Protagoras (339-343)

Soc.

And so he began to put questions in this sort of way: To this I replied: There is no need, for I know it it happens that I have especially studied that ode. he said. Very finely and correctly, I replied. No, I replied. he said. My good sir, I have given it ample attention. he asked, I know that, I said. So far as I can see, it does, I replied (at the same time, though, I was afraid there was something in what he said). Why, I asked, does it not seem so to you? he replied, . This speech of his won a clamorous approval from many of his hearers; and at first I felt as though I had been struck by a skilful boxer, and was quite blind and dizzy with the effect of his words and the noise of their applause. Then—to tell you the honest truth—in order to gain time for considering the poet’s meaning, I turned to Prodicus and calling him—Prodicus, I said, surely Simonides was your townsman: it behoves you to come to the man’s rescue.

Soc.

Accordingly I allow myself to call for your assistance—

just as Scamander, in Homer, when besieged by Achilles, called Simois to his aid, saying—

Dear brother, let us both together stay this warriors might.

Hom. Il. 21.308 In the same way I call upon you, lest Protagoras lay Simonides in ruins. For indeed to rehabilitate Simonides requires your artistry, by which you can discriminate between wishing and desiring as two distinct things in the fine and ample manner of your statement just now. So please consider if you agree with my view. For it is not clear that Simonides does contradict himself. Now you, Prodicus, shall declare your verdict first: do you consider becoming and being to be the same or different? said Prodicus. Now in the first passage, I said, Simonides gave it as his own opinion that it is hard for a man to become good in truth. said Prodicus. And he blames Pittacus, I went on, for saying not, as Protagoras holds, the same as himself, but something different. For what Pittacus said was not, as Simonides said, that it is hard to become but to be good. Now being and becoming, Protagoras, as our friend Prodicus says, are not the same thing; and if being and becoming are not the same thing, Simonides does not contradict himself. Perhaps Prodicus and many others might say with Hesiod that to become good is hard,

for Heaven hath set hard travail on the way to virtue; and when one reacheth the summit thereof, ’tis an easy thing to possess, though hard before.

Hes. WD 289 When Prodicus heard this he gave me his approval: but Protagoras observed: To which I answered: then it is a bad piece of work I have done, it would seem, Protagoras, and I am an absurd sort of physician; my treatment increases the malady. he said. How is that? I asked. he replied,

Soc.

Then I remarked: Upon my word, how opportunely it has happened that Prodicus is here to join in our discussion! For it is very likely, Protagoras, that Prodicus’ wisdom is a gift of long ago from heaven, beginning either in the time of Simonides or even earlier. But you, so skilled in many other things, appear to be unskilled in this, and lack the skill that I can boast because I am a disciple of the great Prodicus; and so now I find you do not understand that perhaps Simonides did not conceive hard in the way that you conceive it—just as, in the case of awful, Prodicus here corrects me each time I use the word in praising you or someone else; when I say, for instance, that Protagoras is an awfully wise man, he asks if I am not ashamed to call good things awful. For awful, he says, is bad; thus no one on this or that occasion speaks of awful wealth or awful peace or awful health, but we say awful disease, awful war or awful poverty, taking awful to be bad. So perhaps hard also was intended by the Ceans and Simonides as either bad or something else that you do not understand: let us therefore ask Prodicus, for it is fair to question him on the dialect of Simonides. What did Simonides mean, Prodicus, by hard? he replied. Then it is on this account, Prodicus, I said, that he blames Pittacus for saying it is hard to be good, just as though he heard him say it is bad to be good. he said, You hear, Protagoras, I said, what Prodicus here suggests: have you anything to say upon it? said Protagoras, Ah, I agree with you, Protagoras, I said, that this is Simonides’ meaning, and that our friend Prodicus knows it, but is joking and chooses to experiment on you to see if you will be able to support your own statement. For that Simonides does not mean that hard is bad we have clear proof forthwith in the next phrase, where he says—

God alone can have this privilege.

Simonides Fr. 37.1.14Surely he cannot mean that it is bad to be good, if he proceeds here to say that God alone can have this thing, and attributes this privilege to God only; otherwise Prodicus would call Simonides a rake, and no true Cean.

Soc.

But I should like to tell you what I take to be Simonides’ intention in this ode, if you care to test my powers,

as you put it,[*] in the matter of verses; though if you would rather, I will hear your account. When Protagoras heard me say this— he said; then Prodicus and Hippias strongly urged me, and the rest of them also. Well then, I said, I will try to explain to you my own feeling about this poem. Now philosophy is of more ancient and abundant growth in Crete and Lacedaemon than in any other part of Greece, and sophists are more numerous in those regions: but the people there deny it and make pretence of ignorance, in order to prevent the discovery that it is by wisdom that they have ascendancy over the rest of the Greeks, like those sophists of whom Protagoras was speaking[*]; they prefer it to be thought that they owe their superiority to fighting and valor, conceiving that the revelation of its real cause would lead everyone to practise this wisdom. So well have they kept their secret that they have deceived the followers of the Spartan cult in our cities, with the result that some get broken ears by imitating them, bind their knuckles with thongs, go in for muscular exercises, and wear dashing little cloaks,[*] as though it were by these means that the Spartans were the masters of Greece. And when the Spartans wish to converse unrestrainedly with their sophists, and begin to chafe at the secrecy of their meetings, they pass alien acts against the laconizing set[*] and any other strangers within their gates, and have meetings with the sophists unknown to the foreigners; while on their part they do not permit any of their young men to travel abroad to the other cities—in this rule they resemble the Cretans—lest they unlearn what they are taught at home. In those two states there are not only men but women also who pride themselves on their education; and you can tell that what I say is true and that the Spartans have the best education in philosophy and argument by this: if you choose to consort with the meanest of Spartans, at first you will find him making a poor show in the conversation; but soon, at some point or other in the discussion, he gets home with a notable remark, short and compressed—a deadly shot that makes his interlocutor seem like a helpless child.

Soc.

Hence this very truth has been observed by certain persons both in our day and in former times—that the Spartan cult is much more the pursuit of wisdom than of athletics; for they know that a man’s ability

to utter such remarks is to be ascribed to his perfect education. Such men were Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, Solon of our city, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and, last of the traditional seven, Chilon of Sparta. All these were enthusiasts, lovers and disciples of the Spartan culture; and you can recognize that character in their wisdom by the short, memorable sayings that fell from each of them they assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their lore to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue—Know thyself and Nothing overmuch. To what intent do I say this? To show how the ancient philosophy had this style of laconic brevity; and so it was that the saying of Pittacus was privately handed about with high approbation among the sages—that it is hard to be good. Then Simonides, ambitious to get a name for wisdom, perceived that if he could overthrow this saying, as one might some famous athlete, and become its conqueror, he would win fame himself amongst men of that day. Accordingly it was against this saying, and with this aim, that he composed the whole poem as a means of covertly assailing and abasing this maxim, as it seems to me.[*] Now let us all combine in considering whether my account is really true. The opening of the ode must at once appear crazy if, while intending to say that it is hard for a man to become good, he inserted indeed. There is no sort of sense, I imagine, in this insertion, unless we suppose that Simonides is addressing himself to the saying of Pittacus as a disputant: Pittacus says—It is hard to be good; and the poet controverts this by observing—No, but to become good, indeed, is hard for a man, Pittacus, truly—not truly good; he does not mention truth in this connexion, or imply that some things are truly good, while others are good but not truly so: this would seem silly and unlike Simonides.