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there is no clear evidence that Protagoras had any disciples.[1] His appears to have been one of the rare (but all the sadder) cases in which persecution (like that of the Japanese Christians in the seventeenth century) really achieved its purpose. There is no evidence to show that Protagoras’s book survived the Athenian persecution. The one copy which, it is reasonable to suppose, no persecution could extort, viz., Protagoras’s own, must have perished with him when the ship went down on which he was fleeing from the pious wrath of the Athenians and the fate which subsequently befel Socrates. Hence it is no wonder that nobody seems to know anything about Protagoras’s book, beyond the title and the two dicta, except Plato, and that all the later references to it are plainly based on his account. And it is remarkable that even Plato does not seem to have first-hand verbatim knowledge of it, though we shall see that he must have known a great deal more about it than any one has done since.
II.
If we are willing to accept the Speech as genuine Protagoreanism, we are enabled to fill up a great and mysterious lacuna in our knowledge. As at present advised we know nothing about the context of the Homo Mensura dictum. But obviously it must have had one, or rather two, one psychological, the other logical. No man makes a great discovery without being led to it by a psychic process. No man ventilates what may be taken as a giant paradox, without trying to make it plausible and palatable to his audience. Especially if he is a professional teacher, i.e., a man who has lived all his life under a consciousness that his living depends on the approval of this same audience.
It is utterly shallow, therefore, to regard Protagoras’s dictum as an irresponsible freak of subjectivism. Subjectivism from its nature can never be unreflective, any more than pessimism. Objectivisms and optimisms always are
- ↑ Theodorus in the Theætetus is represented (1) as his friend, and (2) as no philosopher but a mathematician. As for the Antimoerus of the Protagoras (315 A) we never hear of him again.
