Fragments

What survives of Protagoras

Nothing Protagoras wrote survives complete. These 3 lines reached us only because later writers copied them into works of their own, usually while arguing about something else.

  1. DK 80 B1, Wording secure

    Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians I.60 (c. 200 CE)

    Quoted as the opening of a book called Truth, in a survey of what earlier thinkers had made the standard of judgement. Plato had already put the same sentence in Socrates's mouth six centuries earlier, in order to take it apart.

    The most famous sentence of Greek humanism reaches us twice over from people who wanted to refute it.

  2. DK 80 B4, Wording secure

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers IX.51 (c. 230 CE)

    A biographer explaining why Protagoras was prosecuted at Athens and his books burned. The sentence survives because it was the evidence against him.

    Ancient sources say the books were collected and burned in the marketplace. The one line anyone was sure of is the one that got them burned.

  3. DK 80 B6a, Wording likely his

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers IX.51 (c. 230 CE)

    Reported in the same list of what Protagoras was first to say. The teaching that made him rich and, eventually, indefensible in court.

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