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(c) Plato’s quotation of the words of the Speech is seriously inaccurate. He substitutes ‘healthful’ and ‘diseased,’ for ‘better’ and ‘worse’. But in the Speech these were merely illustrations of the general principle, and the distinction was not restricted to them.
(d) The argument about the cities in 172 A—B is both inaccurate and absurd. Nothing was said in the Speech about the ‘advantageous;’ the terms used were ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Moreover, the compromise proposed is impossible, as Plato must have been fully aware. You cannot allow States to judge as they please about the just and the moral, if they are to be controlled by a perception of their true advantage. For their ideas about justice also may chance to be extremely disadvantageous to them, and may therefore require to be altered. The ‘Protagoras’ of the Speech had talked no such nonsense: he had very sensibly and truly remarked that the opinions of States about the just might have to be altered, just as those of the sick man about the sweet.
In short, Plato’s references do not exactly reproduce either the words or the sense of the ‘Protagoras’ Speech, and thereby prove pretty conclusively that he was not the real author of its contentions. For those who insist on believing that he was, his whole handling of the Speech must seem an unfathomable mystery. He first contrives this brilliant Speech, which contains a number of points, new and unheard of in all Platonic philosophy, together with one distinction of capital importance. And then he goes on as if he did not know what he had done, as if nothing had happened! The main point is blankly ignored, the references to the Speech are all curiously vague and inexact, and the whole Speech is almost at once set aside as possibly inaccurate, on an absurd pretext that the wording is not by Protagoras. If this was the way in which he was going to treat it, why did Plato trouble to make a statement he could make so little of? The Theætetus would have been gayer and more forceful without a long, halting and impotent discussion of what seems a half-understood position. Nothing but external compulsion would drive an expert controversialist to such shifts. But may not such compulsion have been
