, there has been some illumi-

1. This is not a trend for which it is possible to identify a precise origin. Still, in professional journals, which are the primary focus of this article, the most obvious place to point is Drew Hyland’s “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues” (1968).2. See especially Hyland 1968, Griswold 1988c, Frede 1992, and Gill 2002 but also several chapters in Griswold 1988a, Press 1993 and 2000.3. It has become standard procedure for authors of book length commentaries to set out a general account of their interpretive presuppositions in a prologue or opening chapter. See, for example, Dorter 1980 on Phaedo, Griswold 1986 on Phaedrus, and Balaban 1999 on Pro-tagoras; see also Griswold 1988b.4. The best example here is Charles Kahn’s (1996) account of the so-called “early” or “Socratic” dialogues as proleptic. According to Kahn, the date of composition of these dia-logues is not so important as the function they serve within the body of Plato’s work. Several of the early dialogues that end in aporia (Ion, Hippias Minor, Gorgias, Laches, Meno, Charmi-des, and Protagoras) raise theoretical and methodological problems which are only partially explained; the middle dialogues (Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Phaedrus) return to these prob-lems and respond to them more thoroughly. Kahn uses the term “proleptic” to character-ize the early dialogues as encouraging readers to “turn towards” the doctrines contained in the middle dialogues. Charles Griswold Jr., for one, is skeptical about this attempt to see such a large number of dialogues serving a coordinated function, and has engaged in a lively, extended exchange with Kahn on the question (see Kahn 1988, Griswold 1988d, 1990, 1999a, Kahn 2000, and Griswold 2000). See also Dorter 1994 on the Eleatic dialogues (Par-menides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman) and Howland 1998 on the dialogues dramatically dated around the time of Socrates’ death. Against these unitarian readings of the dialogues

Lavery • Plato’s Protagoras and the Frontier of Genre Research 193

nating historical research on how Plato’s dialogues were read in earlier times.� These reflections on Plato’s use of the dialogue form are as much about the dialogue as a genre as they are about Plato as an author. In so far as these questions have been in the foreground or visible in the background, Plato scholars have been working at the leading edge of research on genres of philosophy. Nevertheless, the explicit emphasis in much of this work usually falls on concerns about how to get Plato right, not on general ques-tions about how to analyze or interpret the dialogue form within which he worked—along with many others, such as Cicero, Augustine, Berke-ley, Leibniz, Hume, and Rousseau, to name only a few.� Under the spell of Plato’s genius, commentators have made extravagant claims about the singularity of his work. James Arieti (1991: 2), for instance, maintains that “simply put, Plato’s dialogues are sui generis.” Invoking Aristotle’s account of definition, he adds that “whatever cannot be placed into a genus does not admit of definition. If, therefore, we approach the dialogues with pre-conceptions of an established genus, we shall undoubtedly err” (ibid.). The problem with this reverence is that it is historically problematic, to say the least. For, as Charles Kahn (1996: 1–35, after Giannantoni 1990) reminds us, several authors were writing sokratikoi logoi in the period immediately following the death of Socrates, so that use of the dialogue form in ancient Athens was not as exceptional as it may seem today. Dialogue was, it seems, a conventional genre for the textual exploration of moral and concep-tual questions, even if Plato did excel at the form. Arieti (1991: 2) is simply wrong to say that “Plato invented the dialogue.” Plato’s excellence may not warrant assigning his dialogues to an exclu-sive category all their own; all the same, they do merit special attention as representing the dialogue form. They are, of course, the earliest complete

(broadly conceived), Vlastos 1991 takes a developmentalist line, arguing that the early dia-logues are so grouped because they were composed early in Plato’s career and that they can be used to differentiate the views of Socrates (which Plato is attempting to represent faith-fully in these dialogues) from those of Plato in his maturity (in which Socrates is Plato’s representative).5. This area of research is growing rapidly. See Novotny 1977 for a large-scale summary of various forms of Platonism from antiquity to the twentieth century. See Lane 2001 for an overview of recent interpretive schools and strategies. See Glucker 1987 and 1996 for discussions of Plato’s reception in England. Taylor 2002 identifies the origins of current interpretive practices in nineteenth-century German and English commentators. Gill 2002 compares recent and late ancient strategies for dealing with the dialogue form. Tarrant 2000 surveys ancient Platonism with an eye to how ancient commentators dealt with the dialogue form.6. See Levi 1976 for a good discussion of dialogue that extends beyond Plato, and Smiley 1995 for discussions of Hume and Wittgenstein within the dialogue tradition.


dialogues we have, so they enjoy historical primacy within the dialogue tradition. Also, collectively, they use a wider range of literary devices and explore a broader range of theoretical questions than later works within the genre. And finally, there is a great deal of evidence in the dialogues that Plato was acutely conscious of the methodological, substantive, and normative presuppositions indigenous to the form—undoubtedly because he worked with it for such a long time. For these reasons, in the eyes of most contemporary readers, everyone else who has used the dialogue form since ancient times seems to be emulating Plato. Arieti (ibid.: 1–4) is concerned that readers with preconceived notions about the nature and purpose of the dialogue qua genre will prejudge what to focus on when reading Plato. More specifically, he complains that, in the twentieth century, philosophers appropriated Plato’s writings and dis-regarded the drama in an effort to extract purely theoretical ideas. These charges have some force, especially as they apply to two related traps into which readers are prone to fall: (a) anachronistically reading contempo-rary theoretical doctrines into an ancient text and (b) arbitrarily discount-ing parts of that text as nonessential or ornamental (usually those passages which do not address directly the commentators’ own theoretical concerns). As I shall attempt to explain, both charges can be partially substantiated by a focused review of Plato scholarship in the past fifty years. But, as I shall emphasize, this warning must be qualified in important respects, for many of these commentators have handled the dialogues with more sen-sitivity than Arieti has acknowledged. Indeed, commentators have shown increasing sensitivity to the literary dimensions of the dialogue form. It is, in fact, this evolution that I want to chart. To what extent, then, have recent scholarly treatments of Plato’s dia-logues avoided or fallen into the two traps of anachronism and arbitrary selectivity? In order to answer this question in meaningful detail, it is nec-essary to restrict our attention to work on a single dialogue, which I pro-pose to do by focusing on the secondary literature on Protagoras.� For some special reasons that will be explained below (see section 2.1), I shall concen-trate on work published about this dialogue in professional, English lan-guage periodicals and book-length commentaries since 1956.� The choice

7. All English and Greek quotations from Protagoras are from the Loeb edition of Plato (1924), translated by W. M. Lamb.8. While I have attempted to be as extensive as possible within the purview of English-language scholarship, I do not promise to be exhaustive. Limiting the focus to English sec-ondary literature is not merely arbitrary. As I shall maintain, a key moment in Protago-ras scholarship is Vlastos 1956. As it turns out, it is English-language commentators who were especially responsive to the methods of analysis and substantive concerns in that work. While these commentators occasionally make use of French, German, and Italian scholar-


of Protagoras as the Platonic focus here receives some support from Paul Shorey’s What Plato Said (1933), which begins an account of this dialogue with high praise for both its literary and theoretical merits: “A greater variety of topics and literary motives is combined in the artistic structure of the Protagoras than in any other dialogue except the Phaedrus or the Repub-lic” (119). It is possible to see within this specially demarcated portion of the secondary literature how Plato scholars have been gravitating toward a distinctive genre-based reading of the dialogue over the past half-century. I use the gravitation metaphor deliberately to convey how this approach to Plato has been adopted slowly, incrementally and—in an important sense that will be explained later—naturally. The story that unfolds herein is one in which difficulties over a single prominent feature of the dialogue’s construction (the logic of certain argu-ments) provoked some scholars (analytic philosophers) to apply to Protago-ras a new set of interpretive, exegetical tools (from modern logic). This innovation turned out to offer no help in dealing with other features of the dialogue (its drama and its overall unity, in particular). These features of Protagoras were left for other scholars to deal with. These other scholars include classicists, philologists, and philosophers who did not align them-selves exclusively with the analytic movement. Disciplinary divisions led to a division of exegetical labor for more than a quarter of a century (1956–82). Additionally, and more importantly, along with this division of labor, the dialogue was fragmented, divided up into discrete episodes, which became the domain of one disciplinary camp or the other. In the next decade (1983–92), some important studies turned directly to the problem of accounting for the dialogue’s unity, a development which I characterize as salutary. Finally, since 1993, a number of exegetical strategies have been devised to deal with various dimensions of unity in this dialogue. In short, what I have to present is a narrative of innovation, exploration, interac-tion, and shared discovery.

1.2. Plot Summary of ProtagorasBecause the question of the unity of Protagoras has a special role to play in the story of this scholarly exploration, it will help to begin with a summary of the dialogue. The main action of Protagoras is a lengthy, lively, wide-ranging and com-

ship, little of this research engages non-English work in a critical and detailed manner. The self-imposed restriction of this article does indeed reflect a pattern of interactions evident in the secondary literature itself. See also Stokes (1986: 1–3), who discusses more general dif-ferences between work done on Plato by English-language philosophy scholars and work by Hellenists and Continental philosophy scholars.


plex discussion between Socrates and Protagoras. But before the two cen-tral figures come face to face, there are two frame discussions. The first, an outer frame for the main action, takes place in the street: a brief dia-logue, in which Socrates informs an unnamed friend that he departed from a meeting with Protagoras only moments before (309a–310a). When the friend asks for a report of this meeting, Socrates begins by relating an early morning episode between himself and a young acquaintance, Hippocrates. Hippocrates had come to Socrates’ house in the middle of the previous night looking for assistance in becoming a student of Protagoras (who has recently arrived in town). The discussion that takes place between Socrates and Hippocrates before they meet Protagoras constitutes the dialogue’s second, inner frame (310a–317c). Socrates remains the narrator until the end of the dialogue. Protagoras is staying at the house of Callias, a wealthy young Athe-nian who was known as an extravagant patron of sophists (see Apology 20a for further confirmation). The party of sophists and students at Callias’s is large, and Socrates and Hippocrates have trouble getting past the impa-tient doorkeeper, who mistakes them for newly arrived sophists (314c–d). After the formalities of introductions are completed, Socrates and Protag-oras enter into an informal discussion about Hippocrates and his prospects as a student of Protagoras (314c–317c). As Socrates tells the friend to whom he is narrating these events, Protagoras seems eager to turn the interview into a display of his own powers as a public speaker (317c). So Socrates suggests that the two of them open up their discussion and invite all those present to observe it (317c). The remainder of their meeting, therefore, has the air of a performance, with Socrates representing the interests of Hip-pocrates (a prospective new protégé for the famous sophist) and Protago-ras the representative of sophistry (who must convince Athenians that his educational program offers real benefits). In setting (Callias’s house), in casting (Protagoras, Hippocrates, Socrates, and numerous other historical figures) and in dramatic dating ( just as the fifth century Athenian golden age was about to come crashing to an end in the Peloponnesian War [431–404 BCE]), Plato has signalled that this dialogue dramatizes a momentous occasion. The “performance” commences with Socrates stating some reservations as to the very possibility of teaching what Protagoras professes to teach: good judgment (euboulia), the political art (tên politikên technên), good citizen-ship (agathous politas) or virtue (aretê )—all of which are used interchangeably to characterize the single subject of Protagoras’s instruction (317c–320c). Protagoras responds to this challenge with a lengthy account of how his instruction will improve a student. This defense is a masterpiece of rhetori-


cal oratory, which commentators commonly refer to as the Great Speech (320c–328d). The heart of this speech is Protagoras’s version of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus and the creation of mortal creatures. Every species is equipped by Epimetheus with its own distinctive combination of powers (dunameis) to ensure its survival, except human beings, who are left defenseless when he fails to set aside any powers for them (320d–321c). To save these defenseless creatures, Prometheus steals technical knowledge and fire from Athena and Hephaistos, but the separate branches of tech-nical knowledge are distributed to different people and do not promote communal living; in this condition, political life is not possible and the species is vulnerable to predation by other species (321c–322c). Zeus then sends Hermes with instructions to impose a sense of shame and justice upon all human beings, as a way to regulate cities (322c–323a). In this way, Protagoras characterizes the subject of his instruction (which he eventu-ally settles on calling virtue) as something that does not naturally develop in people but is universally taught. The myth is supplemented with sev-eral arguments to corroborate this conclusion and explain why the sons of prominent politicians, such as Pericles, often fail to match their fathers in achievement (324d–328d). After Protagoras completes his speech, Socrates (328e–329d) requests elaboration on the sophist’s conception of virtue (aretê): is virtue a single quality (as Protagoras had suggested at, e.g., 324d–325a), or a variegated set of qualities (e.g., 322c)? Protagoras replies that virtue is a complex single quality, and that courage, justice, wisdom, moderation, and holiness are its component parts (329d–330b). There follows a series of exchanges about the precise nature of the unity of the special virtues, on which Socrates and Protagoras come to no agreement (328d–334c). When discussion of the unity of virtue reaches an impasse, Socrates threatens to leave (335d). At this point, several members of the audience speak up. Callias, Alcibiades (the most scandalous associate of Socrates), Critias (another controversial associate), Prodicus and Hippias (two other successful sophists) offer their own diagnoses of the problems that prevent Socrates and Protagoras from proceeding. Each speaker also proposes arrangements for resuming the discussion in a manner that is satisfactory to everyone (335d–338e). Discussion is resumed, only now with Protagoras asking Socrates questions. He uses this opportunity to ask for Socrates’ opinion about the merits of a poem by Simonides. Protagoras thinks the poem is logically inconsistent, but Socrates defends it in a long exegetical treatment (338e–347a). Socrates’ exegesis is warmly received by everyone present, but he follows up immediately with a complaint that poetic exege-sis makes a poor substitute for direct dialogue (347c–348a). Socrates then


asks if he may return to his original role as the questioner, and if they can return to the unresolved question about the unity of virtue (348a). Protago-ras consents to this. In the final stretch of the dialogue, Socrates and Protagoras consider the theoretical relationship between courage and wisdom, and they come to the conclusion that there is an intrinsic connection between the two (perhaps even an identity, depending on how the exchange is interpreted, 348a–360e). During this final exchange, Socrates convinces Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus to accept a hedonistic account of value (357c–358b), and shows how this account is inconsistent with the popular view that a person can know what is the right thing to do but not have the will power to do it (i.e., moral weakness [351b–358b]). But as they draw closer to the conclusion about courage and wisdom, Protagoras becomes increasingly uncooperative (360c–e). Socrates concludes by announcing with some bemusement (and frus-tration) that he and Protagoras have exchanged positions on the origi-nal question about the teachability of virtue. If virtue is, as he is arguing, knowledge, then it should be teachable; but if it is not knowledge, as Pro-tagoras seems to be arguing, then it should not be teachable (361a–c). This exchange is more embarrassing for Protagoras than for Socrates, since it raises questions about the legitimacy of the sophist’s original claims to teach something that is valuable. Socrates diagnoses the source of all the confusion as their failure to determine first what virtue is (361d), but when Protagoras will not return to the problem, Socrates leaves (361d–362a).

