Protagoras

“’So do you know what you’re going to be doing now, or does it escape your notice?’ I said. ‘In what connection?’ ‘That you’re about to entrust your own soul to the care of a man who is, as you claim, a sophist, but I’d be surprised if you know what in the world a sophist is. Yet, if you’re ignorant of this, you don’t know what you’re turning your soul over to, or whether to a good or a bad thing.’”

Socrates tries to show Hippocrates, his young friend, just how careless he is being by willingly emptying his soul and his pocketbook to a sophist he does not even know. This is the first instance of Socrates’s famous Socratic method in the dialogue. He attempts to clarify for the interlocutor his own ignorance via a series of sharply pointed questions and revealing answers. The gullibility of zealous men like Hippocrates was necessary for the success of sophists in ancient Greece.

“’The others abuse the young terribly. For when they’ve steered clear of the arts, they drag them back again against their will and shove them into arts, teaching them arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music,’ as he glanced over at Hippias, ‘but when he comes to me he won’t learn a single thing other than what he came about. The thing to be learned is how to make good decisions about his own affairs, so he can run his own household the best way, and about the affairs of his city, so he can be the most powerful in his city’s affairs in both action and speaking.’”

Here, Protagoras defends his particular form of pedagogy and the proper training that he will provide a student like Hippocrates. He implies that young men seek out sophists because they are not interested in having their education funneled into a particular art or craft. Still, to Protagoras’s chagrin, other sophists end up teaching their pupils the arts anyway. Protagoras instead teaches a program of civic virtue in order to make his pupils leaders in their communities. The irony is that Protagoras is something of a vagabond, and the practice of sophistry has fallen into some disrepute by Plato’s era.