The storyline of Plato's Protagoras

The speeches and actions in Protagoras are the moments of a complex, coherent, fully worked out storyline. Hippocrates intends to abandon family and friends, of whom Socrates is one, in order to associate with Protagoras. Later, at the conference of sophists taking place at Kallias’ house, concerned whether Hippocrates’ soul would be harmed by Protagoras’ teaching, Socrates engages the sophist in order to determine the latter’s bona fides. Socrates’ testing indicates that Protagoras privately believes that one may commit ἀδικία [injustice] while exercising σωφροσύνη [prudence] in so doing, though the sophist refuses to agree to that proposition in public. In the second half of the dialogue, a remark of Protagoras’ effects a turning point in the discussion. Socrates recognizes that the sophist’s characterization of ἀνδρεία [courage], at Prt. 351b1‒2, that it comes from nature and from the good nurture (sc. of that nature) in souls, is an apothegm or wise saying. Hippocrates does not intend to associate with Protagoras for the sake of achieving political power, but to acquire the sophist’s wisdom. Protagoras’ wise saying must be made to disappear, lest it draw Hippocrates to follow after its Pied Piper author, thus dissolving his friendship with Socrates. Henceforth, the sophist is forbidden to play a collaborative role in the inquiry: Socrates will lead, Protagoras is to follow. Socrates evokes an ἐπιστήμη [science] of measuring pains against pleasures, to be taught by sophists to the intemperate polloi to overcome their acrasia. Hippocrates’ daylong pursuit of the fugitive slave Satyrus indicates his exemplary self-discipline and that he is the master of his desires. Hippocrates already possesses the ἐπιστήμη that Socrates urges on the polloi. Making use of propositions agreed to by Protagoras in the hedonic calculus passage, Socrates forces him step by step to accept a replacement of his wise saying. By foisting on Protagoras and the other sophists the teaching of an ἐπιστήμη that Hippocrates already possesses, and “unsaying,” as it were, Protagoras’ wise saying, Socrates removes the proximate reasons for his friend to associate with Protagoras. Socrates leaves Kallias' house with the young man, their friendship preserved