1.3. Two General Strategies for Dealing with Protagoras’s ComplexityDramatically and dialectically, Protagoras offers plenty of material for schol-arly treatment. Dramatically, it moves in location from (a) a public space for the outer frame, to (b) Socrates’ bedroom and the courtyard in front of Callias’s house for the inner frame, to (c) inside Callias’s house for the main action. It involves Socrates, Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus in a discussion about the value of sophistry before some of the most famous or notorious figures of fifth-century-BCE Athens and in the house of the city’s most ostentatious patron of the sophists. Indeed, it contains the largest cast of named characters found in any of Plato’s dialogues, and the mise-en-scène is as evocative as Plato’s best dramatic works. Dialectically, it features two rhetorically polished speeches (320c–328d by Protagoras and 342a–347a by Socrates), some provocative remarks about philosophical methodology, and several passages of fine and subtle (albeit potentially fal-lacious) question-and-answer argumentation. The dialogue has attracted much attention from scholars, and it deserves every bit of it. One of the most puzzling problems with Protagoras—to which I have


attempted to draw attention in section 1.2—is accounting for its unity. The dialogue covers so many theoretically diverse issues, and seems to leave so many questions unanswered at the end and throughout, that readers may wonder if indeed it is unified at all. Like one of Aristophanes’ comic plays,� Protagoras threatens to spin out of control at several points: at 314d, Socrates and Hippocrates are originally denied entry by Callias’s door-keeper; at 334c, Socrates attempts to leave because he objects to the length of Protagoras’s answers; and at 348b–c, Protagoras needs to be shamed into resuming the discussion as Socrates requests. How are all the differ-ent theoretical issues and dramatic elements held together? This question about the dialogue’s construction is difficult to answer and is potentially one that bears heavily on readers. It was effectively sidestepped, however, by almost (but not quite) every English-language scholar for almost three decades, 1956–82. This evasion was accomplished (if it can be called an accomplishment) by a silent, widespread consensus that the best way for a commentator to deal with this complex text is to isolate attention on a one- to ten-page episode. Almost all English-language scholarship between 1956 and 1982 accepted a Democritean conception of Protagoras, as a collection or sequence of episodic parts. I borrow the term “Democritean” from Robert Brumbaugh (1993: 239), who uses it to characterize a system of philosophic thought:

This derives from an atomistic metaphysical frame of reference which holds the “divide and conquer” rule of understanding. Wholes are to be analysed in separable parts, which can be extracted without damage; these, then, are linked sequentially: in the present case, in valid or invalid demonstration. (Emphasis added; see also Brumbaugh 1992: 11, 19–21).

The key assumption is captured in the italicized words, that the sepa-rate parts “can be extracted without damage” for isolated explication and interpretation. In accordance with classical, Democritean atomism, these textual parts attach to and detach from each to form chance—rather than teleologically organized—wholes. In the work on Protagoras, we find numerous journal articles offering isolated analysis of Protagoras’s Great Speech, or the debate over the unity of virtue, or the interpretation of Simonides’ poem, or the discussion of hedonism; at the same time, very little work sought out the links between these episodes. The Democritean

9. Or, more precisely and more intriguingly, Eupolis’s Kolakes (Spongers, winner of the Athe-nian festival for Dionysus in 421 BCE), of which only fragments are extant. Like Protagoras, Eupolis’s play appears to be set in the house of Callias, where Protagoras, other sophists, and students of the sophists have gathered. It is possible that Plato borrowed features of the play in constructing Protagoras; however, Storey (2003: 184–85) urges us to be cautious with the fragmentary evidence of Kolakes.


operational assumption was widely adopted by the scholars between 1956 and 1982; accordingly, this was a predominantly Democritean period of Protagoras scholarship. The question of the text’s unity, however, is guided by an alternative set of operational assumptions, which are incommensurable with the Demo-critean ones. Brumbaugh (1993: 242) sums up these assumptions in the metaphysical formula “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A complete whole, existing as an ordered structure, is, according to this for-mula, ontologically prior to its subsisting parts. In the order of understand-ing, the whole (or some conception of the whole as a context) is prior to the parts, for it is only within an ordered structure of the whole that these subsisting parts are fully intelligible. The complexity of an Aristotelian sys-tem admits of subordinate and superordinate levels, each of which may consist of functionally defined parts of a substantive whole: for example, the stomata of a leaf subsist as parts of a leaf, the leaves of a tree subsist as parts of a tree, but the whole tree exists as an independent substantive whole. Aristotle’s functionally oriented approach to conceptual problems inspires Brumbaugh’s (1992: 16–17) characterization of this second system as “Aristotelian.”�0 In keeping with this scheme, exegesis requires that one- to ten-page episodes of Protagoras be situated within the plot or overarch-ing design of the dialogue. If, for example, we extract Protagoras’s Great Speech from the dialogue and explicate these eight pages in isolation, then we cannot specify its function or its specific contribution to the whole; in iso-lation, regarding the parts as “atomic,” we can only specify the dialogue’s molecular morphos, so to speak, never its telos.�� As we shall see in section 2, very little work on Protagoras adopted the Aristotelian approach between 1956 and 1982. The question of unity only becomes important to scholars in the decade between 1983 and 1992, when three monographs address the matter explicitly and at length. And it only becomes central in the years after 1992.

10. Brumbaugh (1992: 11 and 1993: 243–44) formulates his account of Democritean and Aristotelian types as part of a four-part scheme for classifying systems of philosophy. In addition to the two already named, there is also an Anaxagorean system, which is process oriented, and a Platonic system, which aims both for structural coherence and for corre-spondence to extratextual conditions in “the real world.” For our purposes, the Democri-tean/Aristotelian contrast is crucial, but in section 4.3 I will point out evidence of the “Pla-tonic” strategy in Protagoras scholarship.11. Scare quotes around “atomic” are necessary, because the episodes (and, as I shall add later, the arguments) are not indivisible and simple in the Democritean sense. If one wanted to make systematic use of this metaphor, it would be necessary to use a contemporary con-ception of the atom as consisting of subatomic particles. Be that as it may, I find Brum-baugh’s terminology sufficient for my purposes.


2. Protagoras Scholarship: 1956–1982

2.1. A Popular Introduction to Protagoras for Students, a Divided Agenda for ScholarsA crucial, albeit surprising, moment in the scholarly treatment of Protago-ras is the publication of an English translation for students, namely, the Liberal Arts Press edition of 1956 (translated by Martin Ostwald; Plato 1956a).�� The scholarly significance of this book is due entirely to the intro-duction by Gregory Vlastos (hereafter Vlastos 1956), which is nearly as long as the text of the dialogue itself and subjects Protagoras to the sort of analysis for which the late Professor Vlastos was renowned. It is now exactly half a century since the book first appeared and more than a dozen years since it was replaced in the Hackett Publishing catalog (the press that came to own its publication rights), yet the Vlastos introduction is still cited routinely in the secondary literature.�� Compare this to W. K. C. Guthrie’s introduction to his own translation of Protagoras (along with Meno) for Penguin Classics, also published in 1956 (Plato 1956b). Guthrie’s intro-ductory essay has attracted very little scholarly attention.�� And it is safe to conjecture that Michael Frede’s erudite and readable introduction to the Hackett translation that superseded the Ostwald-Vlastos book (Plato 1992) will never exert the influence of the Vlastos introduction. In large part, Vlastos’s influence is due to timing and exegetical methodology. Before Vlastos, no one had attempted to explicate so many of this dialogue’s densest dialectical exchanges using the tools and methods of modern or classical logic.�� From a logical point of view, Vlastos’s analytical tools are not exceptionally sophisticated, those tools being the syllogism and first-order propositional logic supplemented with some elementary predicate notation. Vlastos (1956: xxxi) makes only modest claims about his own technical facility with these tools. For many years, all the same, English-

12. I say that this is a surprising moment in the dialogue’s scholarly treatment, but Glucker (1987: 177) is surely correct to consider translations to be a barometer for measuring the mood of a wider reading audience.13. As recently as 2003, scholars have found Vlastos 1956 worth returning to with a critical eye, which is testimony to its enduring influence beyond the usual sphere of a popular intro-duction. See O’Brien 2003: 77n25, 89n44. More extended consideration of Vlastos 1956 may be found in Russell 2000: 317n15, n17, 325n30, 331n43.14. In part, this is probably because the introduction for Guthrie 1956 was superseded by Guthrie 1975. Vlastos 1956 was effectively superseded by Vlastos’s later work on Protagoras as well, but commentators persist in using the earlier introduction as a resource. I should add that Nails 2002 (310) cites Guthrie 1956 approvingly on his identification of the dialogue’s dramatic date.15. As Vlastos (1956: xxvii n11, lviii) acknowledges, he is preceded by Robinson 1953 in taking Plato’s argumentative methodology seriously. Robinson, however, does not pay spe-cial attention to Protagoras.


language commentators with an analytic bent followed his lead in taking the dialogue seriously and analysing the argumentative exchanges with all the exactitude that formal and informal logic are capable of generating.�� This approach reached its acme with C. C. W. Taylor’s (1976, revised as Taylor 1991) translation and critical commentary for Oxford’s Clarendon Press Plato series. If the scholarly treatment of Plato’s Protagoras during the fifty-year period under consideration admits of a narrative account, then Vlastos 1956 is the initiating incident. It presupposes a problem—how to make sense of the difficult argumentation in Protagoras—and models a strategy for dealing with this problem. As it turns out, this model is not readily applicable to all parts of the dialogue, and the scholarly literature on Protagoras bifur-cated into two camps for many years. Nevertheless, there was an extraor-dinary amount of exegetical work published in the years following Vlastos 1956, the vast majority of it adopting this model.�� In terms of raw num-bers, scholarship using the tools of analytic philosophy simply dominated English secondary literature on Protagoras during this period.�� Of the forty-one articles and one book (Taylor 1976) cited in my bibliography from the 1956–82 period, thirty-one works�� clearly represent this approach.�0 What is evident on first reading Vlastos’s introductory essay is that the passages which receive the closest attention are those in which the argu-

16. This is not to suggest that his influence is confined to English-language commentary. Méron 1979 (144) is evidence of some influence in French-language scholarship, and Manu-wald 1975 is evidence within German-language scholarship. Note that Manuwald 1975 falls under the heading “English” scholarship because it appeared in a predominantly English-language journal Phronesis.17. A fact acknowledged by Vlastos himself. In 1969 he wrote of the significant increase of scholarship on hedonism in Protagoras after 1956: “More was to be contributed to this topic by English-speaking scholars in the following nine years than had appeared in the preceding forty” (Vlastos 1969: 71).18. See Stokes (1986: 1–10) for a more general description of this domination.19. The following articles appeared in mainstream philosophy or history of philosophy jour-nals where analytic philosophy was routinely published: Cobb 1982, Devereux 1975, 1977, Duncan 1978, Ferejohn 1982, Forrester 1975, Gallop 1961, 1964, Gauthier 1968, Klosko 1979, Maguire 1977, Manuwald 1975, Penner 1973, Santas 1966, Savan 1964, Sayre 1963, Sesonske 1963, Sprague 1967, Sullivan 1961, Vlastos 1972, 1974, Wolz 1963, 1967, Woodruff 1976, and Zeyl 1980. Some articles were published in classics or philology journals, but focusing on the same passages as those focused on by analytic philosophers and using the same methods of analysis: Dyson 1976, Gulley 1971, Klosko 1980, O’Brien 1961, and Vlastos 1969. Finally, Taylor 1976 offers a book-length critical commentary that depends heavily on these meth-ods of analysis.20. The following articles were published in classics or philology journals: Adkins 1973, Dickie 1978, Donlan 1969, Moser and Kustas 1966, Parry 1965, and Turner 1965. Finally, there were some articles that do not use the methods of analytic philosophy and were published in philosophy journals that did not emphasize analytic philosophy: Coby 1982, Dubose 1973, Miller 1977, 1978, and Zaslavsky 1982.


mentation is difficult to follow. There may be sound pedagogical reasons for adopting this criterion of selection in a textbook, but clearly Vlastos’s ana-lytical tools influenced his judgment as to which passages deserved explica-tion. The dialogue’s two frames and the initial, informal exchange between Socrates and Protagoras (309a–320c) are glossed very briefly. The middle interlude (334c–338a) is ignored altogether. And in lieu of discussing the lengthy exegetical debate over Simonides (338e–348c), readers are simply directed to Woodbury 1953 (Vlastos 1956: xxiv n1). Even Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d) is treated rather perfunctorily. Rather than analyze or explicate the speech itself, Vlastos (ibid.: ix–xi) summarizes it, then segues to an account of Plato’s Theaetetus (152a–172b) for a more explicit, theoreti-cal statement of the “Protagorean Subjectivism” which he believes under-lies the speech (ibid.: xii–xiv).�� Much of the secondary literature in ana-lytic philosophy and history of philosophy journals in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s reflects the emphasis of Vlastos’s introduction. Typically, these articles focused on one of the following passages: 328d–334c on the unity of virtue,�� 348a–360e on the general relationship between wisdom and courage,�� 351b–360e on hedonism,�� and 351b–358b on moral weak-ness.�� Because some of the passages overlap, they total only eighteen out of approximately fifty-three Stephanus pages. Large portions of the dialogue suffered comparative neglect from philosophers; in keeping with Vlastos 1956, these parts include the opening frames (309a–316a), the middle inter-lude (334c–338e) and the exegesis of Simonides’ poem (338e–348c). The scholarly problem to which Vlastos is responding (how to make sense of the difficult argumentation in Protagoras) has to do with the way his predecessors handled the logic of the dialogue’s densest dialectical

