Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/399

 PROTAGORAS. tft'j not prescribe as the best ; it is a third thing, graver than both, to say that his teaching is Dot only below the exigences of science, but even corrupt and demoralizing. Now of these three points, it is the first only which Plato in his dialogue makes out against Protagoras : even the second, he neither affirms nor insinuates ; and as to the third, not only he never glances at it, even indirectly, but the whole tendency of the discourse suggests a directly contrary conclusion. As if sensible that when an eminent oppo- nent was to be depicted as puzzled and irritated by superior dialectics, it was but common fairness to set forth his distinctive merits also, Plato gives a fable, and expository harangue, from the mouth of Protagoras, 1 upon the question whether virtue is teachable. This harangue is, in my judgment, very striking and instructive ; and so it would have been probably accounted, if commentators had not read it with a preestablished persuasion that whatever came from the lips of a sophist must be either ridiculous or immoral. 2 It is the only part of Plato's works wherein any account is rendered of the growth of that floating, uncertified, self-propagating body of opinion, upon which the cross-examining analysis of Sokrates is brought to bear, as will be seen in the following chapter. Protagoras professes to teach his pupils " good counsel " in their domestic and family relations, as well as how to speak and act in the most effective manner for the weal of the city. Since this comes from Protagoras, the commentators of Plato pronounce it to be miserable morality ; but it coincides, almost to the letter, with that which Isokrates describes himself as teaching, a gener- ation afterwards, and substantially even with that which Xeno- phon represents Sokrates as teaching ; nor is it easy to set forth, 'Plato, Protagoras, p. 320, D. c. 11, et seq., especially p. 322, D, where Protagoras lays it down that no man is fit to be a member of a social com- munity, who has not in his bosom both HKIJ and ai6uf, that is, a sense of reciprocal obligation and right between himself and others, and a sensi- bility to esteem or reproach from others. He lays these fundamental t tributes down as what a good ethical theory must assume or exact in every man, tators treat the sophists, see a specimen in Ast, Ueber Platons Leben unl Schriftcn, pp. 71), 71, where he comments on Protagoras and this fable
 * Of the unjust asperity ar.d contempt with which the Platonic commen-