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initially unreflective, and frequently remain so to the end. For the necessities of life have severely schooled us to begin by turning outward the eye of the soul, and the last thing that man thinks of, the last thing he discovers, is himself.
It is psychologically certain, therefore, that Protagoras must have had, and must have stated, interesting reasons for his position. But we are in the unsatisfactory position of knowing only his conclusion, and neither its premisses nor its context, and no interpretation of the Theætetus can be adequate which takes no account and has no explanation of this fact.
Can we suppose that Plato was equally unfortunate, equally ignorant of the context and grounds of Protagoras’s dictum? Only if we suppose that he neither possessed, nor had ever read, Protagoras’s book on ‘Truth’; nay, that he had never heard it discussed by those who had read it. But this is extremely improbable. It is indeed just possible that Plato knew no more than we do. It is quite possible that Athenian persecution so successfully suppressed the book that no copy escaped to be perused by Plato. Indeed this is even probable, under the very peculiar circumstances of the catastrophe which ended the career of Greece’s greatest Sophist. We may infer this also from the hesitations and apologies with which Plato always accompanies his account of Protagoras. These become intelligible if we suppose that he possessed no copy of the book himself and was not in a position to cite textually anything but the two admitted dicta.
But it is incredible that Plato should not have been familiar with the substance of the book. It was published, as the crown and outcome of the long career of the most popular teacher of the day, in Athens, Plato’s native city, in 411 (or 412) B.C., when Plato was already well advanced in his teens. If he was then already interested in philosophy, he must surely have read it, or at least have heard it discussed. Even if he was not, he must have been the contemporary of dozens who had read it and of hundreds who had heard it discussed; for in a democracy, which cannot act with a tyrant’s promptitude, some time would elapse before the indignation of the orthodox could gather force