21. Moser and Kustas (1966: 112) object to the link made by Vlastos between the Great Speech and the critique of the homo-mensura doctrine in Theaetetus, i.e., the doctrine that man is the measure of all things. It must be noted that the Kerford (1953) article recommended by Vlastos (1956: xi n19) does not conflate the two dialogues this way. In fact, G. B. Kerferd (1949) treats Plato’s critique of the homo-mensura doctrine in a separate article.22. See Gallop 1961, Savan 1964, Sprague 1967, Gauthier 1968, Vlastos 1972, 1974, Penner 1973, Forrester 1975, Woodruff 1976, Devereux 1977, and Ferejohn 1982. Some of these articles take a wider view to include passages from 349a–360e, because the dialogue’s dis-cussion of courage and wisdom resumes discussion about the unity of virtue which was left unfinished at 334a; however, others take a narrower view, considering only one portion of the thicket of arguments between 330b and 334c.23. See Sayre 1963, Manuwald 1975, and Klosko 1980. Duncan 1978 is an outlier, since his account of the final exchange about courage and wisdom is part of an exposition of courage as a theme and motif that runs throughout the dialogue.24. See Sullivan 1961, O’Brien 1961, Sesonske 1963, Wolz 1967, Dyson 1976, and Zeyl 1980.25. See Gallop 1964, Santas 1966, Vlastos 1969, and Gulley 1971. See also Klosko 1979 and Cobb 1982 for more comprehensive work that connects several of these episodes, and the discussion of Klosko 1979 in section 2.3.


passages (in particular, 328d–334c and 348c–360a). Often they invoked unsystematic terminology and worked with impressionistic conceptions of logical inference. Vlastos’s frustrations are expressed pointedly in the opening of an article he wrote later about the unity of virtue discussion at 328d–334c:

Socrates employs formulae which seem hopelessly at odds both with common sense and with the procedural assumptions of his own dialectic. The proportions of this problem are obscured in standard discussions of [passages related to the unity of the virtues]. Some scholars act as though they were blissfully unaware of its difficulties. The grit in the Platonic text gets washed out of their bland paraphrases of Socrates’ views; one who has not worked through the original with stubborn attention to its wording would not know, after reading them, what is the problem I am talking about or even that there is a problem. (Vlastos 1972: 418–19)

This complaint is about Vlastos’s remote predecessors, and it singles out Shorey 1933 for special mention (Vlastos 1972: 419n2).�� His more immedi-ate predecessors, David Gallop (1961) and David Savan (1964) in particular, are excepted from this general complaint; they had embraced the same new analytical tools endorsed by Vlastos, and their analysis of these pas-sages meets a high standard of logical precision. Notice, however, how carefully Vlastos (1972: 419n1) demarcates the passages that are relevant for his own study: 329c–334c and 349d–350c.�� Quite simply, the tools of analytic philosophy seemed to apply more readily to some parts of the dialogue than to others. And as I noted earlier, not every scholar who worked on Protagoras during these years adopted the tools of analytic philosophy. As it happened, much of the work that did not fit the profile of analytic philosophical research focused on different passages in Protagoras. Some concentrated on Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d),�� some on the debate over the meaning of the Simonides poem (338e–347a),�� and one article (Miller 1977) covered the middle inter-lude (334c–338e). For twenty-six years, those who depended on the tools of analytic philosophy and those who did not use these tools managed to avoid interacting with each other in a critical, meaningful way, despite working on the same dialogue. In short, we find two almost independent

26. Other remote predecessors would include the notes from Adam and Adam in Plato 1905, Stocks 1913, Hackforth 1928, and Grube 1933.27. For other studies of this theoretical problem between 1956 and 1982 that are focused in this restricted way, see again note 22.28. Adkins 1973, Turner 1965, Moser and Kustas 1966, and Zaslavsky 1982; Turner uses the speech as historical evidence for the state of literacy in fifth century Athens.29. Parry 1965, Donlan 1969, Dickie 1978; see also Adkins 1960: appendix.


camps working next to each other in the same small field, one consisting of analytic philosophers and historians of philosophy and the other consisting of classicists, philologists, and nonanalytic philosophers.�0 Two divisions sustained the separation of the two camps. First, there is the disciplinary division, according to whether scholars depend on the methods of analytic philosophy. Second, and more important, is the division of the dialogue into discrete episodes, which became the textual domains of one camp or the other. The second division is more impor-tant because it rested on an assumption that was tacitly accepted by vir-tually everyone working on Protagoras during the 1956–82 period. Even if this Democritean conception of the dialogue originated in the philosophy camp, it was followed by everyone who concentrated on a single episode and explicated it in isolation from the dialogue as a whole. The coexistence of these two solitudes—which effectively divided in two the mainstream research agenda on Protagoras—remained constant for twenty-six years.

2.2. “Democritean” Scholarship: 1956–1982Vlastos’s introductory essay in 1956, along with subsequent analytic philo-sophical work on Protagoras, is in keeping with larger trends in twentieth- century Anglo-American philosophy. Robinson 1953 and Vlastos 1956 were among the earliest attempts to apply the tools of analytic philosophy to Plato. This kind of philosophy has a special fascination with formulat-ing precise definitions of key terms and analyzing the logic of arguments. It dates back another half century before Vlastos 1956, to the early work of Bertrand Russell and to the efforts in various branches of philosophy to discover the logical foundations of artificial and natural languages. As part of this program, new tools of analysis were developed to explicate the syntactic structure of propositions and the systematic scaffolding of natural languages. The analytic, philosophical commentary that followed Vlastos 1956 merely extended the reach of this tradition into a new domain. It is difficult to overestimate the sweep of these changes in twentieth- century Anglo-American philosophy, in particular the displacement of the classical syllogistic term-logic (originating in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics) by modern truth-functional logic and predicate notation. These are the most powerful of the new tools now in the hands of philosophical commentators on Plato. Since at the time there were no comparable innovations in the methods of analysis used by classicists, it is understandable that the sudden

30. Stokes (1986: 1–3) makes a similar observation; however, he characterizes the second camp more narrowly as Hellenists, which would leave out Miller 1977 and Zaslavsky 1982, along with some of the work covered below in section 2.3.


burst of activity from philosophy scholars working on Protagoras was not matched by a comparable output from classicists or philologists. As it turns out, the philosophers’ new tools seem to apply readily to the passages of Protagoras that concentrate on defining key terms (e.g., virtue, justice, etc.) and constructing theoretical positions in a step-by-step procedure (e.g., Protagoras’s position on the unity of virtue, 328d–334c, 348c–360c); how-ever, these same tools have no obvious application to other passages (e.g., the outer frame, 309a–310a). Philosophical commentators really were not as interested in much of the dialogue outside 328c–334c and 348c–360c.�� Thus, as we saw, when other scholars concentrated on different passages in Protagoras, the dominance of analytic philosophers working on the dialogue led to its fragmentation, too. In general, the analytic philosophy commentators concentrated on one or more of the many problematic statements and paradoxical theses in Protagoras. Typical guiding questions were of the following sort: What does Plato, Socrates, or Protagoras mean by such claims as “justice is just,” “holiness is just,” “wisdom is the opposite of folly,” “weakness of the will is impossible,” or “pleasure is good”? Debates over these semantic questions considered whether justice and holiness are supposed to be identical, bicon-ditionally instantiated or interdefinable, whether or not “is just” should be explained as a special kind of predication, whether or not the opposition of wisdom and folly should be understood in terms of contradiction or con-trariety, and so on. These questions were pursued with technical, logically exacting rigor, which seemed to require examining passages in isolation rather than in the larger context of the complete dialogue. The crucial first step taken by these commentators in elucidating the semantic content of the problematic statements and paradoxical theses cited above is so simple that its significance is easy to overlook: almost without exception, that step consists in identifying whether a particular perplexing proposition is a premise or a conclusion. If a commentator’s first impulse is to ask this question, then it is natural to focus attention on those parts of a text in which the arguments are thick on the ground and to look past or over those parts which seem barren of discursive argumenta-tion. In other words, the methodology adopted by philosophical commen-tators for clarifying and assessing the function of particular propositions served as their principle of selection; the only passages in the dialogue that offered the appropriate context to apply their analytic and evaluative tools are argumentative rather than dramatic. This explains why a dispropor-

31. Of the thirty journal articles listed in note 19, only Wolz 1963 and Maguire 1977 focus on material from other parts of the dialogue.


tionate amount of the philosophical commentators’ attention was lavished on the dialectical skirmishes between Socrates and Protagoras over the unity of virtue, the relation between courage and wisdom, and the cogency of hedonism. This diagnosis applies to Vlastos 1956 and to much of the philosophical commentary that followed it. Indeed, Vlastos himself con-tributed influential articles on the unity of virtue (330b–334c and 348b–360e), Pauline predication�� in the unity of virtue passages (330b–331e), and weakness of the will (351b–360e).�� It is important to acknowledge that the analytic philosophy commen-tators understood context to be crucial for determining meaning or for addressing controversies about the meaning of a particular proposition. But, as I said, they tended overwhelmingly to work on those parts of the dialogue which seemed to offer only one kind of context, namely, an argu-mentative one. Of necessity, the meaning of a term such as “holiness” (hosiotês) is problematic on its own. At the very least, word meaning is holo-phrastic, i.e., a word must occur in the context of a sentence in order to acquire any determinate semantic content. But the problem that arises sev-eral times in Protagoras is determining the meaning of an entire proposition, such as “both justice is holy and holiness just” (kai tên dikaiosunên hosion einai kai tên hosiotêta dikaion, 331b). In this case, the context has an undeni-able argumentative thrust: Socrates and Protagoras are following a line of reasoning toward a conclusion (even if it gets aborted before arriving at anything conclusive). For this passage, a commentator needs to specify the semantic function of the grammatical copula, einai, and this will depend on the logical function of the proposition within the passage: Is einai being asserted predicatively in a declarative sentence (e.g., a just person exhibits the quality of being holy), definitionally in a theoretical postulate (e.g., jus-tice is conceived of as containing holiness as one of its defining features), or in some other sense and in some other kind of proposition? The diagram presented in figure 1 illustrates the embeddedness of semantic content within an argumentative or logical context, as it seems to be understood by Vlastos 1956 and other philosophical commentators:

32. The name originates in a similarity between “justice is holy” and St. Paul’s dictum, “love is patient and kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4). The predicate “is patient and kind” attaches not to the concept of love (charity) directly, as Paul appears to be saying; rather, it attaches to the people who instantiate love. Similarly, “is just” may be predicated of holiness because it attaches to holy people. For criticism of Vlastos’s Pauline interpretation, see Forrester 1975, Devereux 1977, and Wakefield 1991.33. See Vlastos 1969, 1972, 1974, and 1981. I should add that the direct influence of Vlastos 1956 becomes more difficult to track after these later pieces appear. Because these articles supplement with more detail, expand on, correct, and supersede Vlastos 1956, they attracted more direct critical response from subsequent scholars.


Each of the two interior circles is embedded within the larger circle(s) sur-rounding it. The line enclosing “Semantic Content of Individual Proposi-tions” is dotted to indicate the purported determining role of the logical relations within which the propositions are embedded; there is a certain amount of leakage between the two inner circles, in so far as underdeter-mination of semantic content of an individual proposition demands inter-pretive abeyance until its logical function is determined. The solid line around “Logical Relations between Propositions” indicates the method-ological attempt to cordon off the theoretical, argumentative passages of the dialogue from their dramatic presentation. Because philosophical commentators expected the semantic content of a paradoxical or opaque proposition to be rendered determinate by specifying its logical function in isolation from the dialogue’s drama, it is only natural that they concen-trated on those parts of Protagoras which seemed most susceptible to logi-cal analysis. The drama (i.e., the rest of the dialogue, considered under a single heading to include the frames, the interlude, “comic digressions,” etc.) was, implicitly, left for other people to elucidate. Outside the philosophy camp, work proceeded mainly on two of those parts of Protagoras that were beyond the textual domain of analytic phi-losophers, namely, Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d) and the debate between Socrates and Protagoras over the meaning of Simonides’ ode to Scopas (338e–347a). While this work did not conform to the methods of logical analysis used in the philosophy camp, it accepted the fundamental Democritean assumption that the dialogue could be divided into a suc-cession of episodes which could be isolated for independent examination. Let us consider these two episodes briefly. For each episode, I want to

Figure 1


focus first on those parts which seem to be “argumentative” in the sense recognized by analytic philosophers, then I shall explain why each one fell outside their domain. Most of Protagoras’s Great Speech has the kind of linear, proof-like con-struction that appears amenable to the analytic tools of logic. Immediately after summing up the Prometheus-Epimetheus myth, Protagoras promises “further proof ” (323a) that people believe justice is the result of instruc-tion and not nature, and he introduces the last portion of the speech as an “argument instead of a myth” (ouketi muthon . . . alla logon, 324d). Shouldn’t these sociological arguments have attracted the attention of analytic phi-losophers? Perhaps, but the indispensable core of the speech is an etiologi-cal account of the origins of respect and justice (aidôs and dikê, 322c) in the form of a myth (320c–323a). The story of Prometheus and Epimetheus providing natural defenses for all mortal creatures except humanity con-tains the central message of Protagoras’s speech, and all the subsequent arguments presuppose this etiological myth as their point of departure. The myth is indispensable to the rest of the speech in this way and is not analyzable in strict, logical terms; as a result, none of the speech attracted much attention within the philosophy camp.�� For these reasons, it seems, most of the commentary on this speech came from outside this camp.�� What about the debate between Socrates and Protagoras over the mean-ing of Simonides’ ode? The contradiction upon which this debate turns certainly invites logical analysis. Socrates maintains that the ode is “finely composed,” then Protagoras criticizes the poet for contradicting himself (enantia legei autos autô) on the issue of whether or not it is difficult for a per-son to be good (339b–d). But as it turns out, this is one of the least prob-lematic details of the entire episode; what requires analysis and exegesis is Socrates’ convoluted attempt to explain away this apparent contradiction. Most of the episode is taken up by Socrates’ extended interpretation of the poem, purporting to show that the two opening stanzas agree with each other (tauta ekeinois homologeisthai [339c], homologein autos heautô [339d]).

