Protagoras

At this point, there is a philosophical and dramatic shift in the dialogue. Protagoras takes over the questioning, and Socrates must provide answers. Protagoras believes it is paramount for an educated person to know how to analyze and interpret the verse of the esteemed poets. He asks Socrates whether he finds any contradiction in a couple of famous verses from the esteemed fifth-century BCE poet Simonides. Finding such a contradiction would prove that Simonides is not so wise as most people think. However, Socrates finds Simonides’s verses consistent. Protagoras objects, offers up a speech, and receives applause from the audience.

Because Prodicus hails from the same homeland as Simonides, Socrates calls on him to answer a question about the lines. He asks whether becoming and being are the same thing, and Prodicus responds that they are not. Socrates uses this brief exchange, along with a view from Hesiod, to state that Simonides is not contradicting himself. In one instance, Simonides is discussing the difficulty of becoming good: in the other, he addresses the ease of being good. Socrates further supports his argument in a short discussion with Prodicus about the sense in which Simonides uses his words. He then speaks of the brevity of speech in Spartan society as further evidence of the depth of meaning that can be compressed into a few short lines of verse.

Socrates’s defense of Simonides then turns into a discussion on the difficulty of maintaining goodness in misfortune. Socrates states his famous thesis that the good never willingly do bad things, but badness comes from a state of ignorance. He ends his defense of Simonides’s verse with the conclusion that Simonides is simply saying that all those who do no evil are worthy of his love and praise since, if he were to praise only those who are perfectly good, there would be no one to praise. As Socrates puts it, there is no “wholly blameless human being among all those who partake of the fruit of the wide earth” (76).

At this point, Hippias wants to interject with his own interpretation of the verse, but Alcibiades stops him. Socrates makes a speech against the continued interpretation of verse. Instead, he would like to pursue the line of questioning that was dropped earlier. Protagoras is hesitant to engage, and Socrates sings his praises as an interlocutor. Socrates asks again whether the cardinal virtues are five parts of one and the same thing or whether they are five distinct things with no underlying unity. This time, Protagoras answers by stating that four of the five are united, but courage is different from the rest. Socrates questions Protagoras about the nature of courage and its connection to audacity. Socrates links courage with wisdom, thereby connecting it to the other virtues.

Socrates and Protagoras agree that wisdom and knowledge are the most powerful characteristics for human beings to have (81). Socrates questions him about the nature of pleasure and pain and of goodness and badness. He collapses the distinctions and claims that pleasures are pursued because they are good, insofar as they are purely pleasurable, and pains are avoided for the contrary reason. By collapsing the pairs of names, Socrates wants to expose the view that humans often do not pursue what is truly good because they are overcome by the pleasures of the moment. This would be to say that the good is overcome by the good, but that cannot be. The true issue for Socrates lies in the art of measurement. People are often ignorant as to how good the distant pleasure (or good) is and overestimate the value of the pleasure (or good) that is near at hand. It is not that people avoid the good for the pleasant but that they err in recognizing what the most pleasurable or good thing is. The problem, then, is ignorance in the knowledge of measurement. Protagoras agrees to all of this. Socrates summarizes with the following:

‘Aren’t all actions aimed at this, at living painlessly and pleasantly, beautiful? And isn’t a beautiful deed good and advantageous?’ It seemed so to them in common. ‘Therefore,’ I said, ‘if what’s pleasant is good, no one who knows or believes other things, that are in his power, are better than the things he’s doing, goes on doing them when it’s open to him to do better ones. And this ‘being weaker than oneself’ is nothing other than ignorance, and being stronger than oneself is nothing other than wisdom’ (86).

Socrates uses this discourse to reveal that courageous and cowardly people both pursue the things about which they are passionate. The difference between the courageous person and the cowardly person is that the former has proper knowledge of what is truly frightening and the latter does not. This, again, connects wisdom to courage, indicating that Protagoras is wrong in his thesis that courage is fundamentally disconnected from the other four cardinal virtues.

At the end of the dialogue, Socrates notices a seeming reversal in his and Protagoras’s fundamental views. Socrates proves that every virtue is based on knowledge and may, therefore, open the door to the teachability of virtue. Protagoras, who sought to show that virtue is teachable, now holds the view that virtues, like courage, are something other than knowledge. Socrates believes this leaves them in a “horrendous mess” and wants to continue the discussion in order to clarify things. Protagoras declines, although he claims to admire Socrates. Socrates says that he is overdue to run his errands, and the dialogue ends.