Plato's Protagoras: Translation, Commentary, and Appendices

155 Pages·2010·0.52 MB·English

by  Translated and edited by James A. Arieti

Plato’s Protagoras

Plato’s Protagoras
Translation, Commentary, and Appendices
Translated and Edited by
James A. Arieti and Roger M. Barrus
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plato.
[Protagoras. English]
Plato’s Protagoras : translation, commentary, and appendices / translated and edited by
James A. Arieti and Roger M. Barrus.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-0133-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0493-5 (electronic)
1. Protagoras. 2. Sophists (Greek philosophy). 3. Virtue. I. Arieti, James A. II. Barrus,
Roger Milton. III. Title.
B382.A5A74 2010
170—dc22 2009051857
(cid:2) ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Richard C. McClintock, who for more than
thirty years has lent his rich talents to our work.

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Contents
Foreword ix
Introduction 1
Protagoras 33
Appendix A: Callias’ House 111
Appendix B: On Translating 113
Appendix C: Simonides PMG 542 119
Appendix D: Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and Plato’s Protagoras 125
Glossary 131
Bibliography 137
Index 139
vii

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Foreword
Plato’s Protagoras is a wild, splashy, frolic—unpredictable, name-dropping,
microscopically pedantic, galactically expansive—populated by a slew of
characters who are naïve, pompous, vain, ostentatious, and even serious.
Plato’s prose is spectacularly suited to his subject matter—playfully crammed
with puns, equivocations, sleights of sense, and burlesqued allusions to the
classical literature of his day. The challenges to translators are profound.
How can they clear the hurdle of two and a half thousand years to convey
the substance and spirit of this far off conversation?
We have done our best and have still produced a volume twice as long as
the original. How could this have happened? We have held the text itself
as sacrosanct. Our method has been that of the Masoretes, those biblical
scribes who elucidated the sacred text without altering it by establishing a
noninvasive system of diacritical marks around the Hebrew letters to provide
aid to readers. Like those scholars, we have put our helps around the text, in
the form of an introduction to establish the scene, notes to gloss or interpret
points in the dialogue, and appendices to illustrate the physical setting of
the dialogue, to explain our choices of translations of particularly vexing
terms, to review some of the recent interpretations of the poem by Simonides
that Socrates and Protagoras wrangle over, and to show how Aristotle’s On
Sophistical Refutations might throw light on the Protagoras. In addition, we
provide a glossary of major terms in the dialogue. We have tried to be as
faithful as possible to the text of Plato himself: we have kept pagan references
pagan, and where we have taken the liberty to attempt translating a pun with
ix