34. One interesting exception seems to have been little noticed by other philosophers, namely, Wolz 1963. According to Wolz (ibid.: 222, 234), Plato expected readers to notice pat-terns in a myth, to correlate key features of these patterns, and to extrapolate a general thesis from the particularities of the story. Wolz uses the Prometheus-Epimetheus myth to illus-trate his methodological thesis, and he compares this myth to the ideal of philosopher-kings in Republic. Maguire 1977 also examines the speech, but primarily to determine at what point in it Plato stops portraying Protagoras with historical accuracy and begins putting words in his mouth to serve his own purposes. The only other research on this myth in a philosophy journal is Zaslavsky 1982. But I think it is noteworthy that this was published just prior to the transition that began in 1983, and in a journal outside mainstream analytic philosophy.35. See note 28 for references.


More significantly, Socrates’ exegetical account of the poem arises in response to the dialectical pressures operative in this part of the dialogue. The episode begins with Protagoras maintaining that “the greatest part of a man’s education is to be skilled in the matter of verses (poiêtôn); that is, to be able to apprehend . . . what has been rightly composed, and to know how to distinguish them and account for them . . .” (339a). After eliciting praise from Socrates for Simonides’ ode, Protagoras says the poem contains a contradiction between (a) Simonides maintaining for his own part that it is hard to become good and (b) criticizing Pitticus for saying that it is hard to be good (339d–e). Socrates then rehabilitates the poem by attributing a competitive motive to Simonides (diagnosed by means of a backstory con-necting Sparta and the Seven Sages, 342a–343c), positing the existence of some implicit claims within the poem and transposing words accordingly (343c–344b), differentiating human and divine forms of goodness (344b–345c), having Simonides deny the possibility of moral weakness (345d–e), and drawing a sharp distinction between being and becoming (345d–347a). All of this and more is put forth as Simonides’ intended meaning (dianeisthai [341a] or dianooumenos [347a]). At times this exegesis goes well beyond the evidence of Simonides’ text, if it is not too fanciful to be taken seriously at all—the Spartan origins of philosophy, in particular. At other times it attributes to Simonides theses that are now associated with Socra-tes himself (the denial of moral weakness, for example). In effect, Socrates may well save Simonides from formal contradiction by assimilating the poet’s “meaning” to his own peculiar beliefs (such as they appear to be). In any case, the alleged contradiction does not require special methods of logical analysis to explicate. And, clearly, questions about the shades and nuances of Socrates’ irony are not going to be illuminated by an exegeti-cal approach that is based on logical analysis. So again, under the self-imposed restraints operating in the philosophy camp, it is not surprising that they entirely avoided this episode throughout the 1956–82 period. Conversely, a significant proportion of the research coming from the classicist camp during this period was on the Simonides episode. When we look at this work, we can see how thoroughly these classicists accepted the Democritean approach to Protagoras.�� Furthermore, classicists and phi-lologists working on this episode seemed interested primarily in extracting Simonides’ ode from its context within the dialogue in order to answer questions about the genre and contents of the original poem. Its func-tion within the dialogue is secondary. Leonard Woodbury’s (1953) purpose,

36. The same may also be said of Moser and Kustas 1966 and Adkins 1973, which concen-trate on the Great Speech.


which is adopted by his successors, is summed up in his title—“Simonides on Ἁρετή”; Simonides’ ode, not Plato’s dialogue, is the focus. Parry 1965, Donlan 1969, and Dickie 1978 treat Protagoras as a source document, a leaky vessel for the incomplete poem, and their exegetical efforts are aimed at recovering the sense of the original, complete text; arguably, these might not be counted as scholarly treatments of Protagoras at all, since the pri-mary concern is to extract it from the dialogue and reconstruct the urtext of Simonides.

2.3. Signs of InstabilityI said at the end of section 2.1 that the state of Protagoras scholarship follow-ing Vlastos 1956 remained “constant” for over a quarter of a century. And so it was. However, the situation was not truly stable, for it rested on two artificial divisions—the disciplinary divide between analytic-philosophical and “classical” research, and the Democritean division between the parts of the dialogue. When these divisions proved to be more limiting than lib-erating, there was little reason for anyone to remain constrained by them. These limitations were hardly noticed until the 1980s, but signs of insta-bility were evident from the beginning. Figure 1 helps to diagnose two aspects of instability in the methodology of philosophical exegesis produced between 1956 and 1982. First, there is the narrow conception of “argumentation” on which the analytic phi-losophers depended: it consists entirely of logical relations, and does not include the full repertoire of conversational details that are integral to con-struction of arguments in Plato’s dialogues, Protagoras especially. Second, there is the effort to isolate the arguments (so conceived) by cordoning off the episodes in which they are situated from the drama surrounding them. In the task of elucidating the semantic content of enigmatic, obscure or counterintuitive propositions, philosophical commentators did not see a need to accommodate the drama of Protagoras in any kind of systematic or methodical way. From the abstract viewpoint of logic, a statement of impli-cation remains an implication whether it is asserted by a lone speaker (in, for example, a soliloquy) or by a speaker addressing an interlocutor who is expected to reply immediately (as in a dialogue) or by a speaker addressing a remote and anonymous audience (as in a systematic treatise). The same may be said for a statement of conjunction, disjunction, or any other kind of declarative proposition. But the constants, variables, and logical opera-tors of symbolic logic were not designed to accommodate a wide range of grammatical moods without first reducing the sentences they explicate to declarative propositions. Nor does this kind of analysis capture the degree


of commitment toward the proposition which may be ascribed to Plato as author or to one of his characters as a dramatis persona—beyond accom-modating specifiable antecedent conditions.�� Translation from Greek to truth-functional propositional form (even when supplemented with predi-cate notation, modal operators, etc.) is no less tricky than translation from Greek to English. More importantly, we must bear in mind that the rules of inference found in classical syllogistic logic and modern truth-functional logic were designed to track the transmission of truth through linear infer-ences in demonstrative or refutational arguments. Few of the arguments in Protagoras (or any of Plato’s dialogues, for that matter) are formulated or presented in this fashion, since the “premises” are often the product of an intense, personal, cut-and-thrust exchange.�� Propositions are not simply asserted; they are elicited, asserted, contested, negotiated, and qualified by two or more interlocutors before they are agreed upon and “entered into the record.” Even then, the dramatis personae may agree for different rea-sons or they may have different degrees of commitment toward the claim upon which they both assent.�� In short, these argumentative exchanges are essentially dialectical, not merely logical. The methods of analysis used by analytic philosophers may indeed be powerful tools for explicating inferential relations in linear proofs, theo-rems, and explanations. But a dialogue demands that our tools of analysis accommodate the arguments as they are presented—that is, as dialecti-cal constructs. To catch a glimpse of how difficult this challenge is, let us

37. Additionally, we must remember what kind of clarity is provided by schematizing a proof symbolically. It is capable of clarifying only logical structure, and it does this by sys-tematically factoring out other dimensions of each proposition and the circumstances in which the line of argument is developed. The difference in emphasis between nai and panu ge, for example, is captured reasonably well in the English as “yes” and “certainly,” respec-tively; however, when translated into any kind of logical symbolism, the propositions being assented to by “yes” or “certainly” are turned into bare assertions, and this does not capture any potential difference in emphasis.38. On this, see Nicias’s warning to Lysimachus in Laches:

whomever comes into close contact with Socrates and has any talk with him face to face, is bound to be drawn round and round by him in the course of the dialectic—though it may have started at first on a quite different theme—and cannot stop until he is led into giving an account of himself, of the manner in which he now spends his days, and of the kind of life he has led hitherto; and when once he has been led into that, Socrates will never let him go until he has thoroughly and properly put all his ways to the test. (Plato 1924: 37; Laches 187e–188a)

39. According to Michael J. O’Brien (1961: 409), Plato intentionally depicts Socrates and Protagoras as misinterpreting each other in the exchange at 350b–c. This kind of suspicion can never be ruled out completely, even if it may not be correct in this case. In principle, nominal agreement is no guarantee that Plato is portraying the dramatis personae as under-standing each other.


return to “both justice is holy and holiness just” (331b), and look at it in its immediate context. After Protagoras finishes his Great Speech, Socrates asks him if the central concept, virtue, is one thing or many (329b–d). Pro-tagoras replies that virtue is one thing and that justice, holiness, modera-tion, etc., are its functionally distinct parts (329d). Socrates then wants to know how these parts may be functionally distinguished. He concentrates on the relationship between justice and holiness, which Protagoras says are “unlike” each other. Socrates then characterizes himself as Protagoras’s ally (rather than his antagonist), and he asks Protagoras to imagine that the two of them are being interrogated by a hypothetical interlocutor. Socrates is speaking first in the following passage:

[1] Is it you [Protagoras] who say that one part of virtue is not like another? Is this statement yours [rather than mine, since I only asked the question]? What answer would you give?[2] I must admit it, Socrates, he said.[3] Well now, Protagoras, after that admission, what answer shall we give him, if he goes on to ask this question: Is not holiness something of such nature as to be just, and justice of such a nature to be holy, or can it be unholy? Can holiness be not just, and therefore unjust, and justice unholy? What is to be our reply?[4] I should say for myself, on my own behalf, that both justice is holy and holiness just, and with your permission I would make this same reply for you also; since justice is either the same thing as holiness or extremely like it, and above all, justice is of the same kind as holiness, and holiness is justice. Are you minded to forbid this answer, or are you in agreement with it?[5] I do not take quite so simple a view of it, Socrates, as to grant that justice is holy and holiness just. I think we have to make a distinction here . . . (331a–c; numbers added)

This passage presupposes (from 330b–c) that Socrates and Protagoras may be in fundamental agreement but that the hypothetical third person is skeptical about Protagoras’s position on the unity of virtue. So Socra-tes is speaking for this hypothetical interlocutor and, at the same time, representing himself as Protagoras’s partner. The long quotation begins with Socrates getting Protagoras to take sole responsibility for the general thesis, namely, that the parts of virtue are “unlike” each other [1]. After Protagoras accepts responsibility for this claim [2], Socrates asks a related question about the specific relation between justice and holiness [3]. He then answers this question for himself and asks Protagoras if he agrees with this answer [4]. Protagoras is not prepared to accept Socrates’ answer, but he does not reject it categorically, either [5]. The dialectical complexities of this brief exchange present several distinc-tive difficulties, quite beyond the problems of dissecting the premises and


logical inferences of the theoretical positions of Socrates or Protagoras. First, the unfolding position of Protagoras needs to be differentiated from that of Socrates, even though they have previously agreed to several other claims about justice and holiness (330c–e). But does the single point of disagreement about the answer to [3] signal the first divergence of opinion on this single question or does it signal the need to disambiguate an earlier claim on which their agreement was apparent but not real? Next, are we to interpret Socrates’ questions to Protagoras as disguised questions of his own, based on presuppositions from his own predetermined theoretical position on the unity of virtue question, or are they supposed to originate from an independent set of presuppositions? And finally, what are we to think about the hypothetical interrogator? Is this simply a theoretically possible person with some pertinent questions for Protagoras? Or is Socra-tes using this as a device to disguise his antagonism to Protagoras? Or is it some particular person that Socrates has in mind, such as Hippocrates—the young man he is representing? These and similar questions hover in the background of numerous scholarly debates in the philosophy camp over the logic of this exchange. This is not the place to answer them, but rather to point out problems with one way in which the dialectical aspects of this passage were routinely bypassed. This strategy involved making axiomatic certain claims about Socrates’ exemplary moral character or Protagoras’s sophistical evasive-ness (e.g., Vlastos 1956, 1969, 1972).�0 In a superficial way, declarations of this sort appear to accommodate the drama of Protagoras by incorporating character as part of the exegesis. But, too often, such declarations about the “character” of Socrates or Protagoras are not based on the development of their characterization in this dialogue. Rather, they are “Socrates” or “Pro-tagoras” conceived as hypostasized constructions and based exclusively on external evidence, either from other dialogues by Plato or from historical reputation or from the commentator’s own conception of morality. Vlastos 1972, in particular, explicitly rejects the possibility that Plato—for peda-gogical or polemical purposes—would portray Socrates as professing to believe a proposition that he really believes to be false or defending a posi-tion with fallacious arguments. According to Vlastos (ibid.: 418n5), this possibility is inconsistent with what we know about the philosophical life, or Socrates’ character, from other dialogues of Plato. This artificial, reified conception of Socrates’ character is highly impressionistic: Socrates’ integ-rity is declared to be such that he is unable to lie, dissemble, or intention-ally mislead his interlocutor with a fallacious inference. As a consequence,

40. Following the lead of Klosko 1979, I shall concentrate on Vlastos.


the interpretation of a passage as implying that Socrates does any of these things is rejected on moral grounds (these grounds combining a Kantian antipathy for lying and a popular disdain for sophistic, disputatious argu-mentation). Instead of exploring the dramatic development of character in Protagoras in order to address the dialectical aspects of the dialogue’s argumentation, this approach appeals to extraordinary assumptions of this sort.�� If we review all this research on the fragmented Protagoras, we can see that some parts of the dialogue were ill-served by the Democritean program of research. First, two integral parts of the dialogue’s dramatic plot were not covered in this way by anyone: (a) the two opening frames, which establish the context of the meeting between Socrates and Protagoras (309a–316a), and (b) the middle interlude, which commences with an impasse over the rules of their engagement, involves five additional interlocutors, and ends by establishing new conditions to continue the discussion (334c–338e). If we take Plato seriously as a dramatic artist, then the frames are essential to the dialogue’s construction: in the first, outer frame, Socrates and his unnamed friend discuss the comparative charms of physical beauty and wisdom; in the inner frame, it is established that Socrates is approaching Protagoras on behalf of the young Hippocrates.�� If we take this dialogue seriously as a dialectical drama, then the reflection on procedure in the middle interlude should provide important guidance for subsequent devel-opments.�� In either case, it is hard to imagine how these passages could be analyzed in isolation. One wonders, then, how it became so easy for all the other parts to be analyzed that way. This is the first source of instability in the Democritean approach—that it provides incomplete coverage of the dialogue. Over and above the difficulties faced by scholars in the philosophy camp trying to cordon off the arguments from the drama of Protagoras and by all the Democritean work of explicating its parts in isolation, there remains another difficulty. The exegetical program in which parts of the dialogue are extracted for specialized analysis is bound to leave out one question entirely: what is it that unifies all the episodic parts? This question and the complaint that Democritean research fragments the dialogue into discrete

41. See Klosko 1979 for extended criticism of both the methodology and the substantive point expressed in Vlastos’s (1972) note. At one point in Vlastos 1956, the hedonistic inter-pretation of Socrates’ position is discounted as follows: “hedonism is not in keeping with the general temper or method of Socratic ethics . . .” (ibid.: xl–xli). We saw earlier (section 2.1) that Vlastos 1956 invokes passages from Plato’s Theaetetus to explain the meaning of Protag-oras’s Great Speech; for criticisms of this practice, see Moser and Kustas 1966.42. In section 2.4., we shall look at Gagarin 1969 and Klosko 1979 in this regard.43. In section 2.4, we shall look briefly at Miller 1977 in this regard; see also Cohen 2002.


episodes are Aristotelian in spirit. Here I am thinking not only of Brum-baugh’s characterization of Aristotelian metaphysical systems, but also of what Aristotle says specifically about literary unity and plot in On Poetics.�� In chapter 6, Aristotle calls plot “the first principle (archê ) and . . . the soul (psychê ) of tragedy, and the characters are second” (1450a38). A good plot must put together its events to form a complete action (1450b25), and even if it is complex and involves reversals and discoveries, it must be unified (1452a11–22). In chapter 9, he defines an episodic plot as “one in which the episodes following one another are neither likely nor necessary,” and he calls them “the worst” kind (1451b33–35). Thus, to conceive of a literary work as a sequence of discrete episodes, unified only by the presence of the same characters, is to imply that it is inferior in this sense. Ultimately, this is what Democritean work on Protagoras does: in treating the dialogue as if it were nothing other than a series of independent episodes, it diminishes its artistry. In this same light, the attempt to cordon off the arguments from the drama misrepresents one important contribution made by the literary dimension of a Platonic dialogue. The drama of a dialogue is not mere color, digressive comic relief, or nonfunctional ornamentation. It is that which gives shape, form, unity and purpose to the work as a whole.

