Protagoras

Classical

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Protagoras was the most famous of the Sophists, traveling from city to city teaching rhetoric, argument, and civic virtue for a fee. His claim that 'man is the measure of all things' made truth relative to the perceiver. He wrote a book on the gods that began 'About the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not.' Athens burned his books and banished him. Plato named a dialogue after him and treated him with surprising respect.

Birth

c. 490 BCE·Abdera

Born in Abdera

Protagoras was born around 490 BCE in Abdera, a Thracian city on the northern Aegean coast. Abdera had a reputation, unfair but persistent, as a town of simpletons. It also produced Democritus and Protagoras — two of the sharpest minds of the fifth century. Protagoras grew up in a city at the edge of the Greek world, close to non-Greek peoples and cultures. Some ancient sources say he worked as a porter before his talents were noticed. Whatever the truth, he would eventually become the most successful teacher of his age.

Words

“Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.”
— Protagoras

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