PROTAGORAS of Abdera, the first of the so-called Sophists,—who, about the middle of the 5th century b.c., asserted throughout Greece the claims of education or culture in opposition on the one hand to technical instruction and on the other to physical research,—was an older contemporary of Socrates. At the age of seventy, having been accused and convicted of atheism, Protagoras fled from Athens, and on his way to Sicily was lost at sea. His birth has been plausibly assigned to 481 and his death to 411 b.c. Forty years of his life were spent in the exercise of his popular and lucrative profession in the principal cities of Greece and Sicily. According to Plato {Prot., 318 E), he endeavoured to communicate to his pupils “good counsel or prudence (eυβovλid), which should fit them to manage their households, and to take part by word and deed in civic affairs.” In short, he professed not to “instruct” but to “educate.” Further, the education which he provided was of a literary sort,—oratory, grammar, style, and the interpretation of the poets being among the subjects which he used as instruments. His formal lectures were supplemented by discussions amongst his pupils. He left behind him several treatises, of which only two or three sentences have survived. In Truth, by way of justifying his rejection of philosophy or science, he maintained that “man is the measure of all things— of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.” Besides Truth, and the book Of the Gods which caused his condemnation at Athens, Diogenes Laertius attributes to him treatises on political, ethical, educational, and rhetorical subjects....