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Pericles and Protagoras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Neil O'Sullivan
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Extract

These two men – the statesman ruling Athens in her glory, and the philosopher of the man-measure dictum, the ‘first humanist’ as he has been called – are on anyone's reckoning two of the greatest of European history. They not only knew each other, but appear to have been friends. Ehrenberg managed to spin a whole book out of what he imagined was the friendly relationship between Pericles and Sophocles, even though there is no evidence that they liked each other, and indeed positive evidence that they did not. For the only two anecdotes relating any communication between them (both to do with Sophocles' fondness for young boys) suggest that Pericles rather resented having the playwright as a fellow general on the military expedition they made against Samos in 440.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , April 1995 , pp. 15 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

Notes

1. Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar.

2. Plut, . Per. 8.8 etc.Google Scholar, Athen. 604d (=Testt. 74f. Radt). Ehrenberg (see previous note), pp. 132ff. tries to glean more information from inscriptional evidence, but is very speculative: many reasons apart from Periclean support may have accounted for Sophocles' entry into public life as Hellenotamias in 443/2, if indeed he even held that office: see Avery, H. C., Historia 22 (1973), 509–13Google Scholar.

3. TAPhA 80 (1949), 66–93Google Scholar.

4. CQ 35 (1941), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. P. 14.

6. In general see Ehrenberg, V., AJPh 69 (1948), 149–70Google Scholar, who argues for two colonizing expeditions.

7. Cf. Wade-Gery, H. T., JHS 52 (1932), 217–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who sees it as the project of Thucydides son of Melesias.

8. SchoL Ar. Nu. 332, Hesych. and Suda s.v. θουριομ⋯ντɛις.

9. Schol. Ar. Av. 521. The difference between these two terms cannot be pressed. Although the former refers to production of oracles, and the latter to collection of them, the same man often performed both roles (as indeed this scholion predicates of Lampon himself): cf. Smith, N. D., Class. Ant. 8 (1989), 140–58, esp. 141 fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. On fifth-century meanings of σοøιστής, see Dover, on Clouds 331Google Scholar. To note that Plato uses the term more specifically than his predecessors is not to reject Guthrie's criticism (A History of Greek Philosophy [Cambridge, 1962–1981], 3. pp. 33f.Google Scholar) of Grote's extreme position on the Platonic use of the word.

11. Cf. Longrigg, J., HSPh 67 (1963), 147–65Google Scholar, Lloyd, G. E. R., Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 86–98Google Scholar.

12. Admittedly Socrates goes on to list dithyrambic poets as votaries of the Clouds, but (i) this is part of a running joke about ‘high-flown’ poets (cf. Pax 829, Av. 1372ff.) and (ii) they are modern types whose most famous representative, Cinesias, shared the atheism which is the hallmark of the new intellectuals in this play (Lys. ap. Ath. 551e–552b, Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951], pp. 188f.)Google Scholar.

13. I agree with Dodds (see previous note), p. 132 n. 100 that Antiphon the τɛρατοσκ⋯πος and writer on the interpretation of dreams is to be distinguished from the sophist (There are 18 Antiphons in RE.) For further evidence of sophistic hostility to prophecy, see Antiphon A 8 and Thrasymachus B 8.

14. Smith (above n. 9), 146 f. remarks on the absence of oracular humbug from Aristophanes' portrait of the sophists, and regards Nu. 332 as a solitary exception. But consistency can be saved if, as argued below, we take θουριομ⋯ντɛις not as a reference to literal ‘seers’.

15. Diodor. Sic. 12.39, Diogenes Laert. 2.12–14; cf. Plut, . Per. 32Google Scholar; the historicity of this and other supposed prosecutions is challenged by Dover, K. J., TAΛANTA 7 (1976), 24–54Google Scholar.

16. A modern term of course (OED2 s.v); to the ancients he was an atheist (Euseb, . P.E. 14.3.7)Google Scholar. Even philosophers in the ancient world could think unimportant what we regard as an important difference here: see Diog. Oen. fr. 12 col. 2 (= 80 A 23 D-K).

17. See Smith (above n. 9), esp. 140: ‘with rare exceptions, one finds the practice of divination depicted as quackery, and its practitioners accused of fraud.’ I should also refer to an interesting unpublished paper by Muecke, F., ‘Oracles in Aristophanes’ Knights', delivered at a Greek drama conference at the University of Canterbury (N.Z.) in 02 1992Google Scholar.

18. Parke, H. W., Greek Oracles (London, 1967), pp. 18fGoogle Scholar. saw an implication of ambiguity already in the first allusion to the oracle, Delphic we have, Odyssey 8.79ffGoogle Scholar. Note too Heraclitus fr. 93.

19. Cf. Parke (see previous note), p. 85: ‘Once [the oracle's answer] was delivered verbally or in written form, the Delphic authorities ceased to concern themselves with it further. They did not provide any official gloss or interpretation.’

20. Diog. Laert. 9.6; Guthrie (see above n. 10), 1. p. 403 (cf. p. 414) talks of his ‘intentionally oracular’ style.

21. See, e.g., Kirk, G. S. (ed.), Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge, 1954), p. 7Google Scholar.

22. For the relevant procedure of consulting the Pythia at Delphi, see Parke, H. W. and Wormell, D. E. W., The Delphic Oracle (Oxford, 1956), 1. pp. 30–4Google Scholar. Oracles are described in very similar terms by Lucian, , Philops. 38Google Scholar and Heliod, . Aeth. 2.35.4Google Scholar; Dio Chrysost 53.10 and Galen, , Nat. Fac. 2.70 KGoogle Scholar. use this language of metaphorical ‘oracles’.

23. See Smith (above n. 9), 150f; Aristophanes parodies the practice with the famous λαβ⋯ τ⋯ βιβλ⋯ον refrain in Av. 974ff.

24. MH 6 (1949), 103Google Scholar.

25. (Aboven. 1), pp. 96f.

26. Some of the expressions of this view are listed by Walsh, J., CQ 34 (1984), 101 n. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walsh himself argues that Plato has deliberately combined details from at least two separate visits of Protagoras to Athens, but does not dispute that there was a visit in the late 430s.

27. The earliest according to Zuntz, G., C&M 2 (1939), 121–44, esp. 140Google Scholar. The very early dating he later gave ([above n. 24], 103) – ‘hardly later than 444 B.C.’ – is to some extent based on the unlikely assumption that Protagoras left Athens, never to return, in that year. Although we should not try to date the Tetralogies so precisely, Goebel, G. H., Mnemosyne 42 (1989), pp. 47fCrossRefGoogle Scholar. n. 16 refutes sceptics who doubt their fifth-century origin.

28. Thus Farrar, C., The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge, 1988), p. 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar calls him ‘the first democratic political theorist’.

29. On Plutarch's debt to Aristotelian analysis in his Pericles, see Stadter, P. A., A Commentary on Plutarch's Pericles (Chapel Hill and London, 1989), pp. lxxiii–vGoogle Scholar.

30. Ehrenberg (above a 6), 166–9 discusses some evidence for aspects of the democratic constitution in Thurii attributable to Protagoras.

31. The only other phrase I can find which comes close is from the rhetorical work πɛρ⋯ σχημ⋯των by Alexander, who lived in the first half of the second century A.D. In illustrating the figure of ⋯ντɛναντ⋯ωσις or litotes, he gives as an instance ⋯χθροὐς ἔσχɛν οὐ τοὺς ⋯δυνατωτ⋯τους λ⋯γɛιν κα⋯ πρ⋯ττɛιν (2.23 [= Spengel, Rhet. Or. 3.38.2fGoogle Scholar.]). The source cannot be traced: it is possible that Alexander, a keen student of Thucydides, whom he quotes several times in this work (1.1., 2.11, 2.14 [five times], 2.20,2.24), has made up an example by adapting a phrase of the historian.

32. The latest discussion is by McDonnell, M., JHS 111 (1991), 191f.,CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who examines the question briefly and gives a bibliography of previous opinions. He concludes that Plato had read the historian.

33. See especially Gorgias 515eff.