“Speaking with God” in a Democratic Regime: Socratic Philosophy and Political Practice

• In Event: God and Politics

Abstract

Early in Plato’s Protagoras, the most successful sophist of all antiquity announces a decisive break with his predecessors: while other sophists have tried unsuccessfully to “cloak” their activities, Protagoras has remained above suspicion, ironically, by openly proclaiming his sophistry. He then mentions that he’s “considered further measures—to speak with God (sun theō eipein)—so that nothing terrible happens on account of agreeing I’m a sophist.” Commentators have occasionally remarked on this diffident appeal to conventional piety, but have rarely suggested that it might actually contain significant clues about Protagoras’ methods. Indeed, this phrase, “to speak with God,” is usually held to be nothing more than an Ancient Greek colloquialism, meaning something like “so to speak,” or “God willing.” Yet the idiom is extremely rare, appearing only about a dozen times in all extant works before the Common Era. Remarkably, six of the cases come from Plato, and usually when a character expresses his concerns over the public reception of the associations between wise teachers and their politically powerful students. This paper explores the ways that Protagoras and Socrates took pains, in democratic Athens, to protect their reputations as the teachers of an elitist political skill. I suggest, moreover, that there is something theological in this obfuscation: to maintain that the prudence of capable statesmen—directed at the necessary and the expedient—is always compatible with the egalitarian justice revealed by our moral intuitions, is to adopt a divine perspective on the coherence of virtue and the advantageous.

Author

• Samuel Philip Hage, Tulane University