Abstract

Protagoras, a contemporary of Herodotus, deserves some credit for developing Greek historical consciousness. Protagoras' theory of a two-stage development of mankind does postulate a sequence of events in a linear progression from simple to more complex, higher. That Protagoras engaged in myth indicates that he hadn't the foggiest notion of how to go about an historical answer to questions of human origins; the methods of historical inquiry were so new in his time that there was no body of existing research upon which to base an answer. Protagoras shows us how the historical habit of mind struggled, not altogether successfully, to free itself from the antihistorical thought which was far more congenial to the Greeks