2.4. “Aristotelian” Scholarship: 1956–1982The predominant Democritean character of research on Protagoras during these years is only highlighted by the paucity of work wrestling with the problem of the dialogue’s unity. Some work did relate to the unity prob-lem, however, and its sheer existence indicates something about the basis of the Democritean divisions traced in section 2.3: they were the result of historically contingent factors (larger developments in Anglo-American, analytic philosophy, in particular), but do not reflect the text itself. Two articles focused directly on the problem of specifying how Protago-ras is unified: Gagarin 1969 and Klosko 1979. Dubose 1973 concentrates, instead, on the aporetic ending of the dialogue, especially the image Soc-rates draws of the conclusion of the argument (exodos tôn logôn) he and Pro-tagoras have produced together: as laughing at them for inadvertently switching positions on the question they began with, that is, whether or not virtue is teachable (361a–d). This passage is used to characterize the entire dialogue as a philosophical comedy. From the perspective of the final apo-ria, Shannon Dubose looks back on the pattern of parody in the dialogue—

44. English references to Aristotle’s On Poetics are to Aristotle 2002; all Greek text is from Aristotle 1968. For greater precision, I use Bekker page and line references in the text of this article.


Protagoras’s claim to teach virtue is undermined by his failure to define virtue, Prodicus’s trademark excellence in semantic analysis is portrayed as pointless hairsplitting, and Hippias’s claim to literary authority is deflated by Socrates’ withering dismissal of this practice. Likewise, both Miller 1977 and 1978 explicate a single passage—the middle interlude (334c–338e) and the Prometheus-Epimetheus myth (320c–323a), respectively—but with a view to its function within the dialogue as a whole. Finally, Duncan 1978 identifies an important theme in the dialogue, the relationship between the character of Protagoras and the concept of courage, and it follows this theme as it is treated and developed in successive episodes. It is worth noting that, despite the small size of this pool, several disci-plines are represented in it. Two of these articles (Duncan 1978 and Klosko 1979) make liberal use of the methods that defined the analytic philosophy camp, one (Gagarin 1969) is by a classicist, and three (Dubose 1973, Miller 1977 and 1978) were published in nonanalytical philosophy journals. The Aristotelian approach to Protagoras during these years was therefore inde-pendent of disciplinary divisions. Both Gagarin 1969 and Klosko 1979 concentrate on the relationship between Socrates and Protagoras here, both explore the implications this relationship has upon Protagoras as a whole, and both provide a synop-tic explication of the entire dialogue. Michael Gagarin (1969: 134, 164) advanced the novel interpretation that Socrates and Protagoras are not related as antagonists, as most commentators suppose. Rather, the dia-logue establishes a basic continuity between them, and it makes the posi-tive claim that virtue is teachable. George Klosko’s (1979) position on the relationship between Socrates and Protagoras (that they are antagonists) is more conventional; however, his specific thesis, that Plato deliberately por-trays both principal interlocutors as using fallacies for eristic (disputatious) purposes, contradicts the influential view that, for moral reasons, Plato would never portray Socrates arguing in this unseemly fashion (cf. Vlastos 1972: 418n5). While the fundamental interpretations offered by Gagarin and Klosko differ, there are remarkable similarities in their procedures. Gagarin works his way through the entire dialogue, one episode at a time, but stresses the links between them as much as the content of each. Klosko (1979: 126–29) begins by surveying the dialogue in a panoramic sweep to highlight evidence of the antagonistic relationship of Socrates and Pro-tagoras and the disputatious nature of their discussion; then he turns to three passages which he maintains contain logically fallacious inferences (330b–332a, 332a–333b, 349e–351b; Klosko 1979: 129–41). The analysis in the long, second part of his essay deploys the logical apparatus that is familiar from the philosophy camp, where these passages had already been


given special attention.�� The difference is that, unlike the articles listed above in notes 19 and 20, Klosko analyzes these arguments with due regard to their literary presentation and context. Dubose 1973 and Miller 1978 are no less panoramic than Gagarin 1969 and Klosko 1979, but both examine the dialogue from a single, special vantage point within the text.�� The final page of the dialogue (Dubose) and the Prometheus-Epimetheus myth (Miller) are explicated in detail, but these details are revealed to have systematic implications for the entire dialogue. In this regard, both of these studies contrast sharply with the Democritean practice of explicating isolated passages. Dubose alleges that the entire dialogue is framed by the final image Socrates draws for Pro-tagoras, where the conclusion of their joint discussion is laughing and accusing them of being ridiculous (katêgorein te kai katagelan . . . atopoi, 361a). To defend this thesis, she identifies comic dimensions of Protagoras as they are developed from the opening frames, the introduction of the sophists at Callias’s, the middle interlude, Socrates’ “preposterous” interpretation of Simonides’ poem, and the final theoretical impasse over wisdom and cour-age. According to Miller 1978, Prometheus and Epimetheus mythically represent two useful and complementary kinds of technical knowledge—the one’s rational power of foresight and the other’s experiential capacity for retrospective reflection. Aspects of Prometheus and Epimetheus are then attributed to both Socrates and Protagoras; additionally, the obstacles to productive discussion between the latter are prefigured in the impasse faced by the two mythical titans in their joint efforts to preserve human beings. Accordingly, the myth introduces a motif, the relation between forethought (pro-metheus) and afterthought (epi-metheus), which “illuminates the larger story . . . and provides a Platonic comment on the issues central to the whole of Protagoras” (ibid.: 22). These two papers, then, focus on one framing device in the dialogue and use their analysis of a single episode to elucidate what they consider as one important aspect of Protagoras’s unity. Duncan 1978, by contrast, traces

45. It is worth contrasting Klosko 1979 with Cobb 1982, which surveys many of the same passages but arrives at the opposite conclusion, i.e., that none of them contains a logical fallacy. These studies differ not only in their substantive conclusions, but also in their onto-logical conceptions of the text. Cobb’s is a thoroughly Democritean conception and, like other analytic philosophers at the time, he deals exclusively with the unity of virtue passages (328d–334c, 348c–360c).46. Miller 1977 presents the middle interlude as establishing the Socratic terms on which the second half of the dialogue takes place (question-and-brief-answer procedure). His claims about the pivotal role of this interlude, however, depend on one fundamental assumption: that the midpoint of a Platonic dialogue nearly always has systematic implications as the place where major thematic or methodological questions are addressed. If one accepts this assumption, then this study fits the Aristotelian approach to Protagoras.


one guiding concern as it is woven throughout the dialogue, namely, the question “What about the virtue of courage . . . for Protagoras?” (ibid.: 216). When Protagoras first mentions the set of special virtues in his Great Speech (322b, 323a, 323e, 324e), courage is not included, although it is alluded to indirectly when he commends physical exercise on the grounds that a fit man will not be “forced by bodily faults to play the coward in wars and other duties” (ibid.: 217). Socrates gives courage an explicit place in the subsequent theoretical discussion by adding it to the list of special virtues (329e, ibid.: 218). Finally, the relation of courage to wisdom (which Protagoras has deemed the greatest part of virtue, 330a) is made central for the long, final stretch of the dialogue (348c–360e); in this discussion, Protagoras is pushed by Socrates to accept a hedonistic account of value and, ultimately, to recant his original claim that the special virtues may be sharply differentiated from one another. According to Duncan (ibid.: 224), Protagoras’s original omission of courage in his account of the special virtues and the failure to integrate it into his account by the end of the dia-logue should be especially significant for one member of the audience in Callias’s house, Hippocrates. Socrates’ efforts to flush Protagoras out from cover are for the benefit of this prospective protégé: Hippocrates should be left wondering whether there is much hope that Protagoras can teach virtue and whether Protagorean wisdom (which seems to exclude tradi-tional conceptions of courage) is worth learning.

3. Protagoras Scholarship: 1983–1992

3.1. Signs of a TransitionIn the early 1980s, a transition began to take place in English-language scholarship on Protagoras, primarily within the philosophical camp.�� The most obvious sign of change was the emergence of three book-length exegetical works, all of which raise the profile of the dialogue’s drama and historical context. All pay special attention to its unity, too. In 1983, Larry Goldberg published A Commentary on Plato’s ‘Protagoras’, which explores Protagoras “as an artistic whole with its own special unity and pur-pose” (ibid.: 1). In 1986, Michael Stokes published Plato’s Socratic Conversa-

47. It needs to be said that this transformation is but one instance of a general reaction against the fragmentation of philosophy, a movement that was signaled in Richard Rorty’s critique of analytic philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). More specific tes-timony of a general transformation in Plato scholarship at this time is provided by Schofield (1992: 122): “In the bad old days questions about the literary properties of the Platonic dialogue were not much canvassed by philosophical readers—unless they happened to be Straussians or (in even older days) neo-Platonists. The flavour of the 1980s was rather differ-ent: the relation of form to content has become a prime subject of philosophical interest.”


tions: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues, which contains a detailed, 256-page, long exegesis of Protagoras as a dramatized conversation (along with similar, briefer treatments of Lysis and a portion of Symposium). Finally, in Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment (1987), Patrick Coby explicates the entire dialogue under the operating assumption that “the topics of the dia-logue as well as every turn in its argument are occasioned by the carefully disclosed character of Protagoras” (ibid.: 17). These three authors shared a commitment to attend carefully to the dialogue as a constructed whole, which is contrasted by each with its treatment as a collection of discrete arguments and episodes. These books are, for this reason, Aristotelian in their comprehensiveness and their attention to unifying features. Both Goldberg 1983 and Coby 1987 adopt an interpretive stance toward Protagoras that differs sharply from the Democritean one which predomi-nated in the 1956–82 period. Certainly, in declining to use the analytic philosophers’ tools to schematize the dialogue’s “arguments,” these books do not sit within the philosophical camp. Insofar as exegetical attention in these books is distributed evenly among all the “episodes,” they do not have the exclusive focus of either the analytic philosophical work we have reviewed (on 328d–334c and 348c–360e) or all the other work (on 320d–328d and 338e–348c). But Stokes 1986 is the study I want to examine, for it was the only one of these three books to address explicitly the trends traced in section 2.1. The relevant themes of Stokes’s introduction are worth summarizing here. He begins by acknowledging that, from a logical point of view, great strides had been made in the previous seventy years by philosophers work-ing on the “wiry” argumentation of Plato’s dialogues (ibid.: 1).�� Gregory Vlastos’s work and Taylor’s (1976) translation and commentary of Protago-ras are singled out for special mention. Nevertheless, it is the increase of exegetical work which acknowledges and accommodates Plato’s artistry that Stokes finds most encouraging. This scholarly exegesis treats “Plato’s works as the dialogues they are, rather than the philosophical treatises they are not” (Stokes 1986: 1). Continental European scholars have been more successful in doing this, according to Stokes. In English-language scholar-ship, “very few philosophers indeed have undertaken the task of interpret-ing a dialogue from start to finish, through passages overtly philosophi-cal and manifestly literary alike in exploration of the relation between the parts and the whole” (ibid.: 2). This emphasis on the unity of a dialogue’s parts, the dialectical nature of its arguments, and the artistry of its orga-nization informs his efforts to explicate Protagoras (along with Lysis and

48. Stokes borrows the expression “wiry argument” from Vlastos 1956: xxxi.


Symposium) as Socratic “conversations.” The influence of Stokes’s work was soon evident in the revisions to Taylor’s Clarendon Press edition of Protago-ras. In the preface to the revised edition, Taylor (1991: vii) credits Stokes 1986 as a critical stimulus for many revisions in his translation. Then, in the new introduction, he acknowledges Stokes’s challenge to account for “the thematic unity underlying the rich episodic diversity of the dialogue” (ibid.: xii). Taylor has not been convinced to change his own procedure of commenting on isolated passages, without regard to dramatic or thematic developments that unify the dialogue (ibid.: xviii). But it is no longer pos-sible for commentators to ignore the issue of unity. Because exegetical work by analytic philosophers dominated scholarly discussion of Protagoras between 1956 and 1982, any significant change in the treatment of this dialogue had to begin with them.�� First, there is an important difference between treating the arguments as “dialectical” conversational artifacts (the way Stokes 1986 exemplifies) and as “logical” proofs (the way analytic philosophers had done). Treating the arguments as dialectical makes it very difficult (if not impossible and undesirable) to cordon them off from the dramatic context. Stokes (ibid.: 33) formulates the difference between the logical and dialectical dimensions of an argu-ment in terms of the consequences each has upon the dialogue and its characters:

The consequences of a proposition in this “dialectical” sense include its logical consequences, since a normal person finds it hard to resist conclusive logic when he recognizes it. But dialectical and logical consequences are not identical sets; dialectical consequences range much wider, and include far more propositions, than logical consequences. But dialectical consequences are Socrates’ concern in the dialogues. . . . This concern is important for the dialogues’ interpreta-tion, and it is specially important . . . to realize that people in Plato’s dialogues commit themselves to propositions unfortunate for their later admissions even before Socrates starts to question them.

49. As it happens, two provocative philological articles were published during these years that may be provisionally characterized as Aristotelian, Walsh 1984 and Alford 1988. Walsh (ibid.: 104–6) argues that the large number of notorious miscreants named as students of the sophists in Callias’s house constitute a dramatic comment on the historical failure of the sophists to teach virtue; by the time the dialogue was written, almost all of those named had been exiled, involved in scandalous intrigues, and otherwise disgraced. Alford 1988 (173–74) fills out the institutional context implicit in Protagoras’s reference to punishment as “euthu-nai” (326e) in the Great Speech: the term refers to official punishment of magistrates, but since in Athenian democracy all the citizens take turns in governing, the range of people who might be subject to this punishment is actually quite wide. The institutional context explains how Protagoras can reconcile the democratic and elitist themes of his speech (ibid.: 176). I shall return to these articles in section 4.3.


If Stokes is correct (and I believe he is), then what constitutes the “drama” of a Socratic conversation cannot be confined to discrete parts of a dia-logue (e.g., the frame scenes of Protagoras). For there are elements of dra-matic tension, character revelation, and plot development in the dialecti-cally unfolding arguments themselves. If we reconsider the long passage from 331a–c quoted in section 2.3, we can see how all of these dramatic elements are irreducible components of the dialectic: dramatic tension is increased because the hypothetical interrogator resists Protagoras’s efforts at persuasion; Socrates proves himself to be an unusual ally when he leaves Protagoras exposed as the person responsible for the problematic thesis being investigated; and the question that Socrates attributes to the hypo-thetical interrogator flushes Protagoras out from cover, thereby exposing him as evasive and revealing his opinion. Looking back at figure 1, the solid line between the outermost circle representing the “Dramatic Presen-tation of the Arguments” and the arguments themselves should really be dotted—to convey the drama inherent in dialectical argumentation itself. When we turn to research published in journals at the same time as these three monographs, we find that the episodes within the dialogue are not always treated in isolation. More and more, they come to be treated as functionally interdependent parts within the whole dialogue.�0 Recogni-tion of this interdependence can be illustrated in the small burst of activity on the Simonides exchange at this time. Most of this work was by philoso-phers, which is remarkable in itself, since before 1983 this part of Protago-ras had been the exclusive domain of classicists; moreover, this new work emphasizes Plato’s purposes for including this episode in the dialogue, an emphasis that contrasts sharply with earlier attempts to reconstruct Simonides’ poem independently of its place in the dialogue. These later efforts were novel in attempting to see the Simonides episode as expressing dramatically Plato’s philosophical concerns, rather than as a window on the urtext of Simonides’ ode (Parry 1965, Donlan 1969, and Dickie 1978) or as a practical joke and digression (Vlastos 1956: xxiv). Fresh interest in the Simonides episode on the philosophical side got philosophers and histori-ans of philosophy to read philological work on the episode critically for the first time. And the results are encouraging. Ruth Scodel (1986: 25) reads the particularized, parodic depiction of lit-erary interpretation in the Simonides episode as a complement to the famous attack on writing in Plato’s Phaedrus: Whereas Phaedrus raises general ques-

50. Interdependence of some sort had been acknowledged previously, but only with regard to the relationship between Protagoras’s initial attempt to differentiate the special virtues (330b–334c) and his later attempt to differentiate courage and wisdom (348b–360e). See especially Vlastos 1972, Penner 1973, and Woodruff 1976.


tions about the independence of a written text and its capacity to explain itself (275d–e), Protagoras illustrates the complete dependence of interpre-tation on the prior beliefs of the interpreter. When Socrates does not find something that he recognizes as true in the words of Simonides’ text, he interprets the text to mean what he thinks is true—by resorting to various devices, such as transposing words or inserting something as implied (ibid.: 34). Dorothea Frede (1986: 748) argues that the Simonides episode was added later to an earlier version of the dialogue, a kind of proto-Protago-ras. Socrates’ characterization of a well-ordered discussion between men of education who speak and listen to each other in turn and who have no need for the extraneous voice of poetry (347c–e) is alleged to be a reference to Plato’s later dialogue Symposium (ibid.: 747). This reference was intended to point readers to Plato’s later work, which answered ethical questions in a more satisfactory way than Protagoras does (ibid.: 749). Nickolas Pappas (1989: 259) argues that Socrates’ interpretation of what “Simonides” means in the poem is so manifestly problematic that the person of the author dis-appears. Pappas (ibid.: 248, 258) portrays the episode as a dramatic illus-tration of how use of the principle of charity in poetic interpretation ulti-mately leads to hostility toward poetry (an attitude which is explored more extensively from a political perspective in Republic II, III and X). Carson 1992, unlike earlier philological studies of Simonides’ ode from the 1956–82 period, presents the episode as picking up central motifs from other parts of Protagoras: just as Prometheus mixed the earthly and the divine to save humanity in Protagoras’s speech (321c–d), so does Socrates mix up the elements of Simonides’ poem in his exegesis; whereas Protagoras attempted to appropriate poetry as the predecessor to sophistry (316b–317c), Socrates attempts to appropriate Simonides’ praise poem in order to praise his own views of human good.�� What this 1983–92 research has in common also serves to contrast it with earlier, Democritean work on Simonides: it attempts to link the Simonides episode to something outside these ten pages. Frede begins with an account of intradialogic linkages between the Simonides debate and the rest of Protagoras, then suggests interdialogic linkages to Symposium. Scodel frames her analysis of the episode by pointing out interdialogical link-ages between this episode and thematically similar discussions in Phaedrus, Apology (22a–b), Ion, and Hippias Minor (365c–d). Pappas notices two points of correspondence: (a) between the way Socrates treats Simonides’ poem and the way he treats live interlocutors in Protagoras and other dialogues;

51. This part of Protagoras plays a more restricted role in Baltzly’s (1992) construction of a general account of poetry and literary criticism from multifarious discussions in several dialogues.


and (b) between Socrates’ attitude toward poetry in Protagoras and in other dialogues. Finally, Anne Carson notices an intradialogic link between the Simonides episode and Protagoras’s Great Speech, and she frames the dia-logue’s triadic relationship among Simonides, Socrates, and Protagoras within the traditions of lyric praise poetry. In 1992, in a moment of remarkable synchronicity, three studies were published that illustrate perfectly the Aristotelian turn in scholarship on Protagoras and the disciplinary integration fostered by this approach. The exegesis in Rutherford 1992, Cropsey 1992, and Schofield 1992 gives an overview of the entire dialogue. All three authors deliberately eschew the well established, Democritean focus on isolated analysis of one- to ten-page passages, providing instead a panoramic survey of the text that expli-cates the episodes in relation to each other and to the dialogue as a dra-matic and thematic whole. The only real precedents for this kind of work on Protagoras are Gagarin 1969 and Klosko 1979.�� Appropriately enough, as with Gagarin and Klosko, the central concerns of the three 1992 studies are the dialogue’s theme and unity.�� The appearance of Rutherford 1992 deserves special notice, for it defies both of the trends that dominated the 1956–82 years: (1) the tendency to engage only other members of one’s own discipline and (2) isolating atten-tion on a single episode of Protagoras. First, R. B. Rutherford is a classi-cist, but his “Unifying the Protagoras” was published in Apeiron, a journal devoted to the history of ancient philosophy and science. Second, not only was Rutherford working in the rival camp, so to speak, he also openly declared his interests to reside in Plato’s literary art. His account of Pro-tagoras approaches the major issues “indirectly, by looking at the dialogue as it unfolds, and considering . . . some of the more dramatic and verbal aspects” (ibid.: 135). Both Rutherford’s overview and his focus on the dia-logue’s unity are thoroughly Aristotelian: every major episode in Protagoras is covered and explained by how it contributes to the dialogue’s unified development. On this account, a tension between order and disorder gov-

52. To this list of precedents we might add Vlastos 1956, which as we saw provides an uneven overview, Clapp 1950, and Grube 1933. Cropsey 1992 makes no reference to these precedents, Rutherford (1992: 135n2, 143n11, 153n23, 154n24) refers only to Vlastos 1956 and Stokes 1986, and Schofield (1992: 135n6, n10 and n11) refers to Vlastos 1956, Klosko 1979, and Stokes 1986.53. Two qualifications are necessary here. First, Grube 1933 ignores large tracts of the dia-logue (the opening frames, the interlude, and the Simonides episode, in particular), because at that time it was the unity of virtue and the hedonism passages that were being ignored. Second, Schofield 1992 is not as thorough as Cropsey 1992, Rutherford 1992, and Gaga-rin 1969, for, like so many earlier philosophical commentaries, it ignores the Simonides episode.


erns the plot trajectory of the dialogue. The elemental forces opposing each other to create this tension are manifested in Plato’s characterization of Socrates, Hippocrates, Protagoras, and the secondary interlocutors (ibid.: 134–36, 139, 142–45, 148–51, 155). Hippocrates, for example, first appears as a bundle of contradictory impulses: he wants to study with Protagoras but he would be ashamed to become a sophist himself (310a–312a), and he admires Protagoras’s wisdom but cannot say in what it consists (312a–313c). Protagoras is first described by Socrates as the dominant figure in the chaotic scene of sophists and students in Callias’s house, which Soc-rates reports with an allusion to shades of the dead in Hades (314d–316b). After Protagoras’s Great Speech, Socrates tries to introduce a measure of order into the proceedings by asking Protagoras to make his account of human virtue conceptually coherent. Rutherford’s exegesis uses the drama to explicate the theoretical aspects of Protagoras, and his overview attempts to present the two introductory frames, the Great Speech, the middle inter-lude, and the Simonides episode as integrated with the dialectical exami-nation of the unity of virtue, hedonism, and moral weakness.��

3.2. Signs That the Transition Was Not CompleteIt is in the nature of transitions that new practices exist simultaneously with the older, established ones which are being displaced. Let me there-fore close this brief section by noting what remained of the trends of the previous period. Even in the 1980s, work was still being published on iso-lated passages of the dialogue, with a direct correlation between the pas-sages on which scholars focused and the discipline they represented: sev-eral analytic philosophers concentrated on theoretical passages about the unity of virtue, hedonism, and moral weakness, whereas one philological contribution by C. W. Willink (1983) concentrates on a single dramatic detail. To a great extent, such later work adheres to the settled Demo-critean patterns into which scholarly discussion of Protagoras had already fallen between 1956 and 1982.

54. Let me summarize briefly some other Aristotelian work that was published during this transition decade. Hartman 1984 explicates the argumentation of Protagoras in light of the drama, and she argues that the aporetic ending provides dramatic and aesthetic reasons to regard as inadequate both models for unifying the special virtues at 329b–330b (i.e., that they are qualitatively identical or that they are functionally coordinated). Several articles link two episodes that had previously been treated by rival Democritean camps, the Great Speech of Protagoras (320c–328d) and the hedonism discussion (351b–360e). Balaban 1987, for example, argues that these two episodes contrast two alternative conceptions of education: one, Protagoras’s, conceives of virtue as variegated and nonepis-temic; the other, Plato’s, as unified knowledge. See also the discussion of Weiss 1985a and 1990a in section 3.2.


Consider, for instance, two articles by Michael Ferejohn (1982, 1984), both of which return to the debate over the unity of the virtues among Vlastos 1972, Penner 1973, and Woodruff 1976. Ferejohn inquires whether the special virtues may be functionally differentiated, as Protagoras main-tains, or whether they are identical with one another (329b–330b). Like his predecessors, his exegesis focuses on the logical (rather than the dialecti-cal) development of this discussion in Protagoras, and isolates this passage from the rest of the dialogue. We can thus see how scholarly methodology replicates itself while debate over substantive issues remain unsettled: Ferejohn was responding to an existing debate, and his own position had to be defined within the bounds of the debate as he found it in Vlastos and others. Regarding the same debate, the same pattern may be discerned in the analytic approach of Jeremy Wakefield (1987, 1991) and in Weiss 1985b, McKirahan 1983, 1985, Finamore 1988. Likewise, Morris 1990 and Richardson 1990, which explicate the hedonistic calculus passages (351b–358e), work within the bounds of the debate as defined by Gallop 1964, Dyson 1976, Taylor 1976, Zeyl 1980, and Klosko 1980. Willink’s (1983) philological contribution casts light on one brief pas-sage, but without drawing any conclusions about the dialogue’s unity. It explores Socrates’ allusion to Tantalus at the moment the sophist Prodicus is introduced (315d). At this point in the dialogue, Socrates has just entered Callias’s house to see Protagoras leading a group of students in one discus-sion and Hippias leading another discussion (314e–315c). Then he sees Pro-dicus lying in bed, wrapped in many sheepskins, and leading a third dis-cussion (315d). At this sight, Socrates quotes from Homer’s Odyssey: “ ‘Nay more, Tantalus also did I see there’—for you know Prodicus of Cos is in Athens too” (315d). Willink (ibid.: 33) argues that the Tantalus reference emphasizes the decadence and unspeakable blasphemy that had become associated with Prodicus. How this interesting observation influences the rest of the dialogue, he does not say. One last point deserves to be developed as an illustration of the transi-tion that occurred between 1983 and 1992. During this time, Roslyn Weiss (1989, 1990b) was involved in a revealing exchange with J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor (1990) about the tension between Protagoras and Phaedo on the status of hedonism. On one side, Gosling and Taylor maintain that Socrates endorses a version of enlightened hedonism in Protagoras (355a, 358b) that is compatible with the argument in Phaedo (68c–69c) that the life governed by practical wisdom (phronêsis) is the most pleasant life. On the other side, Weiss (1989: 513, 1990b: 117) maintains that hedonism as formu-lated in Protagoras is rejected in Phaedo. Again, as with Ferejohn and the rest above, these authors were responding to a debate that had already been


well defined during the 1956–82 period, and their strict analysis of the hedonism discussion at Protagoras 351b–358d conforms to the boundaries of that earlier debate: analytic, theoretically oriented focus on isolated pas-sages. But there is a wrinkle in the subplot here that makes this exchange revealing. In addition to what Weiss has to say in these two articles about the iso-lated theoretical content of Protagoras’s hedonism discussion, she published two accounts of the entire courage-wisdom exchange (1985a on 349d–351b, and 1990a on 351b–360e). In the first exchange over the relation between these virtues, Socrates attempts to mediate the class of the courageous and the class of the wise with a third class, that is, the confident: courage instils confidence, confidence is proportionate to knowledge, the wisest are the most confident, therefore the wise are courageous (349d–351b). According to Weiss (1985a: 19), in objecting to Socrates’ line of argument, Protagoras denies the first claim, that the courageous are confident. This objection has “devastating” implications for his own claim to teach virtue, she (ibid.: 20–21) says, for “in his eagerness to refute Socrates, Protagoras attributes courage to nature and nurture of the soul rather than knowl-edge.” In effect, this is an admission that Protagoras, as a sophist, does not teach courage, which cast doubts on Protagoras’s earlier claims that he teaches virtue (318d, 328a–b) and that the special virtues are unified in some way (329d). Thus, Weiss (ibid.: 20–21) maintains, her exegesis of this passage also shows “a way of unifying the Protagoras as a whole, in so far as its major concern is the teachability of virtue.” Weiss 1990a then elabo-rates on the relationship between the discussion of hedonism late in the dialogue (351b–360e) and the promise made by Protagoras to Hippocrates in his first scene (317c–320c): this, like Weiss 1985a, offers as an account of the dialogue’s unity. So the comparison of the two sets of articles by Weiss shows that Democritean and Aristotelian work is going on side by side dur-ing this transition decade, that if Aristotelian work was indeed on the rise, Democritean work had not become obsolete. This is just what we should expect in a transition period.

4. Recent Developments

4.1. Dialectic and DramaLet me review the story up to this point. The first chapter of the present narrative covers the emergence of the analytic, philosophical approach to Protagoras, the subsequent entrenchment of scholarship into two virtually independent, Democritean camps that divided along disciplinary lines, and the growing dominance of the philosophical camp; some research


presupposed an alternative, Aristotelian conception of the dialogue, but this constituted a small percentage of the total amount of work.�� The dis-ciplinary and textual divisions that were so widely accepted at this time were based on artificial criteria, however, and the Democritean “program” rested on an unstable base. The second chapter covers the partial removal of the disciplinary boundary that separated the two camps, together with the growing influence of the Aristotelian conception of the text. In brief, we have traced a long period of expansion and bifurcation, followed by a much shorter period of transition. So our narrative has a beginning and a middle. However, since it takes us up to the present, there is no terminal point that constitutes an end, full stop. As we shall see, hard-won advances from the entire half century have refined exegetical strategies in subtle ways. The first thing to acknowledge is that the legacy of Vlastos 1956 is still evident in the steady output of work on Protagoras that utilizes the tools of analytic philosophy. As one might expect, this work still concentrates on interpreting the discussion between Socrates and Protagoras on the unity of virtue (328d–334c) and the final stretch of the dialogue on courage, wisdom, hedonism, and moral weakness (351b–360e).�� Why this kind of work continues to thrive has largely to do with two factors: (1) the dia-logue’s most complex dialectical exchanges do lend themselves to this kind of analysis to some extent, and so long as analytic philosophy is being practised, we may expect some scholars to prefer it; and (2) as we saw in section 3.2, the debate on a number of passages and theoretical prob-lems in Protagoras was defined by the explosion of analytic, philosophical exegesis during the 1956–82 period, and it is difficult for later scholars to enter these debates without using the terms already established. A scholar can no longer engage the secondary literature on many parts of Protagoras without a grasp of the techniques of logical analysis (as does, e.g., Grube 1933). Argument reconstruction and close conceptual analysis has become the analytic philosopher’s métier, and accordingly persists in the exegesis of Plato’s dialogues. Still, there seems to be a difference in the way that analytical exegesis now defines its focus and carries out the analysis. First, whereas in the hey-day of this approach to Protagoras the arguments were typically presented as linear “demonstrations” of this thesis or “refutations” of that one, recent

55. Six of forty-two works published, less than 15 percent, and all but Gagarin 1969 pub-lished in the second half of the 1956–82 period.56. On 328d–334c, see Rickless 1998, Cooper 1998, Wolfsdorf 2002, O’Brien 2003, and Manuwald 2005. On 351b–360e, see Penner 1997 and Russell 2000. Stalley 1995 on the edu-cational role of punishment in Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d) fits here too.


analysis is more sensitive to the dialectical development of the arguments in the dialogue, more attentive to the dynamic interplay of the dramatis personae from which they emanate, and this attention is now systematic rather than ad hoc. Second, there is also more conscious consideration for the overall plan and purpose of Protagoras as well as for the dialectical details. Nowhere is the second change more evident than in Penner 1997 and Manuwald 2005, whose earlier work (Penner 1973, Manuwald 1975) was paradigmatic of analytic philosophical exegesis. Penner 1997 not only analyzes the “strength of knowledge” thesis (352c–357e), the study also detects in this thesis a rationale for Plato’s use of the dialogue form in his early, Socratic works: the various kinds of epistemic instability manifested when Socrates assaults the practical beliefs of his interlocutors in these dia-logues exemplify special forms of moral weakness being investigated as a general, theoretical issue in Protagoras (ibid.: 144–45). And Manuwald (2005: 116) thinks it a mistake to interpret the ending of the courage-wisdom discussion at 360c as simply “a refutation of Protagoras’s view and other theoretically possible ones” on the unity of the virtues (the way O’Brien 2003 interprets it). Instead, we should read the aporetic ending of this dia-logue in light of an essential compatibility of the theses Protagoras explores with the account of virtue in Republic (in particular, the special virtues are unified and depend on knowledge). In short, pointing toward the fuller, metaphysically grounded account of Republic, Protagoras occupies a place in Plato’s corpus between the “early” Socratic and aporetic dialogues and the more ambitious and complete account developed in Republic (Manuwald 2005: 133). In this way Manuwald (ibid.: 133n54) endorses Kahn’s (1996) proleptic reading of Plato’s early and middle dialogues by invoking a con-ception of Protagoras as having a unified purpose (see note 4). Thus, we find Penner looking “back” from Protagoras to identify a rationale behind the ad hominem character of the Socratic dialogues and Manuwald looking “forward” to Republic for further exploration of the inconclusive inquiry in Protagoras. Russell 2000 exemplifies the first change in analytic philosophical exege-sis mentioned above—its accommodation of the dialectical development of arguments in Protagoras. This analysis of the courage/pleasure relation-ship (349d–360e) is not as narrowly formulated as its 1956–82 predeces-sors. In fact, Russell (ibid.: 312) begins with an endorsement of the trend toward dialectical rather than logical analysis as charted in section 3.1:

Fortunately . . . a number of excellent [recent] studies have explored the role of Socrates’ discussion of hedonism as dialectical—that is, as an argument that


proceeds from the premises of one’s interlocutor—within his larger exami-nation of Protagoras’ own position (see especially Zeyl [1980], Weiss 1990[a], Hemmenway 1996 and McCoy 1998). . . . This approach enjoys several benefits for understanding the place of hedonism within the dialogue. . . . [It] makes Socrates’ strategy dialectical, and philosophically serious.

Russell’s own account of the exchange on hedonism is framed by a diag-nostic account of the global purpose of the dialogue, which, he alleges, is to expose an inconsistency between Protagoras’s educational practices and the Protagorean view of the relations among the virtues (ibid.: 313). Evi-dence for this purpose is drawn from the inner frame discussion between Socrates and Hippocrates (311a–314c; ibid.: 313, 313–14n8). No longer are the relations (whether strictly logical or dialectical) between the propo-sitions isolated for independent explication. Even when argumentation remains the primary focus, dramatic presentation is treated as integral, if not indispensable, to it. Thus, we see that the arguments are no longer cordoned off from the drama, as was done in so much of the analytic philosophical exegesis of the 1956–82 period. This change can be illustrated graphically, as shown in figure 2. The diagram in figure 2 differs from that in figure 1 in two ways. First, the solid line in figure 1, separating the outer circle, “Logical Rela-tions between Propositions,” and the second circle, “Dramatic Presenta-tion of Arguments,” is now dotted. The boundary line between the drama and the argumentation is now recognized to be semipermeable. Second, as the new label for the second circle indicates, the argumentative relations in this dialogue (or any dialogue with well-drawn characters) are dialectical, not merely logical. Russell 2000 is not the only example of this kind of inte-

Figure 2


grated argumentative-dramatic exegesis of Protagoras (nor is this approach unique to Protagoras). If the exegetical practices of the philosophical camp in the earlier period still survive today, they do so in an altered form.

4.2. Four Subclasses of Aristotelian ExegesisAristotelian exegetical strategies—emphasizing the dramatic and thematic unity of the dialogue—have proliferated and diversified into four subclasses in recent years. This kind of work is not entirely new, because precedents can be found for each one. But the precedents were exceptional when they first appeared in scholarship. Now such approaches are commonplace. The four strategies emphasize different aspects of unity. In keeping with Brumbaugh’s characterization of Aristotelian systems as wholes, parts, and formal principles, these may be differentiated as follows (I include a résumé of earlier and recent examples): Thematic: One theme as a formal aspect of a complex whole is traced through all the major parts. Duncan 1978, on the relation between Pro-tagoras and the special virtue of courage, provides an earlier example of this strategy (see section 2.4). Recent examples include Benitez 1992, Ferrarin 2000, Cohen 2002, Garver 2004, and Capra 2005. Benitez 1992 argues that Protagoras holds philosophy and rhetoric in counterpoise to each other and that the resulting tension is put on display (for different purposes) for Hippocrates within the drama and for readers of Plato’s dia-logue. Ferrarin 2000 traces the literary and theoretical implications of the Prometheus motif within the context of the dialogue’s dramatic focus on Hippocrates’ political ambitions. Cohen 2002 explicates the dramatic inter-lude where the subject of discussion becomes how to conduct a discussion (334c–338e), and which thematically encapsulates thereby certain prob-lems associated with both political and educational engagement. Garver 2004 considers the Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d) by reference to the tension between democracy and elitism in the opening frames (309a–310a, 310a–314c). Finally, Capra 2005 explores the thematic implications of a complex satirical allusion to Achilles that Socrates makes when address-ing Protagoras at 340a. Intra-Dialogic Links: Two “episodes” are related to each other within the context of the whole dialogue. Weiss 1985a, which explicates the first courage-wisdom exchange (349b–351b) in light of Protagoras’s promise to teach virtue (312c–320c) and attempts to identify what unifies the whole dialogue, provides an earlier example of this strategy (see section 3.2).��

57. To some extent, Vlastos 1972, Penner 1973, and Woodruff 1976, on the unity of virtue, provide earlier examples of this strategy; however, in keeping with the Democritean spirit of their time, these efforts depend on isolating the “philosophical” argument of Protagoras from


Recent examples include McCoy 1998 and 1999, Woolf 1999 and 2002. McCoy 1998 connects Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d), and the hedonism discussion (351b–360e). McCoy 1999 connects the Simonides episode (338e–348c) to other passages which indicate Protagoras’s under-standing of knowledge to involve goodness (e.g., 334a–c). Woolf 1999 explores the Simonides episode (338e–348c) in light of an earlier, seem-ingly offhand point made by Socrates that a good interlocutor can respond to questions (while a book cannot, 329a). Woolf 2002 explores a rationale behind an apparently anomalous moment: Socrates encourages Protago-ras to investigate a popular account of moral weakness that neither inter-locutor initially accepts (353b), but earlier he had emphatically required Protagoras to answer all questions with his own opinion (331c). General Overview: The “episodes” of the dialogue are surveyed in an effort to relate the major parts to each other and to the architectural construction of the whole; every episode is given proportional treatment. Gagarin 1969, Klosko 1979 provide earlier examples of this strategy (see section 2.4). After Rutherford 1992, Cropsey 1992, and Schofield 1992 (see section 3.1), only Bartlett 2003 used this strategy in a journal article. Curiously, none of his predecessors are cited in this regard. Balaban 1999 also provides an overview of the dialogue, but on the larger canvas of a monograph.�� Perspectival Overview: The “episodes” are surveyed in relation to each other and to the whole dialogue but from the perspective of one episode, which accordingly is explicated in greater detail. Dubose 1973, which sur-veys the dialogue from the perspective of the final aporia (360e–362a), and the overview of Miller 1978, privileging the Epimetheus and Pro-metheus motifs established in Protagoras’s speech (320c–323a), offer earlier examples of this strategy (see section 2.4). Recent examples include Landy 1994, Hemmenway 1996, and Griswold 1999b.�� This last perspectival synoptic strategy reveals how much work on Pro-tagoras has evolved in recent years. For a perspectival overview strives simul-taneously to meet two goals that were considered incommensurable in the 1956–82 period: a panoramic account of the dialogue’s unity, and close attention to the details of one episode or passage. From a Democritean standpoint, especially when occupied by one who conceives of analysis as an exercise in schematizing arguments, these goals push in antithetical

the rest of the dialogue to single out passages that fit the restricted analytic conception of philosophy.58. Manuwald 1999 adds a German critical commentary, and Capra 2001 adds an Italian book-length interpretation.59. To this list we might add Gonzalez 2000, which was published as a book chapter, not a journal article.


directions. In Aristotelian terms, these goals can be reconciled, because accounting for the unity of a literary work must be explicated in terms of whole-part relations, and each major episode is explicated for its function within the whole. Landy 1994 and Griswold 1999b thus pay special atten-tion to the Simonides debate, which was typically neglected by philosophi-cal commentators in the 1956–82 period. Hemmenway 1996 concentrates on the unity of virtue passages (328d–334c, 348b–360e).

4.3. Brumbaugh’s “Platonic” StrategyWhile the Democritean and Aristotelian systems of philosophic thought were sufficient to explain the trends of the 1956–82 period of Protagoras scholarship, recent studies by Joseph Walsh, C. Fred Alford, and David Wolfsdorf require us to add a third system.�0 Brumbaugh (1993: 244) calls it “Platonic” and presents it as a variation on the Aristotelian system��: “It takes Aristotle’s formalism as excellent for bringing out coherence, but insists that correspondence with a real world is involved, too.” The Aristo-telian strategy of exegesis treats a dialogue as constituting its own universe of discourse, with its own constraining set of structural criteria, which is why work of this sort strives to explicate both the complexity and the unity of a dialogue. The Platonic strategy attempts to accommodate the wider “constraining other universe of fact and history” (ibid.: 243). Along these lines, two articles by Wolfsdorf (1997, 1998) return to a his-torically oriented interpretive strategy that was first used by Walsh (1984) and Alford (1988). These studies explore the significance of the fact that the dramatic location, date, and personae of Protagoras correspond to historical locations, dates, and figures. Walsh and Wolfsdorf base this work on the plausible assumption that Plato uses these particular correspondences in order to direct a reader’s interpretation of the dialogue. What makes such correspondences worth investigating and integrating within a dialogue like Protagoras is stated by Debra Nails (2002: xxxvii–viii):

Plato did not invent Athenians with names, demes, and kin; he wrote about real people—some of them still active and living in Athens—people with repu-tations, families, neighbors and political affiliations, people who show up else-where in the existing historical record: lampooned in comedies, called as wit-

60. I know of no work on Protagoras that fits the Anaxagorean, process-oriented system, so the fourth and final system of Brumbaugh’s is left unrepresented.61. See note 49. This is why I “provisionally” described Walsh 1984 and Alford 1988 as Aris-totelian. Since Brumbaugh characterizes Platonic systems as a variant of Aristotelian ones, this earlier description is accurate. But more recent work by Wolfsdorf 1997 and 1998, and Nails 2002 has set this approach apart as a research program with its own purpose, and only now is it possible to see the full implications of Walsh 1984 and Alford 1988.


nesses, elected to office, being sold, marrying, buying property, traveling, dying. Socrates’ society was not only a matter of institutions and ideologies, but a mat-ter of actual people, individuals within a nexus of familial, social, and political relationships, without whom Plato’s dialogues would be denatured. . . . [T]he lives of the people of Plato, insofar as they can be reconstructed, need to be read back into the dialogues in an informed and responsible way.

Accordingly, part of the interpreter’s task is to consult the historical record in whatever sources are extant and to consider the literary and philosophi-cal implications of having Socrates address, in this case, Protagoras in the presence of the cast of historical figures identified in the dialogue and collocated in the house of Callias during a particular period of Athenian history. Using this Platonic strategy, historical references are invoked to address interpretive questions. This approach does not include historical research such as Turner 1965, that uses details in the dialogue to help settle his-torical questions. Turner (ibid.: 68) takes Protagoras 326d as evidence that writing masters in fifth century Athens drew parallel lines on a page to help guide a student’s handwriting. Acknowledging the historical context of the drama is not to be mistaken for treating the dialogue as a historical document, however. The Platonic, historically informed reconception of the text can be represented with a third diagram (figure 3). Figure 3 is identical to figure 2, except that a fourth circle has been added to reflect the historical dimension of the drama in which the dialogue is set. Plato can, and does, exercise poetic license in mixing up the historical details, including the use of incompatible historical references and mixes of fact

Figure 3


with fiction.�� These complications, too, may serve a literary and/or theo-retical purpose. Walsh and Wolfsdorf make some provocative suggestions that illustrate what this program promises. As Walsh 1984 notes, most of the evidence points to 433/32 BCE as the dramatic date of Protagoras, but some of it points to 421, and one reference suggests a date as late as 419.�� Should we be disturbed by these discrepancies or intrigued by them? Whether this disparate evidence can be resolved into a single dramatic date or not, and whether Plato was attempting to date the dialogue precisely or was indifferent to anachronisms are questions that should not be dismissed out of hand. Walsh, for example, thinks that the discrepancies are intentional. They signal the influence of the sophists upon more than one generation of Athenian aristocrats, not all of whom could have been gathered at a single event in the house of Callias. Plato shows the sophists to be a common influence upon all the young Athenians named in Protagoras by concentrat-ing all the elements into one scene; however, the anachronisms encourage us to see the sophists as an ongoing influence, exerted over many years. Walsh 1984 and Wolfsdorf 1998 point out that the subsequent fate of many of the students present in Callias’s house reflects badly on the sophist’s promise to teach virtue.�� Such details may turn out to be as important to the interpretation of

62. Protagoras, for example, is almost certainly an amalgam of historical fact and fictional invention. Apart from Parmenides, it has the earliest dramatic date of all Plato’s dialogues. Even the latest possible date (419 BCE, when Plato was nine or ten years old), is too early for him to have been a witness. It is not plausible to maintain that Protagoras might have the kind of historical veracity that some people have attributed to Apology, as a record of Socrates’ trial.63. The following details seem to support a date in the late 430s BCE, and not any time later: (1) Alcibiades (451–404 BCE) is just getting his beard (309a); (2) Pericles, who died in 429 BCE, is referred to as being alive at the time of the dialogue (319e–320a, 328c); (3) Pericles’s sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, who also died in 429 BCE, are yet in attendance (315a, 328c); (4) Cleinias (born before 450) is described as still requiring a guardian (320a). Other details seem to support a date in the late 420s, and not earlier: (1) Callias is portrayed as being the head of his house (311a, 314d), which could only be possible after the death of his father, Hipponicus, in 422/21 BCE; (2) Agathon (b. 445) would have been too young to be present in the 430s; (3) in its setting and characters, Eupolis’s Spongers corresponds closely to Protagoras, and the play, which won the City Dionysia Festival in 422/21, portrays Protagoras as staying with Callias in Athens at the time. The anomalous passage is Protagoras’s refer-ence to Pherecrates’ Savages as having been performed “last year” (327d). Since the play was produced in 420, this would indicate a dramatic date of 419. See Walsh 1984 and Wolfsdorf 1997 for details.64. See Walsh 1984: 105 and Wolfsdorf 1998: 129–31 for details about the subsequent fates of Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, Phaedrus, Eryximachus, Adeimantus, Agathon, and Pau-sanias. I should add that the most recent discussion of the dramatic date, Nails 2002: 310, argues for a single date, the late 430s.


Protagoras as the semantic content of aretê, the logical status of “both justice is holy and holiness just,” or Socrates’ comic portrayal of the opening scene at Callias’s house. Of course, it goes without saying that similar historically minded questions might be asked of any other dialogue, since elements of historicity are discernable in all Plato’s work. We should be grateful, there-fore, for Debra Nails’s terrific prosopographical resource, People of Plato (2002), for collecting so much of the relevant, divergent evidence for this research.

5. Final Remarks

Rather than draw strong theoretical or systematic conclusions from the history we have reviewed, I want to sketch a few practical morals. Let me begin with a reminder that this dialogue and the research on it were reviewed to provide some concrete reference points for considering James Arieti’s (1991) general complaints about philosophical commenta-tors on Plato. In brief, we can see that Arieti’s complaint about the domi-nance of analytic philosophical commentary has been partly corrobo-rated: it indeed applies generally, though not universally, to the 1956–82 period of research on Protagoras. More importantly, we can also see that the charge has diminishing force after 1982, for since that time there has been a transformation in the way scholars have approached the dialogue and con-ceived of it. Over the years, philosophers and classicists have become more responsive to the dialogue’s principles of construction and more concerned to account for its unity. In light of this transformation, I want to put forth some hypotheses about the dynamics that directed it, for I think it is a sign of good health in Plato scholarship and a change to be encouraged in the exegesis of other philosophers and in the study of other genres. I hope, first, that I have substantiated the initial description of this nar-rative as being one of innovation, exploration, interaction, and shared discovery. Since Vlastos 1956, the scholarly exploration of Protagoras has transformed simultaneously in two ways. The disciplinary bifurcation that followed Vlastos 1956 depended upon some unstated assumptions about (1) the specialized nature of scholarly expertise and (2) the modular nature of the primary source. In keeping with the prevailing Democritean concep-tion of the dialogue throughout the 1956–82 period, most of the exegeti-cal work on Protagoras tended to explore discrete episodes, arguments, and passages; at the same time, different parts of Protagoras came to be adopted by scholars with the “appropriate” specialization as their focus of research. Philosophers concentrated on the unity of virtue, for instance, classicists on the Simonides debate. With few exceptions, scholarly interaction was


confined, first, within each of the two disciplinary camps, then within ever-smaller groups working on particular passages of the dialogue. The ana-lytical precision of this exegetical work is impressive in some respects, but discussion of each episode of the dialogue soon fragmented into a bunch of local dialects, applied by small enclaves to isolated sets of exegetical and theoretical possibilities implicit in one passage or another. (Did classicists working on Simonides in the 1970s care about the intense debates going on at the same time over Pauline predication at 330a?) Anyone travelling up and down this Tower of Babel could hear a range of voices, but the network of interactions enjoyed by any particular voice was actually quite narrow. A disciplinary division of labor was but the most obvious symptom of a more troubling state of parochialism. This pattern was consistent and evident among both philosophers and classicists working on Protagoras for almost three decades. In this context, the developments of the mid-1980s to the early 1990s appear remarkably cosmopolitan. Thanks to these developments, since the mid-1980s scholars represent-ing several disciplinary fields and using an array of analytical and historical resources, have been discovering more about the dialogue as they become more responsive to each other. So the first moral I want to draw regards the interactive, intersubjective context in which scholarly exegesis is now carried out: the salutary developments of the half century since Vlastos 1956 have illustrated how important it is for scholars to stretch themselves and critically engage research that falls outside of their narrowly defined specialized areas of expertise.�� I have been deliberately noncommittal—perhaps even evasive—about the merits of particular articles or books I have reviewed in order to highlight this generally positive trend, without getting enmeshed in the debates over interpretation. I doubt it is a coincidence that signs of improving relations between scholars of different fields occurred around the same time that the pre-dominantly Democritean treatment of the text gave way to a more Aris-totelian one. That is, whereas during the 1956–82 period Protagoras was parcelled out as discrete episodes, in the mid-1980s a conception of the dialogue as a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts emerged and gained implicit acceptance. The division of labor that I outlined in the first section of this narrative was based on a shared assumption about the modularity of Protagoras. Defying this assumption might be the real legacy of Goldberg 1983, Stokes 1986, and Coby 1987: they make it difficult for subsequent commentators to concentrate on any single passage without

65. Stokes (1986: 2–3) and Brumbaugh (1993: 243–48) also register approval for this kind of interaction.


considering its role within the dialogue’s overall architectural design. For this reason, since 1983 we have seen a great deal of exegetical work on the unifying features of this dialogue—especially all the synoptic and histori-cal readings of the dialogue that distinguish the last dozen or so years. The second moral I want to draw is that the dialogical features of Protagoras—its dramatic setting, the interaction of distinctive personae on questions of moral and theoretical significance—are ineliminable whenever we try to account for the work as a complex whole. As a corollary, we should acknowledge as a third moral that these fea-tures are not peculiar to Protagoras as a unique literary work, nor to Plato’s dialogues as a unique body of philosophical work. Rather, they point to the dialogue form as a genre, since the two schemas summarized in figures 2 and 3 are available for use by other authors. Indeed, terminological inno-vations, complex logical developments, dramatic devices, and historical correspondences are evident in the dialogues of Justus Lipsius and Gior-dano Bruno, as John Sellars, Eugenio Canone, and Leen Spruit elaborate in their own terms in the second part of this special issue. Plato may have deployed the dialogue form with more finesse than other authors—espe-cially the less artful dialogues of Berkeley, Leibniz and Hume—but that does not allow us to read his works as sui generi. Instead, we should simply appreciate that, for us, Plato is the progenitor of the dialogue as a philo-sophical genre. Recognizing the dialogue’s fundamental architecture in terms of the schemas represented by figures 2 and 3 requires commentators to over-come the habitual resistance to change that is typical in scholarship. (Even Vlastos’s “novel” application of the tools of modern logic to Protagoras came half a century after the advent of analytic philosophy.) This is the reason why the transformation in Plato scholarship has been slow, and why the transition period began so tentatively in the 1980s. Despite my own attempt to draw a line of demarcation at 1982–83, it must be acknowl-edged that Goldberg 1983, Stokes 1986, and Coby 1987 did not burst a dam and precipitate a great flood of innovative research. The 1980s transforma-tion was gradual, and to a great extent is still going on to this day. What of the more interpretive claim that scholars have “gravitated” to this genre-oriented approach to Protagoras, that this development has been “natural”? I would say that it has been natural in the sense that it has been the product of the “social” interaction of scholars who have learned to learn from people working on the other side of artificial boundaries—in this case, disciplinary and textual boundaries. Plato scholars working on Protagoras have become increasingly more responsive to the text as they


have become more responsive to each other. Thus, the intersubjective con-text of scholarship has led people in various disciplines to converge upon a complex array of interpretive criteria that are as objective as one could hope to find. And these discoveries have emerged from conditions that are as natural as can be—that is, critical, social interaction.

Appendix: Schematic Summary of Plato’s Protagoras

1. Hippocrates and Socrates (309a–314c) I. Outer Frame: Socrates, unnamed friend, others (309a–310a) II. Inner Frame: Socrates and Hippocrates on sophistic education (310a8–314c) A. Testing Hippocrates’ expectations—instruction in technê B. Testing Hippocrates’ expectations again—instruction in paideia C. Socrates’ Cautionary Speech

2. Protagoras and His Program of Education (314c–328d) I. Socrates and Hippocrates arrive at Callias’s house (314c–316a) II. Informal exchange between Socrates and Protagoras (316b–317c) III. Formal exchange: Protagoras’s promise, Socrates’ demotic objections (317c–320c) IV. Protagoras’s Great Speech (320c–328d) A. The Myth—Prometheus’s technê; Zeus’s aidôs and dikê B. Virtue is teachable C. The teachers of virtue

3. The Unity of Virtue, First Discussion (328d–334c) I. Socrates’ preamble (328d–329b) II. Socrates’ question about virtue and the framework for its answer (329b–330b) III. Testing Protagoras and dispatching the face model [unity of virtue] (330b–334c) A. Justice and holiness B. Wisdom and moderation C. Justice and moderation

4. Middle Interlude on the Purpose and Procedure of the Discussion (334c–338e) I. Impasse and its diagnosis: considering whether and how to continue (334c–338b) II. Socrates’ proposed resolution: Socrates and Protagoras trade roles (338b–338e)

5. Simonides’ Poem (338e–348c) I. Exegesis of Simonides’ ode to Scopas (338e–347a) A. Protagoras’s critique of Simonides and Socrates’ first response B. Socrates’ second response: lengthy exegesis of Simonides’ ode II. Socrates on proper symposia: speaking with one’s own voice (347a–348c)

6. Unity of Virtue, Resumed Discussion (348c–360e) I. Courage and wisdom: the first proof (348c–351b) II. Hedonism, courage and wisdom: the second proof (351b–360e) A. Assimilating the Sophists and The Many—moral weakness B. Assimilating courage and wisdom

7. The Final Aporia (360e–362a)


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