From Section 166, Socrates now assumes the persona of the late Protagoras, and gives a long speech (until 168c). It’s pretty funny. He perfectly reproduces the ‘more in sorrow than in anger,’ pompous, demeanour which we might associate with such a senior sophist.

There are rhetorical questions and lots of confusing double-negatives, but the key points are as follows:

• A man in the process of ‘becoming’ (remember, Protagoras questions even that there is such a thing is ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’) is rather like an infinite number of men in succession (166c): perhaps we can think of the slightly different drawings on each page of a flip-book animation.
• There are infinite differences, then, between men. But Protagoras calls him a wise man, who can change appearances.
• In the example of a food tasting bitter to a sick man and sweet to a healthy man, Protagoras says ‘What we have to do is make a change from one to the other, because the other state is better’ (ameinōn gar hē hetera hexis, 167a).
• So the wise man will make wholesome things seem just, to the people of a city, instead of bad ones (167c).
  • And a teacher who can teach students along these lines is a wise man (sophos), and worth the large fees he charges. (Socrates never fails to mention those hefty fees which the sophists insist on charging.)
  • The themes here recall those in the dialogue Gorgias, in which the sophist of that name also claims to teach students to be able to make the citizens better people.
• Protagoras – that is, Socrates in the persona of Protagoras – spends a long paragraph warning Socrates not to engage in unfair questioning, because thus he would risk turning people away from philosophy rather than attracting them. This is highly ironic, because, as we know from the dialogue Euthydemus, it was the sophists – not Socrates at all – whose confrontational style made a point of trying to humiliate young people with word tricks, so that they too would become devotees of this aggressive style.
  • As we know, Socrates’s own approach is to encourage young students to express their ideas, and he is always pleased when they venture to do so.
• The rather smug conclusion invites Socrates to address seriously Protagoras’s principles: (a) that all things are in motion, and (b) that for each person and each city, things are what they seem to them to be (168b).

It’s an impressive performance: Theodorus says ‘It was a very spirited rescue’ of Protagoras’s positions. He’d rather not take part in the next stage of debate with Socrates, though, but his friend insists.

To recap, Socrates says, was it a big deal that they had got Protagoras, as it were, to admit that some men are superior to others in being called ‘wise’? (169d). To explore this further, Socrates reminds us that in normal life, we readily consider that some people are wiser than others: we trust a sea captain on the water, or a general on the battlefield, because they have the practical knowledge for that sphere. If people don’t have such knowledge, they have false judgment. Sometimes even a Protagorean would admit that sometimes people think their neighbours are judging falsely, or are ignorant (170c).

In fact, such contests happen all the time! Somebody will come out with an opinion. What happens then? A crowd of opponents rise up to challenge their view! Theodorus says poetically, ‘Heaven knows they do, Socrates, in their “thousands and tens of thousands,”’ a reference to Homer’s Odyssey xvi.121. With social media, we can certainly confirm that such is indeed the common experience.

In this way, the person with the opinion may claim it is true for them, but there will be thousands for whom it is false (170e). Indeed, Protagoras’s own opinion, that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ is one of these highly contestable and contested theories. But Protagoras himself, Socrates concludes, has to admit that, thus, his opinion must indeed be false:

‘In conceding the truth of the opinion of those who think him wrong, he is really admitting the falsity of his own opinion?’(171b)

This might be going a little too far. Theodorus says that Socrates is not quite fair on the late sophist. Willing to pull back, Socrates imagines that Protagoras would manage to defeat them in argument even from the tomb – where he would be as busy and sought-after as he was in life:

‘Hence it is likely that Protagoras, being older than we are, really is wiser as well; and if he were to stick up his head from below as far as the neck just here where we are, he would in all likelihood convict me twenty times over of talking nonsense, and show you up too for agreeing with me, before he ducked down to rush off again’ (171d).