Page:Plato or Protagoras.djvu/14

 enough to lead to its denunciation and destruction, and the withdrawal of Protagoras from the city. Plato, therefore, was in a position to ascertain the real arguments of Protagoras with great exactitude. For it is improbable that they were protected from reproduction by their abstruseness. Protagoras was not a recluse like Heraclitus, but a popular lecturer. His arguments cannot have been too subtle to be committed to memory.

But if Plato knew, not indeed textually but in substance, the arguments which Protagoras had advanced for his position, why on earth should he suppress them? Why should he not reproduce in his polemic such of them at least as he thought he could answer? Why be at pains to invent bogus arguments on behalf of Protagoras, when the genuine ones were extant, and might even be remembered by the seniors in his own audience? Surely it would have been neither artistic, nor honest, nor prudent, to attempt more than to re-word in a condensed form the substance of the genuine argument. And this is precisely what the Theætetus indicates throughout. The remark in 171 E, which is the chief ground for attributing to Plato the complete fabrication of the Protagoras Speech, does not imply more than this, if it is not unfairly pressed.

III.
If Plato had invented the Protagoras Speech, he would surely have made a better job of it polemically. He would have taken care not to put into the mouth of his ‘Protagoras’ anything his ‘Socrates’ did not subsequently refute. If, therefore, there can be found in the Speech arguments which the Theætetus does not refute, we may be sure that they were not of Plato’s invention. And if Plato thinks he has refuted them and it can be shown that he is wrong, this confidence will be strengthened; there will remain no reasonable doubt but that he has tried in his Speech to represent a real opponent’s actual views, that he has failed to understand him, and therefore failed to dispose of him, as he supposes.

An unprejudiced reading of the Protagoras Speech will, I believe, bear out all these contentions.