Abstract

The Great Speech of Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue is now widely seen as an expression of democratic theory, one of the earliest substantial expressions of democratic theory on record. At the same time, there have long been arguments to the contrary, the most formidable presentation of which is an article by Peter Nicholson that appeared in these pages in 1981. In this short piece, I address Nicholson’s skeptical arguments head-on and in full, in a way that has not yet been done. By doing so, I hope to put skeptical arguments of this sort to rest, and to confirm Protagoras’ Great Speech once and for all as an early, and very interesting, fragment of democratic theory.