Nonfiction · about 380 BC
Protagoras
Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Socrates is woken before dawn by a young man desperate to study with Protagoras, the most famous teacher in Greece, who has just arrived in Athens. They go to the house where he is staying, find him walking the portico trailed by admirers, and Socrates asks what exactly the young man would be buying. Protagoras answers that he teaches good judgement in private and public affairs — in short, virtue. Socrates says virtue cannot be taught, and the dialogue that follows turns on that disagreement, through a long myth told by Protagoras, a quarrel about whether to speak in speeches or in questions, an extended reading of a poem by Simonides, and an ending in which each man finds himself arguing the other's original position.
Plato wrote the dialogue in the earlier part of his career; its dramatic date is before the Peloponnesian War, when the men in the room still had their reputations ahead of them. This edition is Benjamin Jowett's English translation, with his introduction.
This Bibliomancer edition presents Jowett's introduction and the complete dialogue.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
-428–-348 · Ancient
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was an Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, and the founder of the Academy, the school that gave the word its meaning. His dialogues — among them the Apology, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Timaeus and Laws — are the foundation of Western philosophy, and they have survived complete, which is true of almost no other ancient writer. The English here is Benjamin Jowett’s: the Master of Balliol whose translation of the Dialogues (1871) carried Plato to English readers for a century, and whose introductions are printed with it